Page:Essays of Francis Bacon 1908 Scott.djvu/36

Rh of 1585, on the difficult question of her policy towards the Roman Catholic interest. It is a remarkable paper to be produced by a young man of twenty-four. Though Protestant in tone the Letter is yet neither Puritan nor partisan in character. It is a broad, calm, judicial statement of what Bacon considered to be the position of the English Church three years before the Armada. In this paper and in another on the same subject four years later, An Advertisement touching the Controversies of the Church of England (1589), which is the essay Of Unity in Religion in germ, we see the future Lord Chancellor. The philosopher had already written the first sketch of his ideas on the new learning, calling it with the simple grandiloquence of youth, Temporis Partus Maximus, the 'Greatest Birth of Time.' It is certain that Bacon hoped to win advancement at Court by means of his state papers. It is equally certain that the Lord Treasurer Burghley did not appreciate the work of his nephew. He was indeed employed to prepare papers from time to time, but no preferment came. Burghley was a plain, practical man, immersed in complicated affairs of state. It is possible, as has been suggested, that he quietly opposed the advancement of Francis Bacon in order to keep the pathway open for his son, Robert Cecil, a man of moderate ability only. It may be, Machiavellian as he was, that he recognized from the first the pliability of his nephew and declined to trust him with political business. Without a doubt, Bacon's literary and philosophical aims were to him but the Rh