Thus, despite his many resorts to and prostrations before the Scriptures, the general effect of his writings in this regard is to set up in the minds of his readers the old semi-rationalistic equivoque of a "two-fold truth"; reminding us as they do that he "did in the beginning separate the divine testimony from the human." When, therefore, he announces that "we know by faith" that "matter was created from nothing," [114] he has the air of juggling with his problem; and his further suggestion as to the possibility of matter being endowed with a force of evolution, however cautiously put, is far removed from orthodoxy. Accordingly, the charge of atheism--which he notes as commonly brought against all who dwell solely on second causes [115]--was actually cast at his memory in the next generation. [116] It was of course false: on the issue of theism he is continually descanting with quite conventional unction; as in the familiar essay on atheism. [117] His dismissal of final causes as "barren" meant merely that the notion was barren of scientific result; [118] and he refers the question to metaphysic. [119] But if his theism was of a kind disturbing to believers in a controlling Providence, as little was it satisfactory to Christian fervour: and it can hardly be doubted that the main stream of his argument made for a non-Biblical deism, if not for atheism; his dogmatic orthodoxies being undermined by his own scientific teaching. Lechler (Gesch. des englischen Deismus, pp. 23-25) notes that Bacon involuntarily made for deism. Cp. Amand Saintes, Hist. de la philos. de Kant, 1844, p. 69; and Kuno Fischer, Francis Bacon, Eng. tr. 1857, ch. xi, pp. 341-43. Dean Church (Bacon, in "Men of Letters" series, pp. 174, 205) insists that Bacon held by revelation and immortality; and can of course cite his profession of such belief, which is not to be disputed. (Cp. the careful judgment of Prof. Fowler in his Bacon, pp. 180-91, and his ed. of the Novum Organum, 1878, pp. 43-53.) But the tendency of the specific Baconian teaching is none the less to put these beliefs aside, and to overlay them with a naturalistic habit of mind. At the first remove from Bacon we have Hobbes.