“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.

“Then, again, their attention is very much called to human limitations.  Ministers work out the machinery of responsibility in an abstract kind of way; they have a sort of algebra of human nature, in which friction and strength (or weakness) of material are left out.  You see, a doctor is in the way of studying children from the moment of birth upwards.  For the first year or so he sees that they are just as much pupils of their Maker as the young of any other animals.  Well, their Maker trains them to pure selfishness.  Why?  In order that they may be sure to take care of themselves.  So you see, when a child comes to be, we will say a year and a day old, and makes his first choice between right and wrong, he is at a disadvantage; for he, has that vis a tergo, as we doctors call it, that force from behind, of a whole year’s life of selfishness, for which he is no more to blame than a calf is to blame for having lived in the same way, purely to gratify his natural appetites.  Then we see that baby grow up to a child, and, if he is fat and stout and red and lively, we expect to find him troublesome and noisy, and, perhaps, sometimes disobedient more or less; that’s the way each new generation breaks its egg-shell; but if he is very weak and thin, and is one of the kind that may be expected to die early, he will very likely sit in the house all day and read good books about other little sharp-faced children just like himself, who died early, having always been perfectly indifferent to all the out-door amusements of the wicked little red-cheeked children.