an Catholic clergy and peasantry in Canada
to vaccination during the smallpox plague of 1885, see the English,
Canadian, and American newspapers, but especially the very temperate and
accurate correspondence in the New York Evening Post during September
and October of that year.

Another class of cases in which the theologic spirit has allied itself
with the retrograde party in medical science is found in the history of
certain remedial agents; and first may be named cocaine. As early as the
middle of the sixteenth century the value of coca had been discovered
in South America; the natives of Peru prized it highly, and two eminent
Jesuits, Joseph Acosta and Antonio Julian, were converted to this view.
But the conservative spirit in the Church was too strong; in 1567 the
Second Council of Lima, consisting of bishops from all parts of South
America, condemned it, and two years later came a royal decree declaring
that "the notions entertained by the natives regarding it are an
illusion of the devil."

As a pendant to this singular mistake on the part of the older Church
came another committed by many Protestants. In the early years of the
seventeenth century the Jesuit missionaries in South America learned
from the natives the value of the so-called Peruvian bark in the
treatment of ague; and in 1638, the Countess of Cinchon, Regent of Peru,
having derived great benefit from the new remedy, it was introduced into
Europe. Although its alkaloid, quinine, is perhaps the nearest approach
to a medical specific, and has diminished the death rate in certain
regions to an amazing extent, its introduction was bitterly opposed
by many conservative members of the medical profession, and in this
opposition large numbers of ultra-Protestants joined, out of hostility
to the Roman Church. In the heat of sectarian feeling the new remedy
was stigmatized as "an invention of the devil"; and so strong was this
opposition that it was not introduced into England until 1653, and even
then its use was long held back, owing mainly to anti-Catholic feeling.

What the theological method on the ultra-Protestant side could do to
help the world at this very time is seen in the fact that, while this
struggle was going on, Hoffmann was attempting to give a scientific
theory of the action of the devil in causing Job's boils. This effort
at a quasi-scientific explanation which should satisfy the theological
spirit, comical as it at first seems, is real