The _Novum Organum_, considering the time when it came from his pen, is doubtless one of the greatest exhibitions of genius in the history of human thought. This treatise it was which showed the modern world the way out of the scholastic method and reverence for dogma into the experimental method and reverence for demonstrated fact. In the course of it occur many passages which show that the great philosopher was fully alive to the danger, both to religion and to science, arising from their mixture. Early in his argument he says: "But the corruption of philosophy from superstition and admixture of theology separates altogether more widely, and introduces the greatest amount of evil, both into whole systems of philosophy and into their parts." And a little later he says: "Some moderns have indulged this vanity with the greatest carelessness, and have endeavored to found a Natural Philosophy on the first of Genesis and the Book of Job, and other sacred Scriptures, so 'seeking the dead among the living.' And by so much the more is this vanity to be restrained and coerced because their expressions form an unwholesome mixture of things human and divine; not merely fantastic philosophy, but heretical religion. And so it is very salutary that, with due sobriety of mind, those things only be rendered to faith which are faith's."[91] Still later, in his treatise, Bacon returns to the charge yet more strongly. He says: "Nor is it to be overlooked, that natural philosophy has in all ages had a troublesome and stubborn adversary in superstition and the blind and immoderate zeal for religion. Thus it has been among the Greeks, that they who first proposed to the yet unprepared ears of men the natural causes of lightning and tempests were condemned, on that head, for impiety toward the gods; nor by some of the old fathers of the Christian religion were those much better received, who laid it down from the most sure demonstrations, such as no one in his senses could nowadays contradict, that the earth is round, and asserted in consequence that there must be antipodes. Furthermore, as things are now, the condition of discourses on Nature is made severe and more rigorous in consequence of the summaries and methods of scholastic theologians, who, while they have, as far as they could, reduced theology to order, and have fashioned it into the form of an art, have besides succeeded in mingling far more than was right of the quarrelsome and thorny philosophy of Aristotle with the body of religion."