and way of thought are special means granted by Providence,
and to be thankfully accepted.

The mediaeval ecclesiastics expressed a great truth in that saying,
so often quoted, as carrying a reproach with it: "Ubi tres medici, duo
athei,"--"Where there are three physicians, there are two atheists."

It was true then, it is true to-day, that the physician very commonly,
if not very generally, denies and repudiates the deity of ecclesiastical
commerce. The Being whom Ambroise Pare meant when he spoke those
memorable words, which you may read over the professor's chair in the
French School of Medicine, "Te le pensay, et Dieu le guarit," "I dressed
his wound, and God healed it,"--is a different being from the God that
scholastic theologians have projected from their consciousness, or
shaped even from the sacred pages which have proved so plastic in
their hands. He is a God who never leaves himself without witness, who
repenteth him of the evil, who never allows a disease or an injury,
compatible with the enjoyment of life, to take its course without
establishing an effort, limited by certain fixed conditions, it is true,
but an effort, always, to restore the broken body or the shattered mind.
In the perpetual presence of this great Healing Agent, who stays
the bleeding of wounds, who knits the fractured bone, who expels the
splinter by a gentle natural process, who walls in the inflammation that
might involve the vital organs, who draws a cordon to separate the dead
part from the living, who sends his three natural anaesthetics to the
over-tasked frame in due order, according to its need,--sleep, fainting,
death; in this perpetual presence, it is doubtless hard for the
physician to realize the theological fact of a vast and permanent sphere
of the universe, where no organ finds itself in its natural medium,
where no wound heals kindly, where the executive has abrogated the
pardoning power, and mercy forgets its errand; where the omnipotent is
unfelt save in malignant agencies, and the omnipresent is unseen and
unrepresented; hard to accept the God of Dante's "Inferno," and of
Bunyan's caged lunatic. If this is atheism, call three, instead of two
of the trio, atheists, and it will probably come nearer the truth.

I am not disposed to deny the occasional injurious effect of the
materializing influences to which the physician is subjected. A
spiritual guild is absolutely necessary to keep him, to keep us all,
from becoming