“Doctor,” the physician began, as from a sudden suggestion, “you won’t quarrel with me, if I tell you some of my real thoughts, will you?”

“Say on, my dear Sir, say on,” the minister answered, with his most genial smile; “your real thoughts are just what I want to get at.  A man’s real thoughts are a great rarity.  If I don’t agree with you, I shall like to hear you.”

The Doctor began; and in order to give his thoughts more connectedly, we will omit the conversational breaks, the questions and comments of the clergyman, and all accidental interruptions.

“When the old ecclesiastics said that where there were three doctors there were two atheists, they lied, of course.  They called everybody that differed from them atheists, until they found out that not believing in God wasn’t nearly so ugly a crime as not believing in some particular dogma; then they called them heretics, until so many good people had been burned under that name that it began to smell too strong of roasting flesh,—­and after that infidels, which properly means people without faith, of whom there are not a great many in any place or time.  But then, of course, there was some reason why doctors shouldn’t think about religion exactly as ministers did, or they never would have made that proverb.  It’s very likely that something of the same kind is true now; whether it is so or not, I am going to tell you the reasons why it would not be strange, if doctors should take rather different views from clergymen about some matters of belief.  I don’t, of course, mean all doctors nor all clergymen.  Some doctors go as far as any old New-England divine, and some clergymen agree very well with the doctors that think least according to rule.

“To begin with their ideas of the Creator himself.  They always see him trying to help his creatures out of their troubles.  A man no sooner gets a cut, than the Great Physician, whose agency we often call Nature, goes to work, first to stop the blood, and then to heal the wound, and then to make the scar as small as possible.  If a man’s pain exceeds a certain amount, he faints, and so gets relief.  If it lasts too long, habit comes in to make it tolerable.  If it is altogether too bad, he dies.  That is the best thing to be done under the circumstances.  So you see, the doctor is constantly in presence of a benevolent agency working against a settled order of things, of which pain and disease are the accidents, so to speak.  Well, no doubt they find it harder than clergymen to believe that there can be any world or state from which this benevolent agency is wholly excluded.  This may be very wrong; but it is not unnatural.  They can hardly conceive of a permanent state of being in which cuts would never try to heal, nor habit render suffering endurable.  This is one effect of their training.