and its counterpart has been found in thousands of wretched lives terminated by the act of self-destruction, which came so near taking place in the hero of the allegory.  Now the wonderful book from which this example is taken is, next to the Bible and the Treatise of “De Imitatione Christi,” the best-known religious work of Christendom.  If Bunyan and his contemporary, Sydenham, had met in consultation over the case of Christian at the time when he was meditating self-murder, it is very possible that there might have been a difference of judgment.  The physician would have one advantage in such a consultation.  He would pretty certainly have received a Christian education, while the clergyman would probably know next to nothing of the laws or manifestations of mental or bodily disease.  It does not seem as if any theological student was really prepared for his practical duties until he had learned something of the effects of bodily derangements, and, above all, had become familiar with the gamut of mental discord in the wards of an insane asylum.

It is a very thoughtless thing to say that the physician stands to the divine in the same light as the divine stands to the physician, so far as each may attempt to handle subjects belonging especially to the other’s profession.  Many physicians know a great deal more about religious matters than they do about medicine.  They have read the Bible ten times as much as they ever read any medical author.  They have heard scores of sermons for one medical lecture to which they have listened.  They often hear much better preaching than the average minister, for he hears himself chiefly, and they hear abler men and a variety of them.  They have now and then been distinguished in theology as well as in their own profession.  The name of Servetus might call up unpleasant recollections, but that of another medical practitioner may be safely mentioned.  “It was not till the middle of the last century that the question as to the authorship of the Pentateuch was handled with anything like a discerning criticism.  The first attempt was made by a layman, whose studies we might have supposed would scarcely have led him to such an investigation.”  This layman was “Astruc, doctor and professor of medicine in the Royal College at Paris, and court physician to Louis XIV.”  The quotation is from the article “Pentateuch” in Smith’s “Dictionary of the Bible,” which, of course, lies on the table of the least instructed clergyman.  The sacred profession has, it is true, returned the favor by giving the practitioner of medicine Bishop Berkeley’s “Treatise on Tar-water,” and the invaluable prescription of that “aged clergyman whose sands of life”——­but let us be fair, if not generous, and remember that Cotton Mather shares with Zabdiel Boylston the credit of introducing the practice of inoculation into America.  The professions should be cordial allies, but the church-going, Bible-reading physician ought to know