Francis Bacon and his secret society - Grand Lodge of Colorado

AND HIS SECRET SOCIETY. 217
17. They were to promote the building of " fair houses " for
the advancement of learning, and for the relief of sickness, distress,
age, or poverty.
18. When a Rosiprucian died he was to be quietly and unostentatiously
buried.
His grave was either to be left without a
tombstone, or, if his friends chose to erect a monument in his
honour, the inscription upon it ivas to be ambiguous.
It is needless to show what an engine such a society would be,
driven by such a motive power as Bacon, one original mind,
endowed in almost equally balanced proportions with every intellectual
faculty; equally capable of the quick perception of
ideas, as of their prompt acquisition and application to
useful
purposes. With all this, Bacon possessed the still rarer faculty
of being able to communicate his ideas, to impress them upon
the dull, dead minds of the many, as well as upon the more
receptive apprehensions of the few. Where opposition to direct
teaching or advance in any kind of knowledge existed, there his
versatile genius, the " nimbleness of mind," of which he was
conscious, enabled him to devise methods " to let new light in
upon the understanding, and conquer prejudice without raising
contests, animosities, opposition or disturbance," 1 to speak
truth with a laughing face. 2
We are disposed to shrink from the facts which stare us in the
face, and to say : Is it possible that one man can have dared
and accomplished so much? Is it possible that any one brain
could have been capable enough, any life long enough, to enable
one man to have not only planned, but carried through, the
for honour and pood actions. . . . I cannot call riches better than the baggage of
virtue; the Kornan word is better, impedimenta,' for as the baggage ' is to an
army, so is riches to virtue; it cannot be spared nor left behind, but it hindereth
the march. . . .
Ofgreat riches there is no real use except it be in the distribution;
the rest is but conceit." "Money is like muck, not good except it be spread.' 1 ''
In
the same spirit, and with the same metaphor, Coriolan us is said to have regarded
riches. " Our spoils he ticked at, and looked upon things precious as they
were the common muck o' lite world."—Cor. ii. 3. Compare Essays Of Expense
and Of Riches with the speeches of the fallen Wolsey, Henry VIII. iii. 2, 106, etc.,
and with Timon of Athens, i. '2, 90, etc., ii. 1, etc.
l Pref. to Wisdom of the Ancients.
2Promus, 10.1.