the endless succession of little children dying of spasms in the great Dublin Hospital, a sagacious physician knocked some holes in the walls of the ward, let God’s blessed air in on the little creatures, and so had already saved in that single hospital, as it was soberly calculated thirty years ago, more than sixteen thousand lives of these infant heirs of immortality. [Collins’s Midwifery, p. 312.  Published by order of the Massachusetts Medical Society.  Boston, 1841.]

Let it be, if you will, that the wise inspiration of the physician was granted in virtue of the clergyman’s supplications.  Still, the habit of dealing with things seen generates another kind of knowledge, and another way of thought, from that of dealing with things unseen; which knowledge and way of thought are special means granted by Providence, and to be thankfully accepted.

The mediaeval ecclesiastics expressed a great truth in that saying, so often quoted, as carrying a reproach with it:  “Ubi tres medici, duo athei,”—­“Where there are three physicians, there are two atheists.”

It was true then, it is true to-day, that the physician very commonly, if not very generally, denies and repudiates the deity of ecclesiastical commerce.  The Being whom Ambroise Pare meant when he spoke those memorable words, which you may read over the professor’s chair in the French School of Medicine, “Te le pensay, et Dieu le guarit,” “I dressed his wound, and God healed it,”—­is a different being from the God that scholastic theologians have projected from their consciousness, or shaped even from the sacred pages which have proved so plastic in their hands.  He is a God who never leaves himself without witness, who repenteth him of the evil, who never allows a disease or an injury, compatible with the enjoyment of life, to take its course without establishing an effort, limited by certain fixed conditions, it is true, but an effort, always, to restore the broken body or the shattered mind.  In the perpetual presence of this great Healing Agent, who stays the bleeding of wounds, who knits the fractured bone, who expels the splinter by a gentle natural process, who walls in the inflammation that might involve the vital organs, who draws a cordon to separate the dead part from the living, who sends his three natural anaesthetics to the over-tasked frame in due order, according to its need,—­sleep, fainting, death; in this perpetual presence, it is doubtless hard for the physician to realize the theological fact of a vast and permanent sphere of the universe, where no organ finds itself in its natural medium, where no wound heals kindly, where the executive has abrogated the pardoning power, and mercy forgets its errand; where the omnipotent is unfelt save in malignant agencies, and the omnipresent is unseen and unrepresented; hard to accept the God of Dante’s “Inferno,” and of Bunyan’s caged lunatic.  If this is atheism, call three, instead of two of the trio, atheists, and it will probably come nearer the truth.