In 1926, suffragist, pacifist, and preacher, Maude Royden, delivered a sermon about Francis Bacon, on the occasion of the 300th anniversary of his death. Her sermon, redacted for length, is included here. Royden preached it at the Guildhouse Fellowship, a center for Christian worship in London that she and Rev. Percy Dearmer, along with noted musician Martin Shaw, co-founded a few years earlier. The Guildhouse combined attention to cultural and social concerns, along with stressing the arts and music. Royden’s sermon pays homage to Bacon while also using his life as a lesson in morality and a cautionary tale. – Editor
Bacon is himself a most moving illustration of the Shakespearean concept of tragedy. The heroes of Shakespeare’s tragedies are not the victims of destiny. … There is always in them some flaw, some weakness, some discord, that sets them at odds with their own greatness. … [A] man who has all the elements of greatness, but mixed with them some fatal weakness—that is in Shakespeare’s mind a tragic subject … and behind the life of the man whose greatness we remember and celebrate to-day is just such a tragedy.
Bacon was born with everything in his favour. … In 1621 he was impeached for bribery and corruption. He confessed practically everything. … In 1624 he was pardoned and set free. Two years later he died. His epitaph … was given to him by the poet Pope, who calls him “the wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind.”
Behind this meteoric career, there is a sordid story. Bacon was haunted by ambition, always doing things unworthy of himself because he wanted more money, always making friends with the prosperous and often leaving them when they fell.
The most squalid incident, I think, in the whole of his life was in connection with the first person who really befriended him—Essex, Queen Elizabeth’s favourite. Essex was in a position to advance a friend, and he gave Bacon his powerful help. … Essex, however, fell into disgrace and, although at first Bacon tried to act as mediator between the Queen and the disgraced favourite, he actually offered himself to be counsel for the prosecution when he found that Queen Elizabeth meant to be obdurate. Again, when, after the execution [of Essex], the popularity of Essex compelled the Queen to put forward some kind of defence for her own harshness, Bacon with charged with—and accepted—the business of framing it. … Bacon was on the high road to success now, and more favoured by James I than by Elizabeth. He found himself in fortunate agreement with James I in everything that king wanted done, and still more with what Buckingham, who was now favourite, wanted done. [Royden here refers to George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham; editor.] He went, at last, a little too far, for Buckingham was attacked on the subject of monopolies, as they were called. … Buckingham had many, and was much attacked for it, Bacon, as Lord Chancellor, defending and even extending the powers of the monopolists. Then the country began to get restive and the first rumbling of the coming storm was heard. Buckingham, alarmed, felt he must throw something or someone to the wolves, and by a truly poetic justice one of the first people to be thrown was Bacon. The House of Commons … reported that the Lord Chancellor had been guilty of bribery and corruption. At first Bacon denied this with indignation, but in the end he admitted practically everything.
“I do plainly and ingenuously confess [he says] that I am guilty of corruption and do renounce all defence … In the points charged against me there is a great deal of
corruption and neglect, for which I am heartily sorry.” …
Here is his own judgment of himself. What is ours? Let us admit the commonness of the fault. … Then let us try to weigh the greatness of this man, for he was great. There is another side to this squalid story which makes it not squalid, but tragic.
“I have as vast contemplative ends [he says] as I have civil ends.”
And what are those vast contemplative ends?
“I have taken all knowledge to be my province.” …
I have taken all knowledge to be my province.
Is there not, one wonders, something insolent in the desire to know? If people “know too much” do they not know it at their peril? The story of Roger [sic] Bacon, who spent half his life in prison, is repeated later by Galileo, tormented by the Inquisition and threatened with actual death; by Descartes who, in fear at the fate of Galileo, gave up his great projected book. These stories you must remember when I say to you that for [Francis] Bacon to say “I take all knowledge to be my province” was sublime. It is true that the age had changed and he was a child of the Renaissance, for the whole spirit of the Renaissance is in that saying. The world had changed and now was ready to take all knowledge for its province: that is how the Renaissance divided the modern from the medieval world. Yet the first man to put that new spirit into words, the man who expressed in a phrase the longing and hope, the hunger and thirst of a new world, was a man of vision and of power.
Bacon “adjurers mankind to put away the barren philosophies of the past, and to tread boldly the new ways into measureless realms of knowledge and of power. ‘If there be any humility towards the Creator, any reverence for, or disposition to magnify, His works, any charity for man, any anxiety to relieve his sorrows and necessities, any love of truth in Nature, any desire for the purification of the understanding, we must entreat men again and again to discard … these volatile and preposterous philosophies … which have led experience captive and triumphed over the works of God. Drawing nigh in all humility and reverence, they must unroll the volume of creation; thereon must they dwell and meditate; this must they peruse, purely and sincerely, with minds washed clean from preconceived opinions.’” …
That is great and, standing as Bacon did on the threshold of the new world, his was the greatness of intellectual courage and audacity. The words themselves are an achievement.
Yet as a scientist how little he achieved! The great achievement on which he prided himself was the discovery of what is called the “inductive method,” which means, very roughly stated, the experimental method. … He urged that men should, at all costs, observe the facts and proceed by way of experiment. … He called men back from theorising to observation and from observation to experiment. He continually urged upon them this truly scientific method, so that in a sense he is really the father of modern science, though by a curious defect of reasoning he actually believed that the method was infallible and that everybody could work it! There was a certain democratic beauty about Bacon’s theory, for he seems really to have believed us all as competent as himself to make great discoveries in science if only we would follow his method! He said, “Observe the effects, discover the cause, and you have your scientific principle.”
It is true also that Bacon made no great discoveries himself. It is even true that he sneered at the discoveries of other people, that he mocked at Galileo, that he had no particular interest in Kepler; but still it remains that he formulated a theory or method with masterly clarity and with matchless power. He remains great ….
Bacon never dreamed that anything he wrote in so unworthy a medium as the English language could survive. All his more serious works were written in Latin …. Sometimes, however, in his more leisurely moments, when he was writing about nothing in particular, he would condescend to write in English. … If we look through the Essays alone [written in English; editor]—the work of his idler hours—we are amazed at the packed thought, the pungent expression, the beauty of the words. …
The chief work of his life was the pursuit of money, the search for promotion. Strange that a man should have a spirit so great and an ambition so mean; that he should have the power to say such things and give to them only the few odd years that are left him when disgrace comes upon him! …
The chief work of his life was the pursuit of money, the search for promotion.
Such greatness in the essays, the essay “On Friendship” for example—how can a man write like this about solitude—“Faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love,” and take three thousand pounds to betray his friend? That is tragedy, is it not? Perhaps the intellectual tragedy seems almost greater than the moral tragedy: that Bacon should see science as he did, and so nobly, and desire it for the service of humankind, both “for the glory of the Creator and the relief of man’s estate,” and yet be content to give the best years of life, chasing the shadow of fame and money and promotion.
“I take all knowledge to be my province,” said Bacon, and then he took three thousand pounds to dedicate his matchless style to the destruction of his first friend.
Do you know the moment when this brilliant writer comes most near our hearts? It is when he fell. He wrote a prayer, and in that prayer he prays to be forgiven that the great and gracious gifts that had been given to him had been by him not used, like the man with the ten talents, nor neglected like the man with one, but used to such unworthy ends. Anyone who judges Bacon must first realize how infinitely more scathing was Bacon’s judgment on himself. … It is tragic in Bacon; it is the tragedy of most of us. That is what makes it so great. It is so common for men not to use or neglect their gifts, but to use them for such miserable ends. …
One cannot read the life of Bacon and fail to see it. Must we not also pray for forgiveness for the gifts which we do not use well or neglect to use, but use wrongly, the absorption of our purposes in ourselves? We too muddle our lives away, and the condemnation that we mete to Bacon falls on us also. …
The Church Militant, with Supplement 15, no. 175 (October 1926): clix-clxiv. The above text retains British spellings.
