The religious writings of the men who made the scientific revolution — 11 authors, 57 works, 584 notes, from Bacon’s Confession of Faith to Newton on the prophecies of Daniel. The seventeenth century did not divide these men into a scientific half and a devout half, and neither did they: Boyle published more theology than chemistry, Newton left more words on prophecy than on optics, and Ray’s natural history and his natural theology are the same enquiry under two names.
Everything is in the public domain, with one exception: Leibniz’s Theodicy (E. M. Huggard’s translation of 1951) is public domain in the United States only.
Authors are in order of birth.
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon (1561–1626), Lord Chancellor and the man who argued English natural philosophy out of Aristotle and into experiment. He held the study of nature and the study of Scripture to be two books of the same author, and wrote privately on both all his life.
Author index: Francis Bacon
- A Confession of Faith — Bacon’s own creed, written in private and printed in 1641, fifteen years after his death, as penned by an orthodox man of the reformed religion. (1 note)
- A Letter to Mr. Matthew, Imprisoned for Religion — Bacon’s letter to his friend Tobie Matthew, imprisoned in 1607 for his conversion to Rome — a Protestant’s letter of comfort to a Catholic prisoner, and the only one of his many letters to Matthew about religion. (1 note)
- An Advertisement Touching an Holy War — An unfinished dialogue, written in 1622 after Bacon’s fall, on whether a war made for religion can be lawful. (2 notes)
- An Advertisement Touching the Controversies of the Church of England — Bacon’s earliest surviving work, written at twenty-eight during the Martin Marprelate quarrel and printed seventy years later as True Peace. (1 note)
- Certain Considerations Touching the Church of England — Written for James I in the first year of the reign, when the Hampton Court conference had just closed. (7 notes)
- Five Essays on Religion — The five of Bacon’s fifty-eight Essays or Counsels whose subject is religion, gathered here under a title of the vault’s own, from the final edition of 1625: on truth, where Pilate jests and would not stay for an answer; on death; on the unity of the church, and when zeal becomes a scandal; on atheism, where *a… (5 notes)
- New Atlantis — Bacon’s unfinished fable of Bensalem, an island in the South Sea converted to Christianity by a miracle twenty years after the Ascension and governed by Salomon’s House, a college of natural philosophers who open their work with prayer and count their discoveries as praise. (2 notes)
- Religious Meditations — The Meditationes Sacrae, twelve short Latin meditations on texts of Scripture that Bacon printed with the first edition of his Essays in 1597, in the English translation substituted for them in the reprint of the next year: on the works of God and man, the miracles of Christ, charity to enemies, earthly hope… (1 note)
- The Characters of a Believing Christian — Three short religious pieces printed together at the end of Bacon’s Remaines: the Characters, which sets out the Christian life as a string of paradoxes; a second and fuller recension of the Confession of the Faith; and the prayer Bacon wrote after his fall. (4 notes)
- The Translation of Certain Psalms into English Verse — Seven psalms put into English verse in the last year of Bacon’s life, during a long illness, and dedicated to George Herbert — in respect of our ancient and private acquaintance, and in respect of your gifts, being not only a great wit, but a great poet. The only verse Bacon published. (7 notes)
- Two Prayers — The Student’s Prayer and the Writer’s Prayer, which Bacon’s chaplain William Rawley preserved and Archbishop Tenison printed: that the opening of the gates of sense may not close the mind to the divine mysteries, and that the work of the hands may return to God’s glory. (1 note)