On the other hand, the physician has often been renowned for piety as well as for his peculiarly professional virtue of charity,—­led upward by what he sees to the source of all the daily marvels wrought before his own eyes.  So it was that Galen gave utterance to that psalm of praise which the sweet singer of Israel need not have been ashamed of; and if this “heathen” could be lifted into such a strain of devotion, we need not be surprised to find so many devout Christian worshippers among the crowd of medical “atheists.”

No two professions should come into such intimate and cordial relations as those to which belong the healers of the body and the headers of the mind.  There can be no more fatal mistake than that which brings them into hostile attitudes with reference to each other, both having in view the welfare of their fellow-creatures.  But there is a territory always liable to be differed about between them.  There are patients who never tell their physician the grief which lies at the bottom of their ailments.  He goes through his accustomed routine with them, and thinks he has all the elements needed for his diagnosis.  But he has seen no deeper into the breast than the tongue, and got no nearer the heart than the wrist.  A wise and experienced clergyman, coming to the patient’s bedside,—­not with the professional look on his face which suggests the undertaker and the sexton, but with a serene countenance and a sympathetic voice, with tact, with patience, waiting for the right moment,—­will surprise the shy spirit into a confession of the doubt, the sorrow, the shame, the remorse, the terror which underlies all the bodily symptoms, and the unburdening of which into a loving and pitying soul is a more potent anodyne than all the drowsy sirups of the world.  And, on the other hand, there are many nervous and over-sensitive natures which have been wrought up by self-torturing spiritual exercises until their best confessor would be a sagacious and wholesome-minded physician.

Suppose a person to have become so excited by religious stimulants that he is subject to what are known to the records of insanity as hallucinations:  that he hears voices whispering blasphemy in his ears, and sees devils coming to meet him, and thinks he is going to be torn in pieces, or trodden into the mire.  Suppose that his mental conflicts, after plunging him into the depths of despondency, at last reduce him to a state of despair, so that he now contemplates taking his own life, and debates with himself whether it shall be by knife, halter, or poison, and after much questioning is apparently making up his mind to commit suicide.  Is not this a manifest case of insanity, in the form known as melancholia?  Would not any prudent physician keep such a person under the eye of constant watchers, as in a dangerous state of, at least, partial mental alienation?  Yet this is an exact transcript of the mental condition of Christian in “Pilgrim’s Progress,”