Francis Bacon (1561–1626), Lord Chancellor of England until his fall for bribery in 1621, and the man who argued English natural philosophy out of deduction from Aristotle and into experiment. The Advancement of Learning and the Novum Organum set the programme the Royal Society was founded on forty years later. He held that the study of nature and the study of Scripture are two books of the same author and must not be mixed — it is no less true in this human kingdom of knowledge than in God’s kingdom of heaven, that no man shall enter into it except he become first as a little child — and wrote, privately and all his life, the religious pieces gathered here.
Works (5)
- 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. It runs from the eternal generation of the Son through creation, the fall, the law, the incarnation and the church to the last judgement, in a single unbroken sequence of articles. (1 note)
- 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. It is a rebuke to both sides: the bishops for treating every objection as sedition, the reformers for treating every abuse as antichrist. The wrongs of them which are possessed of the government of the church are not to be justified, and the wrongs of the other side are not to be excused. (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. Bacon argues that the church’s peace is not served by treating every disputed ceremony as settled for ever, and goes through the grievances one at a time — the government of bishops, the liturgy and subscription, a preaching ministry, excommunication, non-residence and pluralities, and the maintenance of the clergy. (7 notes)
- 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. The Characters has since been claimed for Herbert Palmer, whose Memorials of Godlinesse printed it in 1645; it is given here as the Remaines gives it. (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)