though his language is very respectful, for the government was implicated, he is very severe.  They punish and restrain, but they do not themselves mend their ways or supply what was wanting; and theirs are “injuriae potentiorum”—­“injuries come from them that have the upperhand.”  But Hooker himself did not put his finger more truly and more surely on the real mischief of the Puritan movement:  on the immense outbreak in it of unreasonable party spirit and visible personal ambition—­“these are the true successors of Diotrephes and not my lord bishops”—­on the gradual development of the Puritan theory till it came at last to claim a supremacy as unquestionable and intolerant as that of the Papacy; on the servile affectation of the fashions of Geneva and Strasburg; on the poverty and foolishness of much of the Puritan teaching—­its inability to satisfy the great questions which it raised in the soul, its unworthy dealing with Scripture—­“naked examples, conceited inferences, and forced allusions, which mine into all certainty of religion”—­“the word, the bread of life, they toss up and down, they break it not;” on their undervaluing of moral worth, if it did not speak in their phraseology—­“as they censure virtuous men by the names of civil and moral, so do they censure men truly and godly wise, who see into the vanity of their assertions, by the name of politiques, saying that their wisdom is but carnal and savouring of man’s brain.”  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.  The essay, besides being a picture of the times as regards religion, is an example of what was to be Bacon’s characteristic strength and weakness:  his strength in lifting up a subject which had been degraded by mean and wrangling