something more than respect; he is allowed to say undisputed what would be sharply controverted in anybody else.  Bishop Gilbert Haven, of happy memory, had been discussing a religious subject with a friend who was not convinced by his arguments.  “Wait till you hear me from the pulpit,” he said; “there you cannot answer me.”  The preacher—­if I may use an image which would hardly have suggested itself to him—­has his hearer’s head in chancery, and can administer punishment ad libitum.  False facts, false reasoning, bad rhetoric, bad grammar, stale images, borrowed passages, if not borrowed sermons, are listened to without a word of comment or a look of disapprobation.

One of the ablest and most conscientiously laborious of our clergymen has lately ventured to question whether all his professional brethren invariably give utterance to their sincerest beliefs, and has been sharply criticised for so doing.  The layman, who sits silent in his pew, has his rights when out of it, and among them is the right of questioning that which has been addressed to him from the privileged eminence of the pulpit, or in any way sanctioned by his religious teacher.  It is nearly two hundred years since a Boston layman wrote these words:  “I am not ignorant that the pious frauds of the ancient, and the inbred fire (I do not call it pride) of many of our modern divines, have precipitated them to propagate and maintain truth as well as falsehoods, in such an unfair manner as has given advantage to the enemy to suspect the whole doctrine these men have profest to be nothing but a mere trick.”

So wrote Robert Calef, the Boston merchant, whose book the Reverend Increase Mather, president of Harvard College, burned publicly in the college yard.  But the pity of it is that the layman had not cried out earlier and louder, and saved the community from the horror of those judicial murders for witchcraft, the blame of which was so largely attributable to the clergy.

Perhaps no, laymen have given the clergy more trouble than the doctors.  The old reproach against physicians, that where there were three of them together there were two atheists, had a real significance, but not that which was intended by the sharp-tongued ecclesiastic who first uttered it.  Undoubtedly there is a strong tendency in the pursuits of the medical profession to produce disbelief in that figment of tradition and diseased human imagination which has been installed in the seat of divinity by the priesthood of cruel and ignorant ages.  It is impossible, or at least very difficult, for a physician who has seen the perpetual efforts of Nature—­whose diary is the book he reads oftenest—­to heal wounds, to expel poisons, to do the best that can be done under the given conditions,—­it is very difficult for him to believe in a world where wounds cannot heal, where opiates cannot give a respite from pain, where sleep never comes with its sweet oblivion of suffering, where the art of torture is the only science cultivated, and the capacity for being tormented is the only faculty which remains to the children of that same Father who cares for the falling sparrow.  The Deity has often been pictured as Moloch, and the physician has, no doubt, frequently repudiated him as a monstrosity.