“We don’t separate God and Nature, perhaps, as you do,” the Doctor answered.  “When we say that God is omnipresent and omnipotent and omniscient, we are a little more apt to mean it than your folks are.  We think, when a wound heals, that God’s presence and power and knowledge are there, healing it, just as that old surgeon did.  We think a good many theologians, working among their books, don’t see the facts of the world they live in.  When we tell ’em of these facts, they are apt to call us materialists and atheists and infidels, and all that.  We can’t help seeing the facts, and we don’t think it’s wicked to mention ’em.”

“Do tell me,” the Reverend Doctor said, “some of these facts we are in the habit of overlooking, and which your profession thinks it can see and understand.”

“That’s very easy,” the Doctor replied.  “For instance:  you don’t understand or don’t allow for idiosyncrasies as we learn to.  We know that food and physic act differently with different people; but you think the same kind of truth is going to suit, or ought to suit, all minds.  We don’t fight with a patient because he can’t take magnesia or opium; but you are all the time quarrelling over your beliefs, as if belief did not depend very much on race and constitution, to say nothing of early training.”

“Do you mean to say that every man is not absolutely free to choose his beliefs?”

“The men you write about in your studies are, but not the men we see in the real world.  There is some apparently congenital defect in the Indians, for instance, that keeps them from choosing civilization and Christianity.  So with the Gypsies, very likely.  Everybody knows that Catholicism or Protestantism is a good deal a matter of race.  Constitution has more to do with belief than people think for.  I went to a Universalist church, when I was in the city one day, to hear a famous man whom all the world knows, and I never saw such pews-full of broad shoulders and florid faces, and substantial, wholesome-looking persons, male and female, in all my life.  Why, it was astonishing.  Either their creed made them healthy, or they chose it because they were healthy.  Your folks have never got the hang of human nature.”

“I am afraid this would be considered a degrading and dangerous view of human beliefs and responsibility for them,” the Reverend Doctor replied.  “Prove to a man that his will is governed by something outside of himself, and you have lost all hold on his moral and religious nature.  There is nothing bad men want to believe so much as that they are governed by necessity.  Now that which is at once degrading and dangerous cannot be true.”