majority of the subscribers to theological reviews are clergymen, and still fewer but physicians and lawyers respectively read the strictly professional legal and medical works. While this is, perhaps, to a degree inevitable, from the shortness of life and the demand of each profession upon its members, yet it cannot be doubted that serious misunderstandings, misappreciations, and under-estimations of each other arise from extreme exclusiveness. The noblest thinkers in all generations have not submitted to the trammels of any profession. Their horizon has embraced the universal field of thought. No man can properly see a part who does not glance over the whole. Bacon was almost as familiar with medicine and theology as with his own profession; such men as Cuvier, Boerhaave, and Sir Humphrey Davy would never have been heard of beyond their immediate neighborhood had they been mere physicians; Sir Isaac Newton was as deeply interested in theology as in astronomy; Jonathan Edwards was a metaphysician and a close observer of nature before he was a divine, while the ablest of divines in all ages have endeavored to make themselves as familiar with the works and words of man as with the works and word of God. Moses Stuart attributed his success as a defender of orthodoxy to his familiarity with the German language, but though he knew it not, it was more the result of his early training as a lawyer; while such men as Whately and Hitchcock, and others of their kind in our own day, exhibit the good effects of the habits of study indicated by the proverb which Dr. Adam Clarke made his life motto: "Through desire a man having separated himself, seeketh and intermeddleth with all wisdom."

We hope yet to see some of the universally applicable subjects of legal and medical science presented in our theological reviews, from a religious standpoint, as frequently the profoundest subjects of morals and religion are discussed with more or less ability in our medical and legal writings, and too often from an anti-religious standpoint.

By a time-honored custom, amounting to common consent, three leading professions in the realm of practical investigation are acknowledged as the indispensable supporters of Christian civilization: Theology, Medicine, and Law. Each can trace a history up to remote antiquity. All are blended in the FOURTH SERIES, VOL. XVII.-7

earliest developments of society, each assumes its separate foundations and limitations as civilization becomes more matured.

Civilization properly has regard principally to the state. Civilized human beings are united by a social compact. They are protected and developed by laws adopted by common consent. Without these restrictions, human beings are loose fibers shaken by the wind, or promiscuously gathered into irregular knots, decaying often into rubbish; with them, they are twisted into ropes or cables, and woven into fabrics that seem to have almost an organic life. Thus China has had a low order of civilization from earliest times. India has had several successive and many rival inferior civilizations. Ancient Egypt was civilized, and so are modern Mohammedan communities, after a fashion. Greece was civilized in several distinct and successive types. Rome had the grandest and most powerful social organization of ancient times; in compactness, majesty, extent, and unity, never surpassed. Indeed, its body of law still holds the people of several nations together.

In all of these the medical profession was in a nascent and rudimentary state. Physiology and the healing art suffered from two defects, the want of science and the want of Christianity. The prodigal waste of human life and of human comfort, therefore, was immense.

In ancient Greece physicians were a separate class of men, well educated and useful, according to their standard; and they suffered less than any other class of scholars from the defects of the Aristotelian philosophy, and the want of that system of inductive reasoning which was afterward so ably developed under the influence of the Christian spirit by Bacon, and on which, more than on any other, the true art of medicine is based.

In that knowledge of the human body, which can be acquired by the patient dy of the external form, the Greek physicians excelled; in an empirical acquaintance with gymnastics and the regimen requisite for strength, agility, and beauty, they certainly were eminent; but of all that close and minute acquaintance with the internal organism, and with the forces working in it, that constitutes modern medical science, they were almost totally ignorant. No one can notice the

allusions to physicians in the Dialogues of Plato, for instance, without perceiving that some of the profound maxims of modern medicine were well known then, and that in the art of developing and invigorating the healthy man more was demanded then than now; and in the nursing of the feeble, and in the treatment of the diseased, the Greek physicians were far from being unskilled.

In one place Plato remarks that "skillful physicians, when one comes to them with a pain in the eyes, do not attempt to cure the eyes alone, but they attend to the head, and not the head alone, but the whole body." But he soon after adds an expression which betrays the measureless inferiority of the ancient philosophers to the moderns in accurate observation: "The Thracian physicians are reported to render men immortal." This simple remark betrays the great defect of ancient science, the want of care in collecting and scrutinizing facts. They did not discriminate between rumors and realities. They spun beautiful theories out of their own brains, they had too little careful study of science. Literature they had, poetry, oratory, logic; in arts they excelled, such as architecture, painting, sculpture; even in some material forms of industry they were eminently superior, such as the making of roads, aqueducts, and bridges. But their philosophy was fanciful and theoretical, and often led them to slight the patient study of facts. Nevertheless this charge is not applicable to all of their medical writers. Medicine in Greece was regarded as an art rather than a department of philosophy, and this, though a degradation at the time, was really a great advantage. Practical arts must be cultivated on the inductive system. As has been well remarked by Macaulay: "The inductive method has been practiced ever since the beginning of the world by every human being. It is constantly practiced by the most ignorant clown, by the most thoughtless school-boy, by the very child at the breast. That method leads the clown to the conclusion, that if he sows barley he shall not reap wheat. By that method the school-boy learns that a cloudy day is the best for catching trout."

All this is undeniably true. Even "clowns," or coloni, (etymologically the same,) if such people do in England sow

*Platonis Charmides.

barley, must exercise the rudiments of observation, though many generations of them have believed that wheat changes into chess, and that the moon "changes" exactly four times in every revolution around the earth, and wonderfully affects the weather just then, and that it would be very foolish to sow seeds or cut timber without reference to her lunar majesty, all of which, and numerous other like baseless notions, show that clownish induction is a very unsafe guide, and that it is a great pity that the philosophers of old had not come down from their misty fog-land of theory long enough to apply their welltrained intellects to the close scrutiny and classification of facts.

The devotees of medicine did attempt to do it. They did not claim to be philosophers, but honest, useful men. They were indeed originally the priests of a god, and used mummeries and incantations and the other enginery of superstition. But there was an element of close investigation from the beginning, which continued to grow, and the frippery of superstition to diminish, till in the writings of such men as Hippocrates, Aratæus the Cappadocian, and Celsus, you seek in vain for any hypotheses or recommendations betraying credulity or deception, or any logic less severe, or inductive less careful, than in the writings of Carpenter, Dunglison, Warren, or Payne. You will not find in Hippocrates so foolish an observation as the one above quoted from Plato: "The Thracian physicians are reported to render men immortal."

The works of Hippocrates alone demonstrate that the people from whom he sprang must have had a class of highly cultivated men, in many respects fully equal to the notions of modern Europe. It would be regarded as proof that the modern Greeks were fully equal to the ancient, if Greece should now produce so great a man as Hippocrates. He lived in an enlightened epoch, in a century fully equal to the famous nineteenth century of our Lord in its impress on the world. Indeed, considered in the simple light of truth, we have great reason to believe that twenty-five hundred years hence the fourth and fifth centuries before Christ will be justly regarded as superior in their influence upon coming time to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries after Christ. Then lived Confucius, the founder or moulder of Chinese society for thousands of years, and Zoroaster, of Persia, almost his equal;

then Rome was laying the foundations of her Republic, and beginning to assume the gristle of her strength. Then flourished the wonderful trio, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, the latter two of whom, shaped by their master, Socrates, swayed an intellectual scepter over Christian thought for nearly two thousand years, and still exert their wondrous power; and then lived and wrote Hippocrates, the "father of medicine." He too is fully worthy to be ranked with the greatest names of that great age.

Greece then was remarkable for her brain-power. Her philosophers had practically repudiated idolatry by their lately invented system of allegorizing the mythological absurdities. On her stage, the comedies of Aristophanes and his cotemporaries represented the gods and goddesses in so laughable and foolish actions, as to show that the populace, or at least "the middling classes," if the anachronism is allowable, were fast losing that unquestioning faith in mythology which Grote labors so hard to prove of the inhabitants of Greece. The philosophers believed either in a fate, the blind and soulless divinity which even yet Bible-denying philosophers like Spence seem to believe in, and were better men than their modern imitators, since they had not the great light to sin against, or they believed in a God governing the universe according to law as firmly even as modern Christians. The idols they believed in with more or less faith did not interfere with their theism any more than the Christian's belief in angels affects his reverence for the Supreme Being. Thus thought, confined to a small and exclusive aristocracy of thinkers, unaided by Christianity, was bringing about its best results, demonstrating at once its own great power and the need of a revelation. Plato, indeed, as is oft quoted, seemed to have arrived so far as to perceive the necessity for a revelation from God, and to earnestly desire it.

The hygienic, social and moral condition of the people was not described by any of these writers. Indeed, the ancients spoke of the people with none of that respect which Christianity has inspired. They were viewed in the mass, not even accurately numbered, and prized only as so much war material. It seems, however, to be universally conceded, that in all the heathen nations the primitive times were the best. There was