physician began, as from a sudden suggestion, "you won't
quarrel with me, if I tell you some of my real thoughts, will you?"

"Say on, my dear Sir, say on," the minister answered, with his most
genial smile; "your real thoughts are just what I want to get at. A
man's real thoughts are a great rarity. If I don't agree with you, I
shall like to hear you."

The Doctor began; and in order to give his thoughts more connectedly, we
will omit the conversational breaks, the questions and comments of the
clergyman, and all accidental interruptions.

"When the old ecclesiastics said that where there were three doctors
there were two atheists, they lied, of course. They called everybody who
differed from them atheists, until they found out that not believing in
God was n't nearly so ugly a crime as not believing in some particular
dogma; then they called them heretics, until so many good people
had been burned under that name that it began to smell too strong of
roasting flesh,--and after that infidels, which properly means people
without faith, of whom there are not a great many in any place or time.
But then, of course, there was some reason why doctors shouldn't think
about religion exactly as ministers did, or they never would have made
that proverb. It 's very likely that something of the same kind is true
now; whether it is so or not, I am going to tell you the reasons why it
would not be strange, if doctors should take rather different views from
clergymen about some matters of belief. I don't, of course, mean all
doctors nor all clergymen. Some doctors go as far as any old New England
divine, and some clergymen agree very well with the doctors that think
least according to rule.

"To begin with their ideas of the Creator himself. They always see him
trying to help his creatures out of their troubles. A man no sooner gets
a cut, than the Great Physician, whose agency we often call Nature, goes
to work, first to stop the blood, and then to heal the wound, and then
to make the scar as small as possible. If a man's pain exceeds a certain
amount, he faints, and so gets relief. If it lasts too long, habit comes
in to make it tolerable. If it is altogether too bad, he dies. That
is the best thing to be done under the circumstances. So you see, the
doctor is constantly in presence of a benevolent agency working against
a settled order of things, of which pain and disease are the accidents,
so to speak. Well, no doubt they find