Increase Mather, president of Harvard College, burned publicly in the
college yard. But the pity of it is that the layman had not cried out
earlier and louder, and saved the community from the horror of those
judicial murders for witchcraft, the blame of which was so largely
attributable to the clergy.

Perhaps no, laymen have given the clergy more trouble than the doctors.
The old reproach against physicians, that where there were three of them
together there were two atheists, had a real significance, but not that
which was intended by the sharp-tongued ecclesiastic who first uttered
it. Undoubtedly there is a strong tendency in the pursuits of the
medical profession to produce disbelief in that figment of tradition
and diseased human imagination which has been installed in the seat of
divinity by the priesthood of cruel and ignorant ages. It is impossible,
or at least very difficult, for a physician who has seen the perpetual
efforts of Nature--whose diary is the book he reads oftenest--to heal
wounds, to expel poisons, to do the best that can be done under the
given conditions,--it is very difficult for him to believe in a world
where wounds cannot heal, where opiates cannot give a respite from pain,
where sleep never comes with its sweet oblivion of suffering, where
the art of torture is the only science cultivated, and the capacity for
being tormented is the only faculty which remains to the children of
that same Father who cares for the falling sparrow. The Deity has often
been pictured as Moloch, and the physician has, no doubt, frequently
repudiated him as a monstrosity.

On the other hand, the physician has often been renowned for piety as
well as for his peculiarly professional virtue of charity,--led upward
by what he sees to the source of all the daily marvels wrought before
his own eyes. So it was that Galen gave utterance to that psalm of
praise which the sweet singer of Israel need not have been ashamed of;
and if this "heathen" could be lifted into such a strain of devotion, we
need not be surprised to find so many devout Christian worshippers among
the crowd of medical "atheists."

No two professions should come into such intimate and cordial relations
as those to which belong the healers of the body and the headers of the
mind. There can be no more fatal mistake than that which brings them
into hostile attitudes with reference to each other, both having in view
the welfare of their fellow-creatures.