Francis Bacon and his secret society - Grand Lodge of Colorado

AND HIS SECBET SOCIETY. 267
the corporal body) ; and before he could be admitted to this
privilege, it was requisite that he should be mystically buried,
as well as mystically dead, which is implied in the ancient Greek
formulary, ' I was covered in the bed,' the body being a sort of
grave or bed of the spirit. " l With the Freemasons, this symbolic
death and burial is or was initiated by the ceremony of
putting the noviciate into a coffin and covering him with a pall.
We have heard, but cannot answer for the fact, of a young man
who fainted under this " nerve test." It is hard to conceive
that such things should be done in civilised countries at the
present hour, and if it be true that they are yet practiced, it
must be that vows taken by the initiates bind them to continue
a system which, at its first invention, had some use in conveying
certain instruction
to very rude minds, incapable of otherwise
receiving it.
The earliest Rosicrucian documents do not enforce the special
doctrines of any church. The later documents are, however,
professedly Christian. We know that Bacon ''was religious;
. . . well able to render a reason of the hope which was in him; "
that he conformed to the ordinances of the Christian religion; 2
that he died in the communion of the Church of England; and
the thought suggests itself that, during the period of his life
when he was " running through the whole round " of the
ancient philosophies (a terrible and unsettling process to young,
excitable minds) — at that time, when his ardent soul was
striving after definite truth, and trying to free itself from the
clouds of error, bigotry, and superstition which obscured it—he
may have found himself, like Malvolio, " more puzzled than the
Egyptians in their fog. " Besides this, the quarrels and divission
on religious questions sorely disturbed him. He could not
believe in the religion of men who hated each other, who would
" dash the first table against the second, and who would so act
as Christians as to make us forget that they are men." Such
1 The Bool- of God, vol. ii. p. 125, quoting from Davies' Mytholoqy of llie
Druids, p. 392.
2 Life of Bacon, by his Chaplain and Secretary, p. 14. See ante, Bacon's
character,