" 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.
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