e and violence, sometimes of
the most hateful kind, had come to be accepted as ordinary instruments
in the government of souls. Hooker felt too strongly the unfairness, the
folly, the intolerant aggressiveness, the malignity of his opponents--he
was too much alive to the wrongs inflicted by them on his own side, and
to the incredible absurdity of their arguments--to do justice to what
was only too real in the charges and complaints of those opponents. But
Bacon came from the very heart of the Puritan camp. He had seen the
inside of Puritanism--its best as well as its worst side. He witnesses
to the humility, the conscientiousness, the labour, the learning, the
hatred of sin and wrong, of many of its preachers. He had heard, and
heard with sympathy, all that could be urged against the bishops'
administration, and against a system of legal oppression in the name of
the Church. Where religious elements were so confusedly mixed, and where
each side had apparently so much to urge on behalf of its claims, he saw
the deep mistake of loftily ignoring facts, and of want of patience and
forbearance with those who were scandalised at abuses, while the abuses,
in some cases monstrous, were tolerated and turned to profit. Towards
the bishops and their policy, though his language is very respectful,
for the government was implicated, he is very severe. They punish and
restrain, but they do not themselves mend their ways or supply what was
wanting; and theirs are "_injuriae potentiorum_"--"injuries come from
them that have the upperhand." But Hooker himself did not put his finger
more truly and more surely on the real mischief of the Puritan movement:
on the immense outbreak in it of unreasonable party spirit and visible
personal ambition--"these are the true successors of Diotrephes and not
my lord bishops"--on the gradual development of the Puritan theory till
it came at last to claim a supremacy as unquestionable and intolerant as
that of the Papacy; on the servile affectation of the fashions of Geneva
and Strasburg; on the poverty and foolishness of much of the Puritan
teaching--its inability to satisfy the great questions which it raised
in the soul, its unworthy dealing with Scripture--"naked examples,
conceited inferences, and forced allusions, which mine into all
certainty of religion"--"the word, the bread of life, they toss up and
down, they break it not;" on their undervaluing of moral worth, if it
did not speak in their phra