answered. "When we say that God is omnipresent and omnipotent and
omniscient, we are a little more apt to mean it than your folks are. We
think, when a wound heals, that God's presence and power and knowledge
are there, healing it, just as that old surgeon did. We think a good
many theologians, working among their books, don't see the facts of the
world they live in. When we tell 'em of these facts, they are apt to
call us materialists and atheists and infidels, and all that. We can't
help seeing the facts, and we don't think it's wicked to mention 'em."

"Do tell me," the Reverend Doctor said, "some of these facts we are in
the habit of overlooking, and which your profession thinks it can see and
understand."

"That's very easy," the Doctor replied. "For instance: you don't
understand or don't allow for idiosyncrasies as we learn to. We know
that food and physic act differently with different people; but you think
the same kind of truth is going to suit, or ought to suit, all minds. We
don't fight with a patient because he can't take magnesia or opium; but
you are all the time quarrelling over your beliefs, as if belief did not
depend very much on race and constitution, to say nothing of early
training."

"Do you mean to say that every man is not absolutely free to choose his
beliefs?"

"The men you write about in your studies are, but not the men we see in
the real world. There is some apparently congenital defect in the
Indians, for instance, that keeps them from choosing civilization and
Christianity. So with the Gypsies, very likely. Everybody knows that
Catholicism or Protestantism is a good deal a matter of race.
Constitution has more to do with belief than people think for. I went to
a Universalist church, when I was in the city one day, to hear a famous
man whom all the world knows, and I never saw such pews-full of broad
shoulders and florid faces, and substantial, wholesome-looking persons,
male and female, in all my life. Why, it was astonishing. Either their
creed made them healthy, or they chose it because they were healthy.
Your folks have never got the hang of human nature."

"I am afraid this would be considered a degrading and dangerous view of
human beliefs and responsibility for them," the Reverend Doctor replied.
"Prove to a man that his will is governed by something outside of
himself, and you have lost all hold on his moral and religious nature.
There is nothing bad men want to