II.  We hold that no man can be well who does not agree with our views of the efficacy of calomel, and who does not take the doses of it prescribed in our tables, as there directed.

To which I demur, questioning why it should be so, and get for answer the two following: 

III.  Every man who does not take our prepared calomel, as prescribed by us in our Constitution and By-Laws, is and must be a mass of disease from head to foot; it being self-evident that he is simultaneously affected with Apoplexy, Arthritis, Ascites, Asphyxia, and Atrophy; with Borborygmus, Bronchitis, and Bulimia; with Cachexia, Carcinoma, and Cretinismus; and so on through the alphabet, to Xerophthahnia and Zona, with all possible and incompatible diseases which are necessary to make up a totally morbid state; and he will certainly die, if he does not take freely of our prepared calomel, to be obtained only of one of our authorized agents.

IV.  No man shall be allowed to take our prepared calomel who does not give in his solemn adhesion to each and all of the above-named and the following propositions (from ten to a hundred) and show his mouth to certain of our apothecaries, who have not studied dentistry, to examine whether all his teeth have been extracted and a new set inserted according to our regulations.

Of course, the doctors have a right to say we sha’n’t have any rhubarb, if we don’t sign their articles, and that, if, after signing them, we express doubts (in public), about any of them, they will cut us off from our jalap and squills,—­but then to ask a fellow not to discuss the propositions before he signs them is what I should call boiling it down a little too strong!

If we understand them, why can’t we discuss them?  If we can’t understand them, because we have n’t taken a medical degree, what the Father of Lies do they ask us to sign them for?

Just so with the graver profession.  Every now and then some of its members seem to lose common sense and common humanity.  The laymen have to keep setting the divines right constantly.  Science, for instance,—­in other words, knowledge,—­is not the enemy of religion; for, if so, then religion would mean ignorance:  But it is often the antagonist of school-divinity.

Everybody knows the story of early astronomy and the school-divines.  Come down a little later, Archbishop Usher, a very learned Protestant prelate, tells us that the world was created on Sunday, the twenty-third of October, four thousand and four years before the birth of Christ.  Deluge, December 7th, two thousand three hundred and forty-eight years B. C. Yes, and the earth stands on an elephant, and the elephant on a tortoise.  One statement is as near the truth as the other.

Again, there is nothing so brutalizing to some natures as moral surgery.  I have often wondered that Hogarth did not add one more picture to his four stages of Cruelty.  Those wretched fools, reverend divines and others, who were strangling men and women for imaginary crimes a little more than a century ago among us, were set right by a layman, and very angry it made them to have him meddle.