However strongly you may differ from these opinions of our own
forefathers with regard to the ground and cause of physical science,
and the arts of healing, I am sure that the recollection of the
thrice holy ground upon which we stand, beneath the shadow of
venerable piles, witnesses for the creeds, the laws, the liberties,
which those our ancestors have handed down to us, will preserve you
from the temptation of dismissing with hasty contempt their thoughts
upon any subject so important; will make you inclined to listen to
their opinion with affection, if not with reverence; and save,
perhaps, the preacher from a sneer when he declares that the doctrine
of those old Saxon men is, in his belief, not only the most
Scriptural, but the most rational and scientific explanation of the
grounds of all human knowledge.
At least, I shall be able to quote in support of my own opinion a
name from which there can be no appeal in the minds of a congregation
of educated Englishmen--I mean Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, the
spiritual father of the modern science, and, therefore, of the
chemistry and the medicine of the whole civilised world. If there is
one thing which more than another ought to impress itself on the mind
of a careful student of his works, it is this--that he considered
science as the inspiration of God, and every separate act of
induction by which man arrives at a physical law, as a revelation
from the Maker of those laws; and that the faith which gave him
daring to face the mystery of the universe, and proclaim to men that
they could conquer nature by obeying her, was his deep, living,
practical belief that there was One who had ascended up on high and
led captive in the flesh and spirit of a man those very idols of
sense which had been themselves leading men's minds captive,
enslaving them to the illusions of their own senses, forcing them to
bow down in vague awe and terror before those powers of Nature, which
God had appointed, not to be their tyrants, but their slaves.
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