unyan 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 cre