But it is not only in the actual processes of surgery that this great improvement in human art may be noted.  The treatment of wounds with respect to their cure by preserving them from bacterial and other poisons has been so greatly improved that it is now regarded almost as a crime to permit suppuration and other horrible processes which were formerly supposed to be the necessary concomitants of healing.  The hospital, whether military or civil, was formerly a scene that might well horrify and make sick a visitant.  It was putrefaction everywhere.  It was stench and poisonous effluvia.  The conditions were such as to make sick if not destroy even those who were well.  How then could the injured sufferers escape?

It is one of the crowning glories of our time that no such scene now exists in any civilized country.  No such will ever exist again, unless science should lose its grip on the human mind and the civilized life subside into barbarism.  The surgeon would now be held in ill-repute that should permit to any considerable degree the processes of putrefaction to take place in a wound of which he has had the care.  The introduction of antiseptic and aseptic methods has made him a master in this respect.  The skillful surgeon bids defiance to the microbes that hover in swarming millions ravenous for admission to every hurt done to the human body.  To them a wound is a festival.  To them a sore is a royal banquet to which through the invisible realm a proclamation goes forth, “Come ye!  Come to the banquet which death is preparing out of life!” All this the modern surgeon disappoints with a smile and a wave of his hand.  The invisible swarms of invading animalculae are swept back.  Not a single bacterium can any longer enter the most inviting wound while the surgeon stands ready with drawn sword to defend the portals of life.

Great Religious Movements.

DEFENCE ON NEW LINES.

In a period so intensely active and progressive as the nineteenth century has been, in politics, science and literature, it would have been surprising if the church had remained inert, wrapped like a mummy in the cerements of the past.  At the beginning of the century, there were voices on all hands loudly proclaiming that it was dead; that it was antiquated and obsolete; that it had lost touch with the life of the time, that it was a relic of exploded superstition; and as a great writer said, had fallen into a godless mechanical condition, standing as the lifeless form of a church, a mere case of theories, like the carcass of a once swift camel, left withering in the thirst of the universal desert.  That in certain circles there was ground for such reproach is sufficiently proved.  Materialism had crept into its colleges, sapping away their spiritual life and driving young men either into Atheism or into the Roman Catholic Communion.  Such activity as it had, was in the evangelical circles only The common people still listened eagerly to Wesley’s successors and were intensely in earnest in the Christian life and work.  It was at the top that the tree was dying, where the currents of the philosophy of Voltaire struck the branches, and where Hume’s scorching radicalism blighted its leaves.  In the universities, and the clubs, not in the workshops, was religion scorned and contemned.