But these sepulchres of the dead!—where lie Turner, Chilton, Crackston, Fletcher, Goodman, Mullins, White, Rogers, Priest, Williams, and their companions—these touch the tenderest and holiest chords. Husbands and wives, parents and children, have finished their pilgrimage, and mingled their dust with the dust of New England. Hushed as the unbreathing air, when not a leaf stirs in the mighty forest, was the scene at those graves where the noble and true were buried in peace. "Deeply as they sorrowed at parting with those, doubly endeared to them by the remembrance of what they had suffered together, and by the fellowship of kindred griefs, they committed them to the earth calmly, but with hope." No sculptured marble, no enduring monument, no honorable inscription, marks the spot where they were laid. Is it surprising that local attachments soon sprung up in the breasts of the survivors, endearing them to the place of refuge and their sorrows? They had come "hither from a land to which they were never to return. Hither they had brought, and here they were to fix, their hopes and their affections." Consecrated by persecutions in their native land, by an exile in Holland of hardship and toil, by the perils of the ocean voyage and its terrible storms, by their sufferings and wanderings in quest of a home, and by the heartrending trials of the first lonely winter—by all these was their new home consecrated and hallowed in their inmost thoughts; and forward to the future they looked with confidence in God and a cheerful reliance upon that beneficent Providence which had enabled them with patience to submit to his chastenings, and, Phœnix-like, to rise from the ashes of the dead and from the depths of the bitterest affliction and distress, with invincible courage, determined to subdue the wilderness before them, and to "fill this region of the great continent, which stretches almost from pole to pole," with freedom and intelligence, the arts and the sciences, flourishing villages, temples of worship, and the numerous blessings of civilized life, baptized in the fountain of the Gospel of Christ.
BIRTH OF MODERN SCIENTIFIC METHODS
BACON AND DESCARTES
A.D. 1620
GEORGE HENRY LEWES
Three centuries of modern thought have not sufficed to settle the dispute as to its own origin. Many Englishmen still claim insistently that Lord Bacon, in his Advancement of Learning, and still more positively in his later and greater work, the Novum Organum (1620) started modern scientific method. Present scientists themselves seem inclined to smile somewhat scornfully at the laurels thus placed on Bacon's brow. And as for Frenchmen, they simply refuse to hear the pompous Lord Chancellor mentioned at all. To them René Descartes is the only genuine originator of all modern philosophy. The publication of his Discourse on Method (1637) marks for them the epoch which separates two worlds of thought.
Fortunately, George Henry Lewes, himself a celebrated English critic and the author of a system of philosophy, presents us the two rivals side by side, seeking to explain and balance the honors due to each.
It is very certain that somewhere about this period did originate that mathematical exactitude of method in both thought and experiment which has produced modern science. And modern science has, in its brief but marvellous career of three centuries, altered the face of the globe. It has taught man more than ancient science did in all the preceding centuries; it has touched even our deepest faiths.