seology--"as they censure virtuous men by the
names of _civil_ and _moral_, so do they censure men truly and godly
wise, who see into the vanity of their assertions, by the name of
_politiques_, saying that their wisdom is but carnal and savouring of
man's brain." Bacon saw that the Puritans were aiming at a tyranny
which, if they established it, would be more comprehensive, more
searching, and more cruel than that of the older systems; but he thought
it a remote and improbable danger, and that they might safely be
tolerated for the work they did in education and preaching, "because the
work of exhortation doth chiefly rest upon these men, and they have a
zeal and hate of sin." But he ends by warning them lest "that be true
which one of their adversaries said, _that they have but two small
wants--knowledge and love_." One complaint that he makes of them is a
curious instance of the changes of feeling, or at least of language, on
moral subjects. He accuses them of "having pronounced generally, and
without difference, all untruths unlawful," forgetful of the Egyptian
midwives, and Rahab, and Solomon, and even of Him "who, the more to
touch the hearts of the disciples with a holy dalliance, made as though
he would have passed Emmaus." He is thinking of their failure to apply a
principle which was characteristic of his mode of thought, that even a
statement about a virtue like veracity "hath limit as all things else
have;" but it is odd to find Bacon bringing against the Puritans the
converse of the charge which his age, and Pascal afterwards, brought
against the Jesuits. The essay, besides being a picture of the times as
regards religion, is an example of what was to be Bacon's characteristic
strength and weakness: his strength in lifting up a subject which had
been degraded by mean and wrangling disputations, into a higher and
larger light, and bringing to bear on it great principles and the
results of the best human wisdom and experience, expressed in weighty
and pregnant maxims; his weakness in forgetting, as, in spite of his
philosophy, he so often did, that the grandest major premises need
well-proved and ascertained minors, and that the enunciation of a
principle is not the same thing as the application of it. Doubtless
there is truth in his closing words; but each party would have made the
comment that what he had to prove, and had not proved, was that by
following his counsel they would "love the whole world better t