tioner of medicine Bishop Berkeley's "Treatise on Tar-water," and
the invaluable prescription of that "aged clergyman whose sands of
life"----but let us be fair, if not generous, and remember that Cotton
Mather shares with Zabdiel Boylston the credit of introducing the
practice of inoculation into America. The professions should be cordial
allies, but the church-going, Bible-reading physician ought to know a
great deal more of the subjects included under the general name of
theology than the clergyman can be expected to know of medicine. To say,
as has been said not long since, that a young divinity student is as
competent to deal with the latter as an old physician is to meddle with
the former, suggests the idea that wisdom is not an heirloom in the
family of the one who says it. What a set of idiots our clerical
teachers must have been and be, if, after a quarter or half a century of
their instruction, a person of fair intelligence is utterly incompetent
to form any opinion about the subjects which they have been teaching, or
trying to teach him, so long!

A minister must find it very hard work to preach to hearers who do not
believe, or only half believe, what he preaches. But pews without heads
in them are a still more depressing spectacle. He may convince the
doubter and reform the profligate. But he cannot produce any change on
pine and mahogany by his discourses, and the more wood he sees as he
looks along his floor and galleries, the less his chance of being useful.
It is natural that in times like the present changes of faith and of
place of worship should be far from infrequent. It is not less natural
that there should be regrets on one side and gratification on the other,
when such changes occur. It even happens occasionally that the regrets
become aggravated into reproaches, rarely from the side which receives
the new accessions, less rarely from the one which is left. It is quite
conceivable that the Roman Church, which considers itself the only true
one, should look on those who leave its communion as guilty of a great
offence. It is equally natural that a church which considers Pope and
Pagan a pair of murderous giants, sitting at the mouths of their caves,
alike in their hatred to true Christians, should regard any of its
members who go over to Romanism as lost in fatal error. But within the
Protestant fold there are many compartments, and it would seem that it is
not a deadly defection to pass