a mark of
weakness.

--I am not so much afraid for truth,--said the divinity-student,--as for
the conceptions of truth in the minds of persons not accustomed to judge
wisely the opinions uttered before them.

Would you, then, banish all allusions to matters of this nature from the
society of people who come together habitually?

I would be very careful in introducing them,--said the divinity-student.

Yes, but friends of yours leave pamphlets in people's entries, to be
picked up by nervous misses and hysteric housemaids, full of doctrines
these people do not approve. Some of your friends stop little children
in the street, and give them books, which their parents, who have had
them baptized into the Christian fold and give them what they consider
proper religious instruction, do not think fit for them. One would say
it was fair enough to talk about matters thus forced upon people's
attention.

The divinity-student could not deny that this was what might be called
opening the subject to the discussion of intelligent people.

But,--he said,--the greatest objection is this, that persons who have not
made a professional study of theology are not competent to speak on such
subjects. Suppose a minister were to undertake to express opinions on
medical subjects, for instance, would you not think he was going beyond
his province?

I laughed,--for I remembered John Wesley's "sulphur and supplication,"
and so many other cases where ministers had meddled with
medicine,--sometimes well and sometimes ill, but, as a general rule, with
a tremendous lurch to quackery, owing to their very loose way of
admitting evidence,--that I could not help being amused.

I beg your pardon,--I said,--I do not wish to be impolite, but I was
thinking of their certificates to patent medicines. Let us look at this
matter.

If a minister had attended lectures on the theory and practice of
medicine, delivered by those who had studied it most deeply, for thirty
or forty years, at the rate of from fifty to one hundred a year,--if he
had been constantly reading and hearing read the most approved text-books
on the subject,--if he had seen medicine actually practised according to
different methods, daily, for the same length of time,--I should think,
that if a person of average understanding, he was entitled to express an
opinion on the subject of medicine, or else that his instructors were a
set of ignorant and incompetent charlatans.

If, bef