The New Atlantis of Francis Bacon

the Strangers’ House, can be briefly summarized. According to their traditions oceanic navigation three thousand years ago was much greater than now, and Bensalem itself had then had a merchant fleet of some one thousand five hundred strong ships of great content. They had thus much intercourse with other peoples, not only with sailors but with men of letters; and communities of Persians, Chaldaeans, Arabians, and Hebrews had then settled among them and still remained. Nor had their intercourse been only with the Mediterranean world. They had also been in contact with China and Tartary. Their civilization had absorbed many cultures. But the most significant event in their early history had been the reign of King Solomona, one thousand nine hundred years before, that is to say, about three hundred B.C. This king they esteemed as the law-giver of their nation; and it was he who had founded the order or society called Solomon’s House, or the College of the Six Days Works. This point is all important. Solomon’s House is no novelty. It stands for something that under happier auspices might also be 2,000 years old in Europe. By a realistic touch Bacon allows the Governor, who gives the information, to be a little in doubt about the origin of the name. He thinks it came about in this way. King Solomona had learned from the Hebrews who lived among them, their doctrine of the Creation. This he had accepted, and finding his name to be virtually identical with that of the Hebrew king most renowned for wisdom, he had called his foundation Solomon’s House. Note the antiquity of the foundation. It was a pre-Christian institution, made on the basis of Old Testament beliefs, at a date which is intended to make it rival the schools of ancient Greece. When Bensalem was evangelized through the agency of Bartholomew, the apostle to the Indies, about twenty years after the Ascension, it was one of the fathers of Solomon’s House who welcomed the sacred books which had been miraculously brought to them floating in an ark upon the sea. Bensalem, therefore, was a land the religious history of which was the same as that of Christian Europe. It had first received the old dispensation and then the new. But it differed from Europe in that it had based its mental life upon the Bible and had thus escaped. what

Bacon always considered the error of the Greeks. Solomon’s

8