[26]

These passages may serve to show something of the nature of those
external hindrances to knowledge with which Bacon himself had had to
strive, which he overcame, and which he set himself with all his force
to break down, that they might no longer obstruct the path of study.
What scholar, what lover of learning, can now picture to himself such
efforts without emotion,--without an almost oppressive sense of the
contrast between the wealth of his own opportunities and the penury of
the earlier scholar? On the shelves within reach of his hand lie the
accumulated riches of time. Compare our libraries, with their crowded
volumes of ancient and modern learning, with the bare cell of the
solitary Friar, in which, in a single small cupboard, are laid away a
few imperfect manuscripts, precious as a king's ransom, which it had
been the labor of years to collect. This very volume of his works, a
noble monument of patient labor, of careful investigation, of deep
thought, costs us but a trivial sum; while its author, in his poverty,
was scarcely able, without begging, to pay for the parchment upon which
he wrote it, as, uncheered by the anticipation that centuries after his
death men would prize the works he painfully accomplished, he leaned
against his empty desk, half-discouraged by the difficulties that beset
him. All honor to him! honor to the schoolmen of the Middle Ages! to the
men who kept the traditions of wisdom alive, who trimmed the wick of the
lamp of learning when its flame was flickering, and who, when its light
grew dim and seemed to be dying out, supplied it with oil hardly
squeezed by their own hands, drop by drop, from the scanty olives which
they had gathered from the eternal tree of Truth! In these later days
learning has become cheap. What sort of scholar must he now be, who
should be worthy to be put into comparison with the philosopher of the
thirteenth century?

The general scheme of Bacon's system of philosophy was at once simple
and comprehensive. The scope of his thought had a breadth uncommon in
his or in any time. In his view, the object of all philosophy and human
learning was to enable men to attain to the wisdom of God; and to this
end it was to be subservient absolutely, and relatively so far as
regarded the Church, the government of the state, the conversion of
infidels, and the repression of those who could not be converted. All
wisdom was included in the Sacred Scriptures, if properly unders