are constantly seeing weakness where you see depravity.  I don’t say we’re right; I only tell what you must often find to be the fact, right or wrong, in talking with doctors.  You see, too, our notions of bodily and moral disease, or sin, are apt to go together.  We used to be as hard on sickness as you were on sin.  We know better now.  We don’t look at sickness as we used to, and try to poison it with everything that is offensive, burnt toads and earth-worms and viper-broth, and worse things than these.  We know that disease has something back of it which the body isn’t to blame for, at least in most cases, and which very often it is trying to get rid of.  Just so with sin.  I will agree to take a hundred new-born babes of a certain stock and return seventy-five of them in a dozen years true and honest, if not ‘pious’ children.  And I will take another hundred, of a different stock, and put them in the hands of certain Ann-Street or Five-Points teachers, and seventy-five of them will be thieves and liars at the end of the same dozen years.  I have heard of an old character, Colonel Jaques, I believe it was, a famous cattle-breeder, who used to say he could breed to pretty much any pattern he wanted to.  Well, we doctors see so much of families, how the tricks of the blood keep breaking out, just as much in character as they do in looks, that we can’t help feeling as if a great many people hadn’t a fair chance to be what is called ‘good,’ and that there isn’t a text in the Bible better worth keeping always in mind than that one, ‘Judge not, that ye be not judged.’

“As for our getting any quarter at the hands of theologians, we don’t expect it, and have no right to.  You don’t give each other any quarter.  I have had two religious books sent me by friends within a week or two.  One is Mr. Brownson’s; he is as fair and square as Euclid; a real honest, strong thinker, and one that knows what he is talking about,—­for he has tried all sorts of religions, pretty much.  He tells us that the Roman Catholic Church is the one ‘through which alone we can hope for heaven.’  The other is by a worthy Episcopal rector, who appears to write as if he were in earnest, and he calls the Papacy the ‘Devil’s Masterpiece,’ and talks about the ‘Satanic scheme’ of that very Church ’through which alone,’ as Mr. Brownson tells us, ‘we can hope for heaven’

“What’s the use in our caring about hard words after this,—­’atheists,’ heretics, infidels, and the like?  They’re, after all, only the cinders picked up out of those heaps of ashes round the stumps of the old stakes where they used to burn men, women, and children for not thinking just like other folks.  They ’ll ‘crock’ your fingers, but they can’t burn us.

“Doctors are the best-natured people in the world, except when they get fighting with each other.  And they have some advantages over you.  You inherit your notions from a set of priests that had no wives and no children, or none to speak of, and so let their humanity die out of them.  It did n’t seem much to them to condemn a few thousand millions of people to purgatory or worse for a mistake of judgment.  They didn’t know what it was to have a child look up in their faces and say ‘Father!’ It will take you a hundred or two more years to get decently humanized, after so many centuries of de-humanizing celibacy.