image thus addresses him: "Thomas, thou hast written well concerning me; what price wilt thou receive for thy labor?" To this day the greater ecclesiastical historians of the Roman Church, like the Abbé Rohrbacher, and the minor historians of science, who find it convenient to propitiate the Church, like Pouchet, dilate upon the glories of St. Thomas Aquinas in thus making a treaty of alliance between religious and scientific thought, and laying the foundations for a "sanctified science." But the unprejudiced historian cannot indulge in this enthusiastic view. The results both for the Church and for the progress of science have been most unfortunate. It was a wretched step backward. The first result of this great man's great compromise was to close that new path in science which alone leads to discoveries of value--the experimental method--and to reopen the old path of mixed theology and science, which, as Hallam declares, "after three or four hundred years had not untied a single knot, or added one unequivocal truth to the domain of philosophy;" the path which, as all modern history proves, has ever since led only to delusion and evil.[90] The path thus unfortunately opened by these strong men became the main path in science for ages, and it led the world farther and farther from any fruitful fact or hopeful method. Roger Bacon's investigations were virtually forgotten; worthless mixtures of literal interpretation of Scripture with imperfectly authenticated physical facts took their place. Every age since has been full of examples of this, but out of them I will take just one; and it shall be no other than that Francis Bacon, who, more than any other man, led the modern world out of the path opened by Aquinas, and back into the path trod by Roger Bacon. Strange as it may at first seem, Francis Bacon, whose keenness of sight revealed the delusions of the old path and the promises of the new, that man whose boldness in thought did so much to turn the world from the old path into the new, presents, in his own writings, one of the most striking examples of the strength of the evil he did so much to destroy.