Francis Bacon and his secret society - Grand Lodge of Colorado

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AND HIS SECRET SOCIETY. 35
ture, not in this country only, but also on the continent (for he
makes no exceptions or qualifications to his statement as to the general
ignorance which prevailed), so, excluding his own work from
the inquiry, he found it still, when, in his old age, he for the
last time summed up the wants and deficiencies of the world in
all these matters. In youth, enthusiasm had led him to hope
and believe in a speedy regeneration and quickening of the
minds and spirits of men. In old age he had learned that " the
dull ass will not mend his pace, " and that such advance could
only be by slow degrees, and in the future ages. " Of myself, "
he says. " I am silent," but he repeats his former opinions and
statements with undiminished emphasis in 1623.
In the face of such facts as these, it appears monstrous to
believe that there could really have been in
Bacon's time that
" galaxy of wits, " that extraordinary blaze and outburst of
light from many suns, and from a heaven full of stars of the
first magnitude, such as we have been taught in our childhood
not only to discern, but to distinguish. It is more reasonable
to suppose that one sun, one supreme spirit, the great natural
magician and natural philosopher, like Prospero, with
many " meaner ministers" to do his biddings, should have
planned and carried out, by a method to be transmitted through
the whole century, that Great Reformation of the whole world
which had been his boyish dream, his fixed idea at the age of
fifteen. Bacon's chief biographer lays stress upon this fact, and
as it is one which is intimately connected with the history of
the Secret
Society which is the subject of the following pages,
it is desirable that it should be firmly established.
Again, therefore,
we draw attention to the eloquent and beautiful chapter
with which Mr. Spedding opens his " Letters and Life of Bacon.
After telling of the brilliant career of the youthful Francis at
Trinity College, Cambridge, of the disappointment which he
experienced in that university where he hoped to have learned
all that men knew, but where, as he declared, they taught
"words, not matter," Mr. Spedding says: "It was then a
thought struck him, the date of which deserves to be recorded,
not for anything extraordinary in the thought itself, but for its