it harder than clergymen to
believe that there can be any world or state from which this benevolent
agency is wholly excluded. This may be very wrong; but it is not
unnatural.

"They can hardly conceive of a permanent state of being in which cuts
would never try to heal, nor habit render suffering endurable. This is
one effect of their training.

"Then, again, their attention is very much called to human limitations.
Ministers work out the machinery of responsibility in an abstract kind
of way; they have a sort of algebra of human nature, in which friction
and strength (or weakness) of material are left out. You see, a doctor
is in the way of studying children from the moment of birth upwards. For
the first year or so he sees that they are just as much pupils of their
Maker as the young of any other animals. Well, their Maker trains them
to pure selfishness. Why? In order that they may be sure to take care of
themselves. So you see, when a child comes to be, we will say a year and
a day old, and makes his first choice between right and wrong, he is
at a disadvantage; for he, has that vis a tergo, as we doctors call it,
that force from behind, of a whole year's life of selfishness, for which
he is no more to blame than a calf is to blame for having lived in the
same way, purely to gratify his natural appetites. Then we see that baby
grow up to a child, and, if he is fat and stout and red and lively,
we expect to find him troublesome and noisy, and, perhaps, sometimes
disobedient more or less; that's the way each new generation breaks its
egg-shell; but if he is very weak and thin, and is one of the kind that
may be expected to die early, he will very likely sit in the house all
day and read good books about other little sharp-faced children just
like himself, who died early, having always been perfectly indifferent
to all the out-door amusements of the wicked little red-cheeked
children.

"Some of the little folks we watch grow up to be young women, and
occasionally one of them gets nervous, what we call hysterical, and then
that girl will begin to play all sorts of pranks,--to lie and cheat,
perhaps, in the most unaccountable way, so that she might seem to a
minister a good example of total depravity. We don't see her in that
light. We give her iron and valerian, and get her on horseback, if we
can, and so expect to make her will come all right again. By and by we
are called in to see an old baby, threescore years a