d this cry, "Down
with the magician!" resounded from cell to cell and from hall to hall.

Another weapon was also used upon the battlefields of science in that
time with much effect. The Arabs had made many noble discoveries in
science, and Averroes had, in the opinion of many, divided the honours
with St. Thomas Aquinas; these facts gave the new missile--it was the
epithet "Mohammedan"; this, too, was flung with effect at Bacon.

The attack now began to take its final shape. The two great religious
orders, Franciscan and Dominican, then in all the vigour of their
youth, vied with each other in fighting the new thought in chemistry
and physics. St. Dominic solemnly condemned research by experiment and
observation; the general of the Franciscan order took similar ground.
In 1243 the Dominicans interdicted every member of their order from the
study of medicine and natural philosophy, and in 1287 this interdiction
was extended to the study of chemistry.

In 1278 the authorities of the Franciscan order assembled at Paris,
solemnly condemned Bacon's teaching, and the general of the Franciscans,
Jerome of Ascoli, afterward Pope, threw him into prison, where he
remained for fourteen years, Though Pope Clement IV had protected him,
Popes Nicholas III and IV, by virtue of their infallibility, decided
that he was too dangerous to be at large, and he was only released at
the age of eighty--but a year or two before death placed him beyond the
reach of his enemies. How deeply the struggle had racked his mind may be
gathered from that last affecting declaration of his, "Would that I had
not given myself so much trouble for the love of science!"

The attempt has been made by sundry champions of the Church to show that
some of Bacon's utterances against ecclesiastical and other corruptions
in his time were the main cause of the severity which the Church
authorities exercised against him. This helps the Church but little,
even if it be well based; but it is not well based. That some of his
utterances of this sort made him enemies is doubtless true, but the
charges on which St. Bonaventura silenced him, and Jerome of Ascoli
imprisoned him, and successive popes kept him in prison for fourteen
years, were "dangerous novelties" and suspected sorcery.

Sad is it to think of what this great man might have given to the world
had ecclesiasticism allowed the gift. He held the key of treasures
which would have freed mankind from ages of error