“I’ve thought about that,” the Doctor answered, “and I’ve talked about it and read about it, and I’ve come to the conclusion that nobody believes in God and trusts in God quite so much as the doctors; only it is n’t just the sort of Deity that some of your profession have wanted them to take up with.  There was a student of mine wrote a dissertation on the Natural Theology of Health and Disease, and took that old lying proverb for his motto.  He knew a good deal more about books than ever I did, and had studied in other countries.  I’ll tell you what he said about it.  He said the old Heathen Doctor, Galen, praised God for his handiwork in the human body, just as if he had been a Christian, or the Psalmist himself.  He said they had this sentence set up in large letters in the great lecture-room in Paris where he attended:  I dressed his wound and God healed him.  That was an old surgeon’s saying.  And he gave a long list of doctors who were not only Christians, but famous ones.  I grant you, though, ministers and doctors are very apt to see differently in spiritual matters.”

“That’s it,” said the Reverend Doctor; “you are apt to see ‘Nature’ where we see God, and appeal to ‘Science’ where we are contented with Revelation.”

“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?”