ld folios
in calf and vellum I will show you, to be bullied by the proprietor,
of a "Wood and Bache," and a shelf of peppered sheepskin reprints by
Philadelphia Editors. Besides, many of the profession and I know
a little something of each other, and you don't think I am such a
simpleton as to lose their good opinion by saying what the better heads
among them would condemn as unfair and untrue? Now mark how the great
plague came on the generation of drugging doctors, and in what form it
fell.

A scheming drug-vender, (inventive genius,) an utterly untrustworthy and
incompetent observer, (profound searcher of Nature,) a shallow dabbler
in erudition, (sagacious scholar,) started the monstrous fiction
(founded the immortal system) of Homoeopathy. I am very fair, you
see,--you can help yourself to either of these sets of phrases.

All the reason in the world would not have had so rapid and general an
effect on the public mind to disabuse it of the idea that a drug is a
good thing in itself, instead of being, as it is, a bad thing, as was
produced by the trick (system) of this German charlatan (theorist). Not
that the wiser part of the profession needed him to teach them; but the
routinists and their employers, the "general practitioners," who lived
by selling pills and mixtures, and their drug-consuming customers, had
to recognize that people could get well, unpoisoned. These dumb cattle
would not learn it of themselves, and so the murrain of Homoeopathy fell
on them.

--You don't know what plague has fallen on the practitioners of
theology? I will tell you, then. It is Spiritualism. While some are
crying out against it as a delusion of the Devil, and some are laughing
at it as an hysteric folly, and some are getting angry with it as a
mere trick of interested or mischievous persons, Spiritualism is quietly
undermining the traditional ideas of the future state which have been
and are still accepted,--not merely in those who believe in it, but in
the general sentiment of the community, to a larger extent than most
good people seem to be aware of. It need n't be true, to do this, any
more than Homoeopathy need, to do its work. The Spiritualists have some
pretty strong instincts to pry over, which no doubt have been roughly
handled by theologians at different times. And the Nemesis of the pulpit
comes, in a shape it little thought of, beginning with the snap of a
toe-joint, and ending with such a crack of old beliefs that t