an may have a diploma and a State certificate authorizing him to
practise, but if the patient do not deem himself bound to be practised
upon has the physician a right to make him miserable until he will
submit? Clearly, he has not. If he can not persuade him to come to the
dispensary and take medicine there is an end to the matter, and he may
justly conclude that he is misfitted to his vocation.

I am sure that the ministers and that singularly small contingent of
earnest and, on the whole, pretty good persons who cluster about them do
not perceive how alien they are in their convictions, tastes, sympathies
and general mental habitudes to the great majority of their fellow men
and women. Their voices, like "the gushing wave" which, to the ears of
the lotus-eaters,

"Far, far away did seem to mourn and rave,"

come to us as from beyond a great gulf--mere ghosts of sound, almost
destitute of signification. We know that they would have us do
something, but what it is we do not clearly apprehend. We feel that they
are concerned for us, but why we are imperfectly able to conceive. In an
intelligible tongue they tell us of unthinkable things. Here and there
in the discourse we catch a word, a phrase, a sentence--something
which, from ancestors whose mother-speech it was, we have inherited the
capacity to understand; but the homily as a whole is devoid of meaning.
Solemn and sonorous enough it all is, and not unmusical, but it lacks
its natural accompaniment of shawm and sackbut and the wind-swept harp
in the willows by the waters of Babylon. It is, in fact, something of a
survival--the memory of a dream.

VI.

The first week of January is set apart as a week of prayer. It is a
custom of more than a half century's age, and it seems that "gracious
answers have been received in proportion to the earnestness and
unanimity of the petitions." That is to say, in this world's speech, the
more Christians that have prayed and the more they have meant it, the
better the result is known to have been. I don't believe all that. I
don't believe that when God is asked to do something that he had not
intended to do he counts noses before making up his mind whether to do
it or not God probably knows the character of his work, and knowing that
he has made this a world of knaves and dunces he must know that the
more of them that ask for something, and the more loudly they ask, the
stronger is the presumption that they ought not t