JESCULAP1US. 491 



brave preachers of righteousness, the grave reformers of 

 truth, the earnest seekers of holiness, have chiseled their 

 stern edicts on stone ; and here, also, amid deepening sha- 

 dows, have sung the " pensive muses, whom dismal scenes 

 delight, frequent at tombs, and in the realms of night." 

 And yet still higher, looms the snow-capped summit, lofty 

 and lonely, cold and silent as eternity, where the inspired 

 few have spoken the words of life. Here, in "infinite but 

 incomprehensible solitude, yet in the boundless self-suffi- 

 ciency of their blessed natures," the martyrs and prophets 

 have uttered their oracles, and, in love and worship, brooded 

 in loneliness, with the silent stars, over the depths of God. 



Endless seem the attractions of the word, and beautiful 

 continually are the first songs of joy when the soul has 

 found its symbol. Is it strange that myriads of thoughtful, 

 cultivated human spirits, should thus cling to the word, and, 

 like happy children, play with the toy when its meaning was 

 long forgotten ? Touching, sadly touching is this awe and 

 veneration for the garments and bones of the saints, this 

 worship of the wood of the true cross ; and melancholy is this 

 reverential retrospection into the past, the dreary domain of 

 night and silence. Still sadder is the backward longing, and 

 still more fatal is the backward looking, as the only rest of 

 the spirit. Especially is this reliance on the past alone, in 

 science, fatal to future growth and development ; this back- 

 ward looking alone is bad, and worse than it seems, in all 

 departments of thought and knowledge. An ingenuous 

 criticism of the regular profession of medicine of this hour 

 is, that it demands a deeper philosophy, and needs a higher 

 faith. It asks a philosophy that has come into the world 

 unembarrassed by mortgages to the thought and intellect of 

 the dead, and uncumbered by the mouldy formulae of de- 

 parted generations, and without the oppressive details of a 

 too painful genealogy. The Faith which it deeply needs is 

 not a blind, indiscriminate worship of traditional power ; 

 no veneration for the "word of the master;" no uninquiring 

 acceptance of the imaginative fables of other days, or the 



