and misery. With his
discoveries as a basis, with his method as a guide, what might not the
world have gained! Nor was the wrong done to that age alone; it was done
to this age also. The nineteenth century was robbed at the same
time with the thirteenth. But for that interference with science the
nineteenth century would be enjoying discoveries which will not be
reached before the twentieth century, and even later. Thousands of
precious lives shall be lost, tens of thousands shall suffer discomfort,
privation, sickness, poverty, ignorance, for lack of discoveries and
methods which, but for this mistaken dealing with Roger Bacon and his
compeers, would now be blessing the earth.

In two recent years sixty thousand children died in England and in Wales
of scarlet fever; probably quite as many died in the United States. Had
not Bacon been hindered, we should have had in our hands, by this time,
the means to save two thirds of these victims; and the same is true
of typhoid, typhus, cholera, and that great class of diseases of
whose physical causes science is just beginning to get an inkling. Put
together all the efforts of all the atheists who have ever lived, and
they have not done so much harm to Christianity and the world as has
been done by the narrow-minded, conscientious men who persecuted Roger
Bacon, and closed the path which he gave his life to open.

But despite the persecution of Bacon and the defection of those who
ought to have followed him, champions of the experimental method rose
from time to time during the succeeding centuries. We know little of
them personally; our main knowledge of their efforts is derived from the
endeavours of their persecutors.

Under such guidance the secular rulers were naturally vigorous. In
France Charles V forbade, in 1380, the possession of furnaces and
apparatus necessary for chemical processes; under this law the chemist
John Barrillon was thrown into prison, and it was only by the greatest
effort that his life was saved. In England Henry IV, in 1404, issued a
similar decree. In Italy the Republic of Venice, in 1418, followed these
examples. The judicial torture and murder of Antonio de Dominis were not
simply for heresy his investigations in the phenomena of light were
an additional crime. In Spain everything like scientific research was
crushed out among Christians. Some earnest efforts were afterward made
by Jews and Moors, but these were finally ended by persecution; an