ors
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 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 kind 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 eggshell; but if he is very weak and
thin, and is one of the kind that may be expected to die