If there were no other benefit to be obtained from the perusal of the writings of heathen philosophers, orators, poets, and historians, than the pleasure which a cultivated taste derives from them, it might become a question whether this is not dearly purchased by the admixture of those sensual blandishments and false estimates of human happiness, which endanger the moral and religious principle. But there is another point of view in which they may be regarded; for whilst the brightest luminaries of heathenism do indeed exhibit Reason in her most attractive dress, they still more emphatically show us the utmost limits to which she is capable of extending her flight. They may possibly exclaim with the Psalmist, that "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handy work;" but they utterly fail, when they attempt to give any account of the Almighty Creator of the Universe; or of the origin of the earth which they inhabit; or of themselves its inhabitants. If we even allow that their minds may have received some light from the scattered rays of primæval religion; yet it was never such as to enable them to give any rational explanation of the moral obliquities of human beings, or of the imperfect retributions which the very best constituted forms of government exhibit, and still less, to cry out with the venerable patriarch, assailed, in his utmost need, by the unprovoked accusations of former friends, "I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that He shall stand at the latter day upon the earth; and though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God." *

* Job. xix. 25.

"All nature,” it has been well observed, "is but the manifestation of a supreme intelligence, and to that being only, to whom is given the faculty of reason, can this truth be known. A part of what is past he can comprehend; something even of the future he can anticipate ; and on whatever side he looks, he sees proofs, not of wisdom and power only, but of goodness. But these abstract powers form not the whole immaterial part of man. He has moral powers and capacities unsatisfied with what he sees around him. He longs for a higher and more enduring intellectual fruition-a nearer approach to the God of nature; and, seeing that every material organ, every vital function, every thing in him and around him, is created for an end, he cannot believe that a God of power and goodness will deceive him; and on these attributes he builds his hopes of continued being, and future happiness. To this the religion of

Her light is dim, and

nature leads and then leaves us. beyond the point to which she brings us there is a way which the vulture's eye hath not seen, the lion's whelp hath not trodden, nor the fierce lion passed—a cold and dismal region, where our eyes behold none but the appalling forms of nature's dissolution; but here our Heavenly Father deserts us not; He lights a new lamp for our feet, and places a staff in our hands, on which we may lean securely through the valley of the shadow of death, and reach and dwell in a land where death and darkness have heard the doom of everlasting banishment."

* Sedgwick's Discourse on the Studies of the University of Cambridge.

It is an unquestionable fact that the more conversant we are with the writings either of the most enlightened heathen philosophers, or of the wisest natural theologians, the greater is the value we shall be prone to set on the written word of God; and, whatever the heathen or the infidel may have essayed in order to render the thought of death indifferent to us, the words of an inspired prophet will ever be uppermost in the mind of the sincere Christian-" There is no peace, saith the Lord, unto the wicked." (Is. xlviii. 22.) What a barrier does such a law of our fallen nature as this oppose to sin and wickedness! What a solution does it afford of the terrors which the soul of the dying, but impenitent, Christian experiences when death comes upon him unawares. The present is not, what Cicero would have the accused Cluentius suppose it, the last scene of all. There is one still more terrible to come, when "the heavens shall be rolled up like a scroll,”—and the sea shall give up its dead, and all shall appear before the judgment seat of Christ; then, and not till then, will the sting of death be felt in its complete intenseness; and the consciencestricken sinner call in vain upon the mountains and rocks to fall upon him, and hide him from the face of Him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb. (Rev. vi. 16.)

In proportion to the desolation of this second death, will, on the other hand, be the joy of the blessed children of the Father whose robes shall have been washed in their Redeemer's blood. However great may have been the confidence of their faith at the hour of death, what will be their happiness, when that faith which, on earth,

was "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen," shall be changed for an inheritance of everlasting and inconceivable glory!

The first duty of a physician consists, let me repeat, in endeavouring to relieve the bodily diseases and sufferings of his patients. But he knows that his best efforts are liable to disappointment; and since "it is appointed unto all men once to die," I shall not, I hope, be considered as having gone much out of my way in attempting to draw, from the experience of a long professional life, the useful and consolatory lesson that death is a King of Terrors to the ungodly only. Besides, so intimate is the connexion between the immortal spirit and its frail material tenement, that the one cannot be out of order without affecting the other, and, whilst the heathen moralist has placed upon record the wholesome admonition

"Animum rege, qui, nisi paret, Imperat,"

and higher authority bids us "guard the heart with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of life," the practical pathologist, not contradicting either, but confirming both, will make the "mens sana in corpore sano" the cynosure of his professional course.

CHAPTER III.

It must be evident, from the whole tenor of the former chapter, that, however visionary any proposal to combine the two professions of Divinity and Medicine may be deemed, they are nevertheless connected by bonds of reciprocal obligation and service. To both these professions the vices of mankind are alike the chief purveyors. They both, likewise, seem unfortunately destined to know, that, in spite of every effort to establish uniformly sound principles, there will be discordant schools to which Mrs. Hannah More's witty sarcasm will apply—“ Orthodoxy is my Doxy-Heterodoxy is yours." And I can assure the unfortunate man who is led to think disparagingly of medicine because there are quacks in the world, that he is not a whit more wise than he who does despite to the Sacred Scriptures, because there are hypocritical professors of religion, and false interpreters of the Bible.

The practice of medicine, as well as the habits of society, at the present day, are very different from what they were at the period when the celebrated Dr. Radcliffe flourished. He performed wonderful cures, and amassed immense riches, yet he was evidently himself the victim of the very excesses he deplores, and the results of which he so often successfully combated by his prescriptions.