MEDICAL PROFESSION IN MODERN THOUGHT. 347 



cration, and their crown was the martyr's crown of thorns. We have, 

 happily, fallen on better days ; the secrets which we win from Na- 

 ture Ave may proclaim without fear, and in the confident assurance 

 that, after being proved and tried, they will be accepted ; we are 

 fighting a winning fight, and the stars in their courses are with us. 

 What cause, then, for arrogant self-assertion, overbearing aggression, 

 and willful determination to seek occasions of offense ? The advan- 

 tages of our position and strength entail the responsibility of mod- 

 eration and forbearance, for the strength is not our own it is the 

 power of the universe working in us to its higher ends. 



One may esteem science duly, then, without feeling sympathy with 

 the aggressive delight with which some persons accentuate its hostil- 

 ity to expiring doctrines, and exult in the overthrow of articles of 

 faith which have sustained and solaced multitudes of men in. the dark 

 hours of life and in the darker hour of death. It can be no pleasure 

 to a generous nature, inevitable though it be, to shatter the faith of 

 even the poor Indian, who, driven from his hunting-grounds by the 

 inexorable fate of a stronger race, looks upward with feeble faith to a 

 Great Spirit, and forward with dim hope to the happy hunting-grounds 

 far away where the sun goes down. To aspire to be the first to pro- 

 claim the downfall of a position of refuge to which men have clung 

 with passionate earnestness for many generations seems to show " a 

 pitiful ambition in the fool who uses it," a singular blindness to the 

 essential continuity of development, a strange ignorance of what is 

 the final end of all science. A scientific discovery is a very good 

 thing in its way, but it is only a means to an end, after all the im- 

 provement of man's estate that is to say, his moral and intellectual 

 as well as his material state ; and when he who has been happy enough 

 to discover a new metal or a new star or a new cell or a new salt 

 magnifies himself mightily, and fondly dreams of an immortal fame, 

 one cannot help some such feeling of the ludicrous as would be raised 

 by the spectacle of a hodman who, having carried his brick to the 

 building in course of construction, should call upon all the world to 

 take notice of the wonderful work which he had done in architecture. 

 Science has yet to realize, at any rate its cultivators seem oftentimes 

 to forget, that its end must be constructive ; that after analysis must 

 come synthesis ; that all the analytical work in the world will leave 

 matters in a chaotic state until the constructive spirit, moving over 

 their surface, shall organize the incoherent results, and make them 

 serve for a higher social development. The problem is to make 

 straight in the future a highway over which mankind may pass to a 

 higher life. The philosopher who, with far-reaching eye, overlooks 

 the relations of sciences ; the poet who reveals subtilties of human 

 feeling, gives lofty utterance to human sympathies with Nature, and 

 infuses nobler aspirations into men ; the preacher of human brotherhood 

 who, inspired with strong moral feeling, proclaims the lessons of self- 



