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 understood and explained.  “I believe,” said he, “that the perfection of philosophy is to raise it to the state of a Christian law.”  Wisdom was the gift of God, and as such it included the knowledge of all things in heaven and earth, the knowledge of God himself, of the teachings of Christ, the beauty of virtue, the honesty of laws, the eternal life of glory and of punishment, the resurrection of the dead, and all things else.[27]