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 (11)
- 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)
- 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. Six speakers — a moderate divine, a Protestant zealot, a Roman Catholic zealot, a soldier, a courtier and a politique — take up the question of a war against the Turk, and the discussion stops before it is answered. Bacon dedicated it to Lancelot Andrewes, and the dedication is as much an account of his own disgrace and of how he meant to use the time it gave him as it is a preface. (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. 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)
- 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 little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion; and on superstition, which Bacon thought worse than unbelief. (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. It is the scientific society Bacon wanted, set inside the Christian commonwealth he assumed it would serve. William Rawley’s note to the reader is kept, as the book was always printed with it. (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, hypocrites and impostors, atheism, heresy, and the church. The meditation on atheism is the first form of the essay Of Atheism. (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. 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)
- 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. The third prayer Spedding prints with them is the one after Bacon’s fall, given in this section with the Characters of a Believing Christian. (1 note)