n from the sacred pages which have proved so plastic in their hands.
He is a God who never leaves himself without witness, who repenteth him
of the evil, who never allows a disease or an injury, compatible with the
enjoyment of life, to take its course without establishing an effort,
limited by certain fixed conditions, it is true, but an effort, always,
to restore the broken body or the shattered mind. In the perpetual
presence of this great Healing Agent, who stays the bleeding of wounds,
who knits the fractured bone, who expels the splinter by a gentle natural
process, who walls in the inflammation that might involve the vital
organs, who draws a cordon to separate the dead part from the living, who
sends his three natural anaesthetics to the over-tasked frame in due
order, according to its need,--sleep, fainting, death; in this perpetual
presence, it is doubtless hard for the physician to realize the
theological fact of a vast and permanent sphere of the universe, where no
organ finds itself in its natural medium, where no wound heals kindly,
where the executive has abrogated the pardoning power, and mercy forgets
its errand; where the omnipotent is unfelt save in malignant agencies,
and the omnipresent is unseen and unrepresented; hard to accept the God
of Dante's "Inferno," and of Bunyan's caged lunatic. If this is atheism,
call three, instead of two of the trio, atheists, and it will probably
come nearer the truth.

I am not disposed to deny the occasional injurious effect of the
materializing influences to which the physician is subjected. A spiritual
guild is absolutely necessary to keep him, to keep us all, from becoming
the "fingering slaves" that Wordsworth treats with such shrivelling
scorn. But it is well that the two callings have been separated, and it
is fitting that they remain apart. In settling the affairs of the late
concern, I am afraid our good friends remain a little in our debt. We
lent them our physician Michael Servetus in fair condition, and they
returned him so damaged by fire as to be quite useless for our purposes.
Their Reverend Samuel Willard wrote us a not over-wise report of a case
of hysteria; and our Jean Astruc gave them (if we may trust Dr. Smith's
Dictionary of the Bible) the first discerning criticism on the authorship
of the Pentateuch. Our John Locke enlightened them with his letters
concerning toleration; and their Cotton Mather obscured our twilight with
his "Nishmath Chajim."