down to it again.

--A man that knows men, in the street, at their work, human nature in
its shirt-sleeves, who makes bargains with deacons, instead of talking
over texts with them, a man who has found out that there are plenty of
praying rogues and swearing saints in the world,--above all, who has
found out, by living into the pith and core of life, that all of the
Deity which can be folded up between the sheets of any human book is to
the Deity of the firmament, of the strata, of the hot aortic flood of
throbbing human life, of this infinite, instantaneous consciousness in
which the soul's being consists,--an incandescent point in the filament
connecting the negative pole of a past eternity with the positive pole
of an eternity that is to come,--that all of the Deity which any human
book can hold is to this larger Deity of the working battery of the
universe only as the films in a book of gold-leaf are to the broad
seams and curdled lumps of ore that lie in unsunned mines and virgin
placers,--Oh!--I was saying that a man who lives out-of-doors, among
live people, gets some things into his head he might not find in the
index of his "Body of Divinity."

I tell you what,--the idea of the professions' digging a moat round
their close corporations, like that Japanese one at Jeddo, on the bottom
of which, if travellers do not lie, you could put Park Street Church and
look over the vane from its side, and try to stretch another such spire
across it without spanning the chasm,--that idea, I say, is pretty
nearly worn out. Now when a civilization or a civilized custom falls
into senile dementia, there is commonly a judgment ripe for it, and it
comes as plagues come, from a breath,--as fires come, from a spark.

Here, look at medicine. Big wigs, gold-headed canes, Latin
prescriptions, shops full of abominations, recipes a yard long, "curing"
patients by drugging as sailors bring a wind by whistling, selling lies
at a guinea apiece,--a routine, in short, of giving unfortunate sick
people a mess of things either too odious to swallow or too acrid to
hold, or, if that were possible, both at once.

--You don't know what I mean, indignant and not unintelligent
country-practitioner? Then you don't know the history of medicine,--and
that is not my fault. But don't expose yourself in any outbreak of
eloquence; for, by the mortar in which Anaxarchus was pounded! I did not
bring home Schenckius and Forestus and Hildanus, and all the o