y across the seas, throughout the
land and around the world. You lose some of yours merely in handling.
The defects of firing cannot be always foreseen. The intrusion of
inferior clay cannot be always prevented. The mere friction of contact
may produce bad nicks. Nor is the fineness nor the excellence of the
product an insurance against mishaps. From your factories or stores your
output is at the mercy of carriers without compunction, and in our
homes it is exposed to the heavy hands of servants without sentiment.
The pleasure of many a dinner is impaired by the fear or the
consciousness that inapt peasants are playing havoc with the treasures
of art on which the courses are served.

If, however, the ceramic kingdom is strewn with smashed crockery, how
much more so are the worlds of theology, medicine, politics, society,
law, and the like. No finer piece of plate was ever put forth than the
one inscribed: "I will believe only what I know." It was for years
agreeable to the pride and vanity of the race. It made many a fool feel
as if his forehead was lifted as high as the heavens, and that at every
step he knocked out a star. When, however, the discovery was made that
this assumption to displace deity amounted to a failure to comprehend
nature, some disappointment was admitted. He who affected by searching
to find out and to equal God could not explain the power by which a tree
pumps its sap from roots to leaves, or why a baby rabbit rejects the
grasses that would harm it, or why a puling infant divines its mother
among the motley and multitudinous mass of sibilant saints at a sewing
society which is discussing the last wedding and the next divorce. He
"who admits only what he understands" would have to look on himself as a
conundrum and then give the conundrum up. He would have the longest
doubts and the shortest creed on record. Agnosticism is part of the
smashed crockery of the moral universe.

Nor is the smug and confident contention: "Medicine is a science, one
and indivisible," so impressive and undented as it was. Sir Astley
Cooper in his plain, blunt way is reported to have described his own
idea of his own calling as "a science founded on conjecture and improved
by murder." The State of New York has rudely stepped in and legally and
irrevocably recognized three schools of medicine and will recognize a
fourth or a fifth as soon as it establishes itself by a sufficient
number of cures or in a sufficient number of