Here, look at medicine.  Big wigs, gold-headed canes, Latin prescriptions, shops full of abominations, recipes a yard long, “curing” patients by drugging as sailors bring a wind by whistling, selling lies at a guinea apiece,—­a routine, in short, of giving unfortunate sick people a mess of things either too odious to swallow or too acrid to hold, or, if that were possible, both at once.

——­You don’t know what I mean, indignant and not unintelligent country-practitioner?  Then you don’t know the history of medicine,—­and that is not my fault.  But don’t expose yourself in any outbreak of eloquence; for, by the mortar in which Anaxagoras was pounded!  I did not bring home Schenckius and Forestus and Hildanus, and all the old folios in calf and vellum I will show you, to be bullied by the proprietor of a “Wood and Bache,” and a shelf of peppered sheepskin reprints by Philadelphia Editors.  Besides, many of the profession and I know a little something of each other, and you don’t think I am such a simpleton as to lose their good opinion by saying what the better heads among them would condemn as unfair and untrue?  Now mark how the great plague came on the generation of drugging doctors, and in what form it fell.

A scheming drug-vendor, (inventive genius,) an utterly untrustworthy and incompetent observer, (profound searcher of Nature,) a shallow dabbler in erudition, (sagacious scholar,) started the monstrous fiction (founded the immortal system) of Homeopathy.  I am very fair, you see,—­you can help yourself to either of these sets of phrases.

All the reason in the world would not have had so rapid and general an effect on the public mind to disabuse it of the idea that a drug is a good thing in itself, instead of being, as it is, a bad thing, as was produced by the trick (system) of this German charlatan (theorist).  Not that the wiser part of the profession needed him to teach them; but the routinists and their employers, the “general practitioners,” who lived by selling pills and mixtures, and their drug-consuming customers had to recognize that people could get well, unpoisoned.  These dumb cattle would not learn it of themselves, and so the murrain of Homeopathy fell on them.

——­You don’t know what plague has fallen on the practitioners of theology?  I will tell you, then.  It is SPIRITUALISM.  While some are crying out against it as a delusion of the Devil, and some are laughing at it as an hysteric folly, and some are getting angry with it as a mere trick of interested or mischievous persons, Spiritualism is quietly undermining the traditional ideas of the future state which have been and are still accepted,—­not merely in those who believe in it, but in the general sentiment of the community, to a larger extent than most good people seem to be aware of.  It needn’t be true, to do this, any more than Homeopathy need, to do its work.  The Spiritualists have some pretty strong instincts to pry over, which no doubt have been