He witnesses to the humility, the conscientiousness, the labour, the learning, the hatred of sin and wrong, of many of its preachers.

He had heard, and heard with sympathy, all that could be urged against the bishops' administration, and against a system of legal oppression in the name of the Church.

Where religious elements were so confusedly mixed, and where each side had apparently so much to urge on behalf of its claims, he saw the deep mistake of loftily ignoring facts, and of want of patience and forbearance with those who were scandalised at abuses, while the abuses, in some cases monstrous, were tolerated and turned to profit.

Towards the bishops and their policy, though his language is very respectful, for the government was implicated, he is very severe.

They punish and restrain, but they do not themselves mend their ways or supply what was wanting; and theirs are "_injuriae potentiorum_"-- "injuries come from them that have the upperhand." But Hooker himself did not put his finger more truly and more surely on the real mischief of the Puritan movement: on the immense outbreak in it of unreasonable party spirit and visible personal ambition--"these are the true successors of Diotrephes and not my lord bishops"-- on the gradual development of the Puritan theory till it came at last to claim a supremacy as unquestionable and intolerant as that of the Papacy; on the servile affectation of the fashions of Geneva and Strasburg; on the poverty and foolishness of much of the Puritan teaching--its inability to satisfy the great questions which it raised in the soul, its unworthy dealing with Scripture--"naked examples, conceited inferences, and forced allusions, which mine into all certainty of religion"-- "the word, the bread of life, they toss up and down, they break it not;" on their undervaluing of moral worth, if it did not speak in their phraseology--"as they censure virtuous men by the names of _civil_ and _moral_, so do they censure men truly and godly wise, who see into the vanity of their assertions, by the name of _politiques_, saying that their wisdom is but carnal and savouring of man's brain." Bacon saw that the Puritans were aiming at a tyranny which, if they established it, would be more comprehensive, more searching, and more cruel than that of the older systems; but he thought it a remote and improbable danger, and that they might safely be tolerated for the work they did in education and preaching, "because the work of exhortation doth chiefly rest upon these men, and they have a zeal and hate of sin." But he ends by warning them lest "that be true which one of their adversaries said, _that they have but two small wants--knowledge and love_." One complaint that he makes of them is a curious instance of the changes of feeling, or at least of language, on moral subjects.