A scheming drug-vender, (inventive genius,) an utterly untrustworthy and incompetent observer, (profound searcher of Nature,) a shallow dabbler in erudition, (sagacious scholar,) started the monstrous fiction (founded the immortal system) of Homoeopathy.  I am very fair, you see,—–­you can help yourself to either of these sets of phrases.

All the reason in the world would not have had so rapid and general an effect on the public mind to disabuse it of the idea that a drug is a good thing in itself, instead of being, as it is, a bad thing, as was produced by the trick (system) of this German charlatan (theorist).  Not that the wiser part of the profession needed him to teach them; but the routinists and their employers, the “general practitioners,” who lived by selling pills and mixtures, and their drug-consuming customers, had to recognize that people could get well, unpoisoned.  These dumb cattle would not learn it of themselves, and so the murrain of Homoeopathy fell on them.

—­You don’t know what plague has fallen on the practitioners of theology?  I will tell you, then.  It is Spiritualism.  While some are crying out against it as a delusion of the Devil, and some are laughing at it as an hysteric folly, and some are getting angry with it as a mere trick of interested or mischievous persons, Spiritualism is quietly undermining the traditional ideas of the future state which have been and are still accepted,—­not merely in those who believe in it, but in the general sentiment of the community, to a larger extent than most good people seem to be aware of.  It need n’t be true, to do this, any more than Homoeopathy need, to do its work.  The Spiritualists have some pretty strong instincts to pry over, which no doubt have been roughly handled by theologians at different times.  And the Nemesis of the pulpit comes, in a shape it little thought of, beginning with the snap of a toe-joint, and ending with such a crack of old beliefs that the roar of it is heard in all the ministers’ studies of Christendom?  Sir, you cannot have people of cultivation, of pure character, sensible enough in common things, large-hearted women, grave judges, shrewd business-men, men of science, professing to be in communication with the spiritual world and keeping up constant intercourse with it, without its gradually reacting on the whole conception of that other life.  It is the folly of the world, constantly, which confounds its wisdom.  Not only out of the mouths of babes and sucklings, but out of the mouths of fools and cheats, we may often get our truest lessons.  For the fool’s judgment is a dog-vane that turns with a breath, and the cheat watches the clouds and sets his weathercock by them,—­so that one shall often see by their pointing which way the winds of heaven are blowing, when the slow-wheeling arrows and feathers of what we call the Temples of Wisdom are turning to all points of the compass.

—­Amen!—­said the young fellow called John—­Ten minutes by the watch.  Those that are unanimous will please to signify by holding up their left foot!