Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
which we think fit to keep secret.” But as the story draws to a close, so also
does the isolationist policy which had governed Bensalem since its Chris-
tianization. The scientific high priest who has related all these things rises
to his feet as the story's narrator kneels before him to receive his blessing:
God bless thee, my son, and God bless this relation which I have made. I
give thee leave to publish it for the good of other nations; for we here are
in God's bosom, a land unknown.
12
The story ends as the European visitors are assigned “a value of about two
thousand ducats” for the propagation of this scientific gospel. If we believe
Rawley's note added at the end of the text that “the rest was not perfected,”
we might surmise that Bacon had intended to add more. But the narrative
strikes a telling allusive pose by closing at this point. By ending on this note,
in other words, this great scientific commission is brought into parallel with
the closing passage of Matthew's gospel in which Christ commands his
apostles to “go therefore and make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19).
Just as Christ's coming had filled out the revelation of the Old Testament
and thus marked the beginning of a new and final epoch, so now with sci-
ence. The full vision of science's possibilities that Bacon's fable dramatizes
represents an analogous endpoint in the realm of natural philosophy. Since
the fullness of the scientific gospel was manifest in Bensalem, it could no
longer remain hidden. Like the truths stored up by Israel until the coming
of the Messiah, Bacon's scientific Israel had remained in “God's bosom, a
land unknown.” But Israel had been given this revelation, as we see again
and again in both the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, not for its own
sake but so that the revelation it was given might benefit all the nations of
the earth (Genesis 18:19, 22:18; Acts 3:25; Galatians 3:8). Applied now to
the revelation of God's works in Bensalem's cultivation of scientific tech-
nique, Bacon was dramatizing a corresponding historical meaning. The
new science was not a deviation from the continuity of Christian history; it
was as old as providence itself, and its manifestation now at the end of the
age simply marked the epoch of its universal propagation.
The historical continuity that
New Atlantis
achieves by presenting the
age of science as a new revelatory dispensation also sanctioned the radical
new beginning Bacon was calling for. What might have otherwise seemed
unorthodox in substance—the notion that the church was destined to
bring in a kingdom of works in addition to the kingdom of the word—was
made orthodox by being represented through a sacred narrative form. The
