victions stands out from first to last as one of the special characteristics of the man; and one whose life is so marked in this respect, and whose death so heroically crowns it, should not be lightly charged with a facile faith, or an easy and unscrupulous compliance, nor be too harshly judged if the distinction he made be thought unsound.

Latimer was evidently sincere and in earnest. Whatever he did, he did with his whole heart. He loved his workand whether as preacher or as bishop, he was faithful to it. His fidelity was unconquerable, and his frankness knew no fear. He was a "downright" preacher-never one of those discreet men who say nothing to disturb their hearers, and had he lived in these days, he would have been marked among those whom a certain class are fond of stigmatizing as "political preachers." He handled sin without gloves, and hesitated not to beard the lion in his den. Sending his new year's present to Henry, according to the custom of the court, while others sent money or jewels, he sent the New Testament, with a leaf turned down at the passage, “Fornicators and adulterers God will judge." Preaching before him, he preached as the case demanded; and accused for so doing-of preaching seditiously, he justified himself, and asked "How should I preach to a kingly audience, but as to the king?" There were tendencies in him to asceticism, but he had a great heart, a rich humor and an exuberant wit, which saved him from the sour pietism he would else have exhibited, and made him always genial and delightful. His Howard-like labors among the sick, the insane, the imprisoned and the poor, at the outset of his career, and the work of befriending the injured and the destitute, to which he devoted himself as a member of Cranmer's household, during his last years, sufficiently attest the philanthropic spirit that was in him. He knew how to be severe-and yet none could be gentler or more tender. And in this union and balance of varied, and some of them opposite qualities, we find the explanation of his power as a preacher, and of the general favor and affection. with which he was regarded as a man.

But we must close. It is on many accounts a splendid period to which Latimer belonged; and it is a most interesting picture that we look upon as the canvass of history unrolls, and his contemporaries rise before us. The impe

rious Henry, the courtly Cranmer, the ambitious but masculine Čromwell, and others more or less marked are among the actors in the great drama of the time. But among them all, who presents a claim to stand higher in our regards, or is seen ás occupying a loftier pedestal of manhood than he good if not great? There are men of mightier intellects and finer culture about him; men of power and of all worldly circumstance; but in presence of this simple and venerable old man, who of them is not obliged to confess his superiority? So goodness is ever more than greatness; nay, so goodness is ever the truest greatness. In God's calendar, the men of conscience and of heart are the heroes, and Latimer is one of them. And standing behind us there, at the dawn of our modern age, not perfect, yet so robust in his manhood and so firm and faithful in his integrity, this is the lesson he teaches us-a lesson that we of this age, and especially the young men of this age, amidst our materialisms and our easy conformities, more need to heed than any other:-a supreme and overmastering reverence for God and honest convictions; an unconquerable loyalty to principle, lead where it may; a loyalty that will not break nor bend, though friends desert and the world frown; that will not yield, though the bap tism of fire is before us, and fidelity must be crowned with suffering, or death.

E. G. B

ART. XV.

Bacon and Christianity.

IN a former article, we spoke of the influence of a strong and passionate individuality upon the thought and the destiny of an age, and of ages of the dependence of the devo tional faculties of mankind, for their vitality, purity, and elevation, upon the universal mode of thought in the acquisition of knowledge of the material world-of the intimate connection of science religion and philosophy, in all

1 Relations of Positive Thought to Religion. Quarterly, April, 1859.

nations and ages; and cursorily traced that connection in the history of philosophy from Thales to Bacon; and then suggested the great epoch which Bacon has inaugurated.

Bacon was one of the greatest contemplative individualities of all history. He had also a keen practical insight into the affairs of men, and of the State; and his executive abilities made him illustrious among his cotemporaries. But his first love was philosophy; the first and great aim of his life was to dethrone the dogmatism of Aristotle, and of the middle ages, which had long held the human intellect in chains, and was then the master of the two great Universities of England. The scholastics had perpetuated, in consequence of the enervating influences of monasticism, this dogmatism of the Grecian philosophers, in science and in religion. He saw that the knowledge of the world was locked in frozen fountains, and early in life attempted the great work of unsealing those fountains for the invigoration of human thought. He attempted a gigantic task, one that could not be consummated in his own times. His day is just dawning, and the reign of his power is just commencing; his philosophy has given foundation to the material age-the first resting-place for human faith. Dogmatism and speculation have an innate hold upon the credulity and indolence of mankind. They are the handmaids of a mythological religion; they ruled the religious dogmas of the ancients, and have aided in building up stupendous errors in modern theology. The images which they have created have come sweeping down with a terrible grandeur from the clouds of antiquity. They have made barren the soil of the human mind, dried up the fountains of knowledge, forged manacles for those able men who, otherwise, would have been masters in the world of original discovery; they have created religious and philosophical despotisms which have degraded the race, shed the blood of millions, and made States the servants of sanguinary religious powers; and also, by shouting out the word skepticism,' that graceless, powerless phantom of the air, have frightened free thought, free speech, free investigation, and unbiassed conclusions half out of the pale of civilization. Bacon, in his own day, could not erect a hindrance to their advancement. They had enthroned themselves in Oxford, and in Rome; and from these two centres of despotic power continued to

inflict arbitrary opinions upon the faith of mankind. Oxford only threw off one despotism, that of Rome, and bowed her neck to another, that of a fractious and ambitious king. She was then, and is too much now, mediæval. She is founded upon dogmas and not upon essential truth. She assumes conclusions, pretends that they are sanctified as the truths of history, and arbitrarily imposes them upon the young men of England. Bacon, this great apostle of modern intellectual and religious freedom, in this one thing only, bowed his neck to the yoke of antiquity. After the manner of the men of his time, he gave fulsome praises to his queen, and to her church. This was more the result of the weakness of his ambition to stand high in the State, than of conviction. In all things else he stood strictly upon the inductive system; and had no fawning and supple knee for the assumptions of antiquity, no matter what powers then adopted them.

The first great blow to the reign of antiquity was given by the establishment of the Church of England in defiance of the Church of Rome. But she was weak with the follies of her old master, and dogmatized supremely, as seen in the immortal Thirty-Nine. The next blow was given in the schism of the dissenting churches. They detached and globed themselves off into their sympathetic unities throughout the British Empire, and from that Empire traced the circles of their orbits throughout the world. But they too were tinctured with the old poison of dogmatism, which ran leaching through the Church of England to them. They had not learned to respect truth and their own reason more than they respected antiquity. In their dissent, they were not free; they only threw off the visible power of the state, and of an old church, that the same tyranny might rule them in another form, the tyranny of the old culture, the old theology. Even the emancipations of Bacon and Luther could not rive the chains which centuries had been forging. The edicts of synods and councils had an unmistakable power over them, and their followers of to-day cannot entirely throw off the influence. They loved civil liberty, a greater civil liberty than the Magna Charta gave them. Bacon had not prepared the State to give them what they asked; and they were compelled to leave the ancestral oak, the old institutions, and the old social culture of England,

to find that in America which England denied them. But when they came, they came manacled with the rusty links of Aristotle and the Latin fathers. The Grecian spirit of assertion, and the gloomy tincture of medieval superstition, came with them, and distorted the features of every relig ious truth which they enunciated. As the veil falls from the face of science, the features of theology become genial, and pleasant, and noble to the human race.

Even now, strong practical minds wish for some other faith, some little freedom from the old theology; but they dare not rebel, and take what they want. The sympathetic or social nature of public opinion, combined with the natural fear of one for the mass when it is against him, will not let them take an independent position. But some are snapping these chains asunder, and are standing in that awful duality in which all men must stand on the great day of account, with themselves, and with their God. Bacon, with his positive modes of thought, with his rules for testing facts, and studying them in their genera and their species, and with his correctives of the human reason, has shattered and scattered the iron surroundings of an irreligious antiquity, and the fixedness of faith which the church and the state would fasten upon the individual.

Let us see, more particularly, the results of his labors.

A man's temperament, his associations, his pursuits, his purposes and ambitions, influence his modes of thought, and his conclusions. Correct conclusions are beyond our control. We must believe a proposition if the evidences on which it is founded are placed before us in a conclusive manner-and Bacon's philosophy was the natural result of his course in life. His habits of life generated a certain mode of attaining truth, and that mode was positive; and this made his philosophy a positive philosophy. Had he been less a man of the world, less an executive man, he would not have given us his positive system. He had an inordinate ambition for preferment; he apprehended the capacities of his own genius, and he felt that they entitled him to responsible positions in the State; and he succeeded to those positions with the sheer force of ability, against the jealousy of the powerful Cecils, and against that shrewd, learned, and heartless lawyer, Coke. This advancement in practical affairs afforded him the means for gratifying his