120 SELECTED ESS A YS FROM LA Y SERMONS 



study, is turned loose among his medical studies, with the 

 result, in nine cases out of ten, that the first year of his cur- 

 riculum is spent in learning how to learn. Indeed, he is 

 lucky if, at the end of the first year, by the exertions of his 

 teachers and his own industry, he has acquired even that 

 art of arts. After which there remain not more than three, 

 or perhaps four, years for the profitable study of such vast 

 sciences as Anatomy, Physiology, Therapeutics, Medicine, 

 Surgery, Obstetrics, and the like, upon his knowledge or ig- 

 norance of which it depends whether the practitioner shall 

 diminish, or increase, the bills of mortality. Now what is it 

 but the preposterous condition of ordinary school education 

 which prevents a young man of seventeen, destined for the 

 practice of medicine, from being fully prepared for the study 

 of Nature; and from coming to the medical school, equipped 

 with that preliminary knowledge of the principles of Physics, 

 of Chemistry and of Biology, upon which he has now to 

 waste one of the precious years, every moment of which 

 ought to be given to those studies which bear directly upon 

 the knowledge of his profession? 



There is another profession, to the members of which, 

 I think, a certain preliminary knowledge of physical science 

 might be quite as valuable as to the medical man. The 

 practitioner of medicine sets before himself the noble object 

 of taking care of man's bodily welfare; but the members of 

 this other profession undertake to "minister to minds dis- 

 eased," and, so far as may be, -to diminish sin and soften 

 sorrow. Like the medical profession, the clerical, of which 

 I now speak, rests its power to heal upon its knowledge of 

 the order of the universe — upon certain theories of man's 

 relation to that which lies outside him. It is not my busi- 

 ness to express any opinion about these theories. I merely 

 wish to point out that, like all other theories, they are pro- 



