ace of refuge and their sorrows? They had come "hither
from a land to which they were never to return. Hither they had brought,
and here they were to fix, their hopes and their affections."
Consecrated by persecutions in their native land, by an exile in Holland
of hardship and toil, by the perils of the ocean voyage and its terrible
storms, by their sufferings and wanderings in quest of a home, and by
the heartrending trials of the first lonely winter--by all these was
their new home consecrated and hallowed in their inmost thoughts; and
forward to the future they looked with confidence in God and a cheerful
reliance upon that beneficent Providence which had enabled them with
patience to submit to his chastenings, and, Phoenix-like, to rise from
the ashes of the dead and from the depths of the bitterest affliction
and distress, with invincible courage, determined to subdue the
wilderness before them, and to "fill this region of the great continent,
which stretches almost from pole to pole," with freedom and
intelligence, the arts and the sciences, flourishing villages, temples
of worship, and the numerous blessings of civilized life, baptized in
the fountain of the Gospel of Christ.

BIRTH OF MODERN SCIENTIFIC METHODS

BACON AND DESCARTES

A.D. 1620

GEORGE HENRY LEWES

Three centuries of modern thought have not sufficed to settle
the dispute as to its own origin. Many Englishmen still claim
insistently that Lord Bacon, in his _Advancement of Learning_,
and still more positively in his later and greater work, the
_Novum Organum_ (1620) started modern scientific method.
Present scientists themselves seem inclined to smile somewhat
scornfully at the laurels thus placed on Bacon's brow. And as
for Frenchmen, they simply refuse to hear the pompous Lord
Chancellor mentioned at all. To them Rene Descartes is the only
genuine originator of all modern philosophy. The publication of
his _Discourse on Method_ (1637) marks for them the epoch which
separates two worlds of thought.

Fortunately, George Henry Lewes, himself a celebrated English
critic and the author of a system of philosophy, presents us
the two rivals side by side, seeking to explain and balance the
honors due to each.

It is very certain that somewhere about this period did
originate that mathematical exactitude of method in both
thought and experiment wh