Bacon was obsequious to the tyranny of power, but he was never inclined to bow to the tyranny of opinion; and the tyranny of Puritan infallibility was the last thing to which he was likely to submit.

His mother would have wished him to sit under Cartwright and Travers.

The friend of his choice was the Anglican preacher, Dr.Andrewes, to whom he submitted all his works, and whom he called his "inquisitor general;" and he was proud to sign himself the pupil of Whitgift, and to write for him--the archbishop of whom Lady Bacon wrote to her son Antony, veiling the dangerous sentiment in Greek, "that he was the ruin of the Church, for he loved his own glory more than Christ's." Certainly, in the remarkable paper on _Controversies in the Church_ (1589), Bacon had ceased to feel or to speak as a Puritan.

The paper is an attempt to compose the controversy by pointing out the mistakes in judgment, in temper, and in method on both sides.

It is entirely unlike what a Puritan would have written: it is too moderate, too tolerant, too neutral, though like most essays of conciliation it is open to the rejoinder from both sides--certainly from the Puritan--that it begs the question by assuming the unimportance of the matters about which each contended with so much zeal.