and Travers.  The friend of his choice was the Anglican preacher, Dr. Andrewes, to whom he submitted all his works, and whom he called his “inquisitor general;” and he was proud to sign himself the pupil of Whitgift, and to write for him—­the archbishop of whom Lady Bacon wrote to her son Antony, veiling the dangerous sentiment in Greek, “that he was the ruin of the Church, for he loved his own glory more than Christ’s.”

Certainly, in the remarkable paper on Controversies in the Church (1589), Bacon had ceased to feel or to speak as a Puritan.  The paper is an attempt to compose the controversy by pointing out the mistakes in judgment, in temper, and in method on both sides.  It is entirely unlike what a Puritan would have written:  it is too moderate, too tolerant, too neutral, though like most essays of conciliation it is open to the rejoinder from both sides—­certainly from the Puritan—­that it begs the question by assuming the unimportance of the matters about which each contended with so much zeal.  It is the confirmation, but also the complement, and in some ways the correction of Hooker’s contemporary view of the quarrel which was threatening the life of the English Church, and not even Hooker could be so comprehensive and so fair.  For Hooker had to defend much that was indefensible:  he had to defend a great traditional system, just convulsed by a most tremendous shock—­a shock and alteration, as Bacon says, “the greatest and most dangerous that can be in a State,” in which old clews and habits and rules were confused and all but lost; in which a frightful amount of personal incapacity and worthlessness had, from sheer want of men, risen to the high places of the Church; and in which force and violence, sometimes of the most hateful kind, had come to be accepted as ordinary instruments in the government of souls.  Hooker felt too strongly the unfairness, the folly, the intolerant aggressiveness, the malignity of his opponents—­he was too much alive to the wrongs inflicted by them on his own side, and to the incredible absurdity of their arguments—­to do justice to what was only too real in the charges and complaints of those opponents.  But Bacon came from the very heart of the Puritan camp.  He had seen the inside of Puritanism—­its best as well as its worst side.  He witnesses to the humility, the conscientiousness, the labour, the learning, the hatred of sin and wrong, of many of its preachers.  He had heard, and heard with sympathy, all that could be urged against the bishops’ administration, and against a system of legal oppression in the name of the Church.  Where religious elements were so confusedly mixed, and where each side had apparently so much to urge on behalf of its claims, he saw the deep mistake of loftily ignoring facts, and of want of patience and forbearance with those who were scandalised at abuses, while the abuses, in some cases monstrous, were tolerated and turned to profit.  Towards the bishops and their policy,