ds, in such an unfair
manner as has given advantage to the enemy to suspect the whole doctrine
these men have profest to be nothing but a mere trick."

So wrote Robert Calef, the Boston merchant, whose book the Reverend
Increase Mather, president of Harvard College, burned publicly in the
college yard. But the pity of it is that the layman had not cried out
earlier and louder, and saved the community from the horror of those
judicial murders for witchcraft, the blame of which was so largely
attributable to the clergy.

Perhaps no, laymen have given the clergy more trouble than the doctors.
The old reproach against physicians, that where there were three of them
together there were two atheists, had a real significance, but not that
which was intended by the sharp-tongued ecclesiastic who first uttered
it. Undoubtedly there is a strong tendency in the pursuits of the
medical profession to produce disbelief in that figment of tradition and
diseased human imagination which has been installed in the seat of
divinity by the priesthood of cruel and ignorant ages. It is impossible,
or at least very difficult, for a physician who has seen the perpetual
efforts of Nature--whose diary is the book he reads oftenest--to heal
wounds, to expel poisons, to do the best that can be done under the given
conditions,--it is very difficult for him to believe in a world where
wounds cannot heal, where opiates cannot give a respite from pain, where
sleep never comes with its sweet oblivion of suffering, where the art of
torture is the only science cultivated, and the capacity for being
tormented is the only faculty which remains to the children of that same
Father who cares for the falling sparrow. The Deity has often been
pictured as Moloch, and the physician has, no doubt, frequently
repudiated him as a monstrosity.

On the other hand, the physician has often been renowned for piety as
well as for his peculiarly professional virtue of charity,--led upward by
what he sees to the source of all the daily marvels wrought before his
own eyes. So it was that Galen gave utterance to that psalm of praise
which the sweet singer of Israel need not have been ashamed of; and if
this "heathen" could be lifted into such a strain of devotion, we need
not be surprised to find so many devout Christian worshippers among the
crowd of medical "atheists."

No two professions should come into such intimate and cordial relations
as those to which belong