The New Atlantis of Francis Bacon

first industrial revolution:

This was the situation Bacon had to meet. We may help ourselves to understand his problem in some measure if we again invoke Schweitzer’s name. Schweitzer was passionately Christian. But he had read Kant, and Hegel, and Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, and the application to Christianity of their teachings made by Bauer and Strauss. Schweitzer rightly felt that this new German philosophy meant a real advance in human consciousness, and that if Christianity could not live in the new mental and spiritual climate, it could not live at all. Such was Bacon’s position in the world of Elizabeth and James. So far from being a lukewarm Christian, as Professor Broad once suggested, who ‘regarded the Church as a branch of the civil service and the Archbishop of Canterbury as the Minister for Divine affairs’; so far from making hypocritical genuflexions in the direction of Christianity, as Professor Willey said; he was, like Schweitzer, one to whom the call to ‘Follow me’ had come with irresistible force. But the new world in which Bacon had to obey the call was the new world in which the power of technology had impressed itself on the liveliest minds. He could not live in the illusory wisdom recommended by C. S. Lewis, teaching that the right attitude for man is to bow himself before ‘reality’ even if it comes in the form of poverty, plague, or bogus science. Instead he offered a reinterpretation of Christianity in which it was the duty of man to exercise dominion over the creation, as an expression both of his humility before the power of God, who had made it and given it its laws, and as the means of effectively fulfilling the command of charity, to love one’s brother as oneself. In short one should try to follow Christ in a scientific and technological age. Two quotations may suffice to establish this point. At least the will allow me to be silent and Francis Bacon to speak for himself.

The first is from the ‘Sacred Meditations’ which appeared together with the ‘Essays’ in 1596. It was Bacon’s first introduction to the public. In the second of the ‘Meditations’ Bacon entered upon a comparison of the miracles of the Old Testament and the New. The former were often destructive, like the plagues of Egypt. But the latter, at least so far as Jesus himself was concerned, were all acts of mercy. I quote: ‘All his miracles were