for calling in any but the incumbent curer. How should people know how to choose? The hair-dressers once petitioned Parliament for an act to compel people to wear wigs. My own opinion is of the opposite extreme, as in the following letter (Examiner, April 5, 1856); which, to my surprise, I saw reprinted in a medical journal, as a plan not absolutely to be rejected. I am perfectly satisfied that it would greatly promote true medical orthodoxy, the predominance of well educated thinkers, and the development of their desirable differences.
Sir. The Medical Bill and the medical question generally is one on which experience would teach, if people would be taught.
The great soul question took three hundred years to settle: the little body question might be settled in thirty years, if the decisions in the former question were studied.
Time was when the State believed, as honestly as ever it believed anything, that it might, could, and should find out true doctrine for the poor ignorant community; to which, like a worthy honest state, it added would. Accordingly, by the assistance of a Church, which undertook the physic, the surgery, and the pharmacy of sound doctrine all by itself, it sent forth its legally qualified teachers into every parish, and woe to the man who called in any other. They burnt that man, they whipped him, they imprisoned him, they did everything but what was Christian to him, all for his soul's health and the amendment of his excesses.
But men would not submit. To the argument that the State was a father to the ignorant, they replied that it was at best the ignorant father of an ignorant son, and that a blind man could find his way into a ditch without another blind man to help him. And when the State said—But here we have the Church, which knows all about it, the ignorant community declared that it had aright to judge that question, and that it would judge it. It also said that the Church was never one thing long, and that it progressed, on the whole, rather more slowly than the ignorant community.
The end of it was, in this country, that every one who chose taught all who chose to let him teach, on condition only of an open and true registration. The State was allowed to patronise one particular Church, so that no one need trouble himself to choose a pastor from the mere necessity of choosing. But every church is allowed its colleges, its studies, its diplomas; and every man is allowed his choice. There is no proof that our souls are
