dit of introducing the practice of inoculation into America.
The professions should be cordial allies, but the church-going,
Bible-reading physician ought to know a great deal more of the subjects
included under the general name of theology than the clergyman can be
expected to know of medicine. To say, as has been said not long since,
that a young divinity student is as competent to deal with the latter
as an old physician is to meddle with the former, suggests the idea that
wisdom is not an heirloom in the family of the one who says it. What a
set of idiots our clerical teachers must have been and be, if, after
a quarter or half a century of their instruction, a person of fair
intelligence is utterly incompetent to form any opinion about the
subjects which they have been teaching, or trying to teach him, so long!

A minister must find it very hard work to preach to hearers who do not
believe, or only half believe, what he preaches. But pews without heads
in them are a still more depressing spectacle. He may convince the
doubter and reform the profligate. But he cannot produce any change on
pine and mahogany by his discourses, and the more wood he sees as
he looks along his floor and galleries, the less his chance of being
useful. It is natural that in times like the present changes of faith
and of place of worship should be far from infrequent. It is not less
natural that there should be regrets on one side and gratification on
the other, when such changes occur. It even happens occasionally that
the regrets become aggravated into reproaches, rarely from the side
which receives the new accessions, less rarely from the one which is
left. It is quite conceivable that the Roman Church, which considers
itself the only true one, should look on those who leave its communion
as guilty of a great offence. It is equally natural that a church which
considers Pope and Pagan a pair of murderous giants, sitting at the
mouths of their caves, alike in their hatred to true Christians, should
regard any of its members who go over to Romanism as lost in fatal
error. But within the Protestant fold there are many compartments, and
it would seem that it is not a deadly defection to pass from one to
another.

So far from such exchanges between sects being wrong, they ought to
happen a great deal oftener than they do. All the larger bodies of
Christians should be constantly exchanging members. All men are born
with conservative or aggressi