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.
The good people of Northampton had a very remarkable man for their clergyman,--a man with a brain as nicely adjusted for certain mechanical processes as Babbage's calculating machine.The commentary of the laymen on the preaching and practising of Jonathan Edwards was, that, after twenty-three years of endurance, they turned him out by a vote of twenty to one, and passed a resolve that he should never preach for them again.A man's logical and analytical adjustments are of little consequence, compared to his primary relations with Nature and truth: and people have sense enough to find it out in the long ran; they know what "logic" is worth.
In that miserable delusion referred to above, the reverend Aztecs and Fijians argued rightly enough from their premises, no doubt, for many men can do this.But common sense and common humanity were unfortunately left out from their premises, and a layman had to supply them.A hundred more years and many of the barbarisms still lingering among us will, of course, have disappeared like witch-hanging.But people are sensitive now, as they were then.You will see by this extract that the Rev.Cotton Mather did not like intermeddling with his business very well.
"Let the Levites of the Lord keep close to their Instructions," he says, "and God will smite thro' the loins of those that rise up against them.I will report unto you a Thing which many Hundreds among us know to be true.The Godly Minister of a certain Town in Connecticut, when he had occasion to be absent on a Lord's Day from his Flock, employ'd an honest Neighbour of some small Talents for a Mechanick, to read a Sermon out of some good Book unto 'em.This Honest, whom they ever counted also a Pious Man, had so much conceit of his Talents, that instead of Reading a Sermon appointed, he to the Surprize of the People, fell to preaching one of his own.For his Text he took these Words, 'Despise not Prophecyings'; and in his Preachment he betook himself to bewail the Envy of the Clergy in the Land, in that they did not wish all the Lord's People to be Prophets, and call forth Private Brethren publickly to prophesie.While he was thus in the midst of his Exercise, God smote him with horrible Madness; he was taken ravingly distracted; the People were forc'd with violent Hands to carry him home.I will not mention his Name:
He was reputed a Pious Man."--This is one of Cotton Mather's "Remarkable Judgments of God, on Several Sorts of Offenders,"--and the next cases referred to are the Judgments on the " Abominable Sacrilege" of not paying the Ministers' Salaries.
This sort of thing does n't do here and now, you see, my young friend! We talk about our free institutions;--they are nothing but a coarse outside machinery to secure the freedom of individual thought.
The President of the United States is only the engine driver of our broad-gauge mail-train; and every honest, independent thinker has a seat in the first-class cars behind him.
--There is something in what you say,--replied the divinity-student;--and yet it seems to me there are places and times where disputed doctrines of religion should not be introduced.You would not attack a church dogma--say Total Depravity--in a lyceum-lecture, for instance?
Certainly not; I should choose another place,--I answered.--But, mind you, at this table I think it is very different.I shall express my ideas on any subject I like.The laws of the lecture-room, to which my friends and myself are always amenable, do not hold here.I shall not often give arguments, but frequently opinions,--Itrust with courtesy and propriety, but, at any rate, with such natural forms of expression as it has pleased the Almighty to bestow upon me.
