It is the confirmation, but also the complement, and in some ways the correction of Hooker's contemporary view of the quarrel which was threatening the life of the English Church, and not even Hooker could be so comprehensive and so fair.

For Hooker had to defend much that was indefensible: he had to defend a great traditional system, just convulsed by a most tremendous shock--a shock and alteration, as Bacon says, "the greatest and most dangerous that can be in a State," in which old clews and habits and rules were confused and all but lost; in which a frightful amount of personal incapacity and worthlessness had, from sheer want of men, risen to the high places of the Church; and in which force and violence, sometimes of the most hateful kind, had come to be accepted as ordinary instruments in the government of souls.

Hooker felt too strongly the unfairness, the folly, the intolerant aggressiveness, the malignity of his opponents--he was too much alive to the wrongs inflicted by them on his own side, and to the incredible absurdity of their arguments--to do justice to what was only too real in the charges and complaints of those opponents.

But Bacon came from the very heart of the Puritan camp.

He had seen the inside of Puritanism--its best as well as its worst side.