Francis Bacon and his secret society - Grand Lodge of Colorado

268 FRANCIS BACON
divisions, he says, " were evils unknown to the heathen; " yet he
lived in the very midst of such divisions. He was eleven years
old at the time of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, when 60,000
Huguenots or Protestants were butchered by the order of
Charles IX. and his mother, the victims including Admiral de
Coligny, one of the most virtuous men that France possessed,
and the mainstay of the Protestant cause. He was a child
when the tyranny and barbarity of the Inquisition was in full
force, and for thirty-one years of his life he was witness to the
scenes of intolerable cruelty and iniquity which were perpetrated
under the name of religion by the Spanish Tiberius, Philip II.,
not only in his own country and amongst the unhappy Moors,
but, almost worse, in Flanders or the Netherlands, where the
miserable Protestants, at first patient under the extravagant
oppression to which they were subjected, at last rebelled, and,
at the sight of the tribunals of the Inquisition erected in their
principal cities, forgot their own weakness, and, impelled by
rage and fury, pulled down churches, subverted altars, and
obliged the clergy to fly. The atrocities which followed, the
execrable cruelties which were committed, and the detestation of
the papists which was inspired in the formerly peaceable
Flemings, are matters of history. No one will read Motley's
graphic narrative of the events of this time, and marvel that a
thoughtful man, witnessing such scenes, should be led to doubt
if religion, if Christianity, in whose name such deeds of darkness
were performed, could be a true thing ?
In the Essay of Unity, Bacon speaks of " Lucretius, the poet,
who, when he beheld the act of Agamemnon, that could endure
the sacrificing of his own daughter, exclaimed: '
Could religion
prompt to deeds so dreadful? ' What would he have said if he
had known of the massacre in France, or the powder treason in
England? He would have been seven times more epicure and
atheist than he was.
But Bacon seems to have said to himself: " Since men thus
quarrel over their religious opinions, I will seek for sbme ground
upon which all mankind may meet in common consent and harmony.
AH men who have any claim to intelligence and goodness