42.
“Now (in the time of Lord Bacon, that is,) now sciences are delivered to be believed and accepted, and not to be farther discovered; and therefore, sciences stand at a clog, and have done for many ages.”
In the present time, this is true only, or especially, of theology as an art, and divinity as a science; so made by the schoolmen of former ages, and not yet emancipated.
43.
“Generally he perceived in men of devout simplicity this opinion, that the secrets of nature were the secrets of God, part of that glory into which man is not to press too boldly.”
God has placed no limits to the exercise of the intellect he has given us on this side of the grave. But not the less will he keep his own secrets from us. Has he not proved it? who has opened that door to the knowledge of a future being which it has pleased him to keep shut fast, though watched by hope and by faith?
44.
The Christian philosophy of these latter times appears to be foreshadowed in the following sentence, where he speaks of such as have ventured to deduce and confirm the truth of the Christian religion from the principles and authorities of philosophers: “Thus with great pomp and solemnity celebrating the intermarriage of faith and sense as a lawful conjunction, and soothing the minds of men with a pleasing variety of matter, though, at the same time, rashly and unequally intermixing things divine and things human.”
This last common-place distinction seems to me, however, unworthy of Bacon. It should be banished—utterly set aside. Things which are divine should be human, and things which are human, divine; not as a mixture, “a medley,” in the sense of Bacon’s words, but an interfusion; for nothing that we esteem divine can be anything to us but as we make it ours, i. e. humanise it; and our humanity were a poor thing but for “the divinity that stirs within us.” We do injury to our own nature—we misconceive our relations to the Creator, to his universe, and to each other, so long as we separate and studiously keep wide apart the divine and the human.