Had we lived in the days of the old medicine, I
would have been compounding a purge out of the blood of a goat, and the
ashes of an heifer, and the juice of hyssop. But I have a far better
medicine under my hands here. This moment I will make you a purge to the
purpose." And then the learned man, half-doctor, half-divine, chanted
again the sacred incantation as he bent over his pestle and mortar,
saying: _Ex carne et sanguine Christi_! Those shrewd old eyes soon saw
that, in spite of all their defences and all their denials, damage had
been done to the conscience and the heart that nothing would set right
but a frank admission of the evil that had been done, and a prompt
submission to the regimen appointed and the medicine prepared. And how
often we ministers puddle and peddle with goat's blood and heifer's ashes
and hyssop juice when we should instantly prescribe stern fasting and
secret prayer and long spaces of repentance, and then the body and the
blood of Christ. How often our people cheat us into healing their hurt
slightly! How often they succeed in putting us off, after we are called
in, with their own account of their cases, and set us out on a wild-goose
chase! I myself have more than once presented young men in their trouble
with apologetic books, University sermons, and watered-down explanations
of the Confession and the Catechism, when, had I known all I came
afterwards to know, I would have sent them Bunyan's _Sighs from Hell_. I
have sent soul-sick women also _The Bruised Reed_, and _The Mission of
the Comforter_ with sympathising inscriptions, and sweet scriptures
written inside, when, had I had Mr. Skill's keen eyes in my stupid head,
I would have gone to them with the total abstinence pledge in my one
hand, and Jeremy Taylor's _Holy Living and Dying_ in my other. "No diet
but that which is wholesome!" almost in anger answered the sick man's
mother. "I tell you," the honest leech replied, in more anger, "this boy
has been tampering with Beelzebub's orchard. And many have died of it!"

5. It was while all the rest of the House Beautiful were supping on lamb
and wine, and while there was such music in the House that made Mercy
exclaim over it with wonder--it was at the smell of the supper and at the
sound of the psalmody that Matthew's gripes seized upon him worse than
ever. All the time the others sat late into the night Matthew lay on the
rack pulled to pieces. After William Law's death at