a very ignorant Christian complain, that the terms of communion with Christ, and access to the benefits of his death, are made exceedingly dangerous by the eternal death on the one hand, and the damnation on the other; it ought surely to be considered, in the first place, what it cost our Saviour to procure this access, and obtain these terms for us, that we may not think the self-examination, and continual watchfulness over our ways, too much, on our part, to requite his condescension and sufferings for us.

ought to be well considered, in the next place, that this very alarming guard on each side of our way to Him, and our own salvation, is not more than is necessary to creatures so apt to forget both Him and ourselves, and stupidly to trim our services between him and his enemies, the devil, the world, and our fleshly corruptions. Taking the matter in this light, we shall judge it one of the most wise and gracious dispensations of the gospel, that our way upward hath so frightful a precipice on our right hand, and on our left, made so visible to us, that we may easily avoid both, in case we use but a share of that caution, which in our worldly affairs of any moment we never fail to demonstrate. Herein however is no force put on us, for we may either leap from the narrow way, or go back, whenever we think Christ and heaven are not worth the pains of such a passage, not worth coming constantly, and well prepared, to the table of the Lord. It was very hard, or indeed rather impossible, for those Dissenters to apologize for their occasional comformity under the Test Act, who could for a place of worldly profit receive this sacrament with the established church, vilified by them, at all other times as superstitious, popish, and idolatrous. But what can be said for the pretended Christians and professed members of that church, who are no more than occasional conformists twice in the year, and during the rest dissent not only from that, but from the church of Christ, to a too close conformity with the world and the flesh?

110. That lawyer, who does not believe in an original lawgiver and judge of the universe, ought by no means to be intrusted with the cause of a single client. That physician, who doubts whether or no he himself hath a soul, ought not to have the care of another man's body. And that clergyman, who in eating. drinking, &c. does not keep a strict eye on his body, is most unfit to undertake a cure of souls. Such are, at best, but quacks in law, physic, and divinity. For my own part, as a clergyman,

I thought it my duty to lay out some time on the study of physic, that I might be of some use to the poorer part of my parishioners, in regard to their health in remote parts of the kingdom, where they were incapable of access to better advice. As this was a pure effect of charity, and as I never meddled with distempers or medicines, which I did not perfectly understand, I killed none, and by God's blessing cured many. This species of application having however led me to a considerable extent of physical reading, and to innumerable consultations in private with physicians of character, it is apparent to me (I ask pardon of the faculty) that the art of healing, if more than a child, is still but a minor. For this I am far from blaming the gentlemen of the profession, who are little, perhaps less, wanting to its improvement, as lawyers or divines are, in their respective departments. As matters are at present, every young physician must look out, as early as he can, for practice in order to bread; must therefore tread only in the path beaten by such as went before him; and consequently hath little or no leisure for experiments, which could he sometimes make, he must not venture them in prescription, lest if they should not prove successful, he should at once come into the world with a stillborn reputation and hope of business. As to older physicians, already arrived at extensive practice, their time is too much engrossed by patients, and by attention to the fortunes they are making, to tolerate any views of improvement in the art. The faculty itself can furnish no remedy for this evil, as it is left in this, unpatronised. Higher powers must be called to an interposal in this very important business, or physic must be given up, as hitherto it hath been, to casualties and precarious hypotheses. If the emperor, and present kings of Europe, could be made sensible of their influence in this behalf, the wished-for improvement might, in twenty or thirty years be brought to its highest degree of perfection; and during that whole period, receive a gradual and happy growth. My good intention will plead a pardon for the suggestion of two methods. The first is, of physical missionaries. The European potentates, having by agreement, divided the four quarters of the world among themselves, each might send to his own division four, five, or six missionaries, to pick up the physical knowledge and medicines of his own department. Do not laugh at this, ye learned doctors. In all ages, and throughout all countries, physic hath been practised; and different climates produce different medicines, whereof ye

yet know but few. On these the experience of men, equal to yourselves in natural sagacity, and the love of life, have been long at work. A very great part of all your knowledge, and a still greater part of all your medicines and methods of cure, have been handed down to you from such men. What else had your father Hippocrates to build on? From what other quarter had you your ipecacuanha, your jalap, your Peruvian bark, your opium, camphor, assafoetida, pareira brava, &c.? To be qualified for this mission, a man should be between the age of twenty-one and thirty, healthy, active, and inquisitive; and thoroughly well trained in the knowledge of physic, as now practised in Europe, not servílely wedded to that knowledge, but open to conviction. He should be well acquainted with the Latin, and French languages. His first year abroad should be laid out in acquiring some knowledge of the language of the people he is sent to, and the four other years of his mission, on its ultimate purpose. As often as opportunities may be found, he should transmit to the court from whence he travels an account of his discoveries, with samples of all the medicines in high repute there, especially if known by himself to deserve it. His salary should be six hundred pounds per annum during life, if the prince and college of physicians of his own country shall judge his services entitled to it. Nay, if on his return they find his journal worth publication, let him have a thousand per annum as long as he lives. This young man, practising physic in the country he goes to, may merit all its discoveries by commutation. He may also inculcate somewhat of true religion, and of wholesome laws, to the governors of ignorant and barbarous countries. The second method or project for the improvement of physic is, that of experiments on living men and Now for an uproar on the cruelty of a parson! Now for a senseless affectation of delicacy and tenderness, which costs nothing but empty words and wry faces, in a set of people, who would rather let a man perish than be the death of a fly, and would starve a woman to feed a lap-dog! I remember Chiselden took upon him to assert, and gave some reasons for so doing, that the tympanum is not the immediate organ of hearing, against the contrary old opinion held by almost all the body of anatomists. This produced a paper war, wherein an immensity of hard words was flung from both sides with jaculation dire. To determine a point however, not of the very last consequence, a fellow under sentence of death was extremely well pleased to have the perfora

women.

tion tried on both his ears, and his life given him, in case he survived the trial. At any rate, dying by a lancet was more eligible than by a rope. But it seems there was no great danger of death in the operation. The king consented. On this occasion the ladies, by their outcries of cruelty (what! dissections of living men? was it not enough to carve dead men like loins of pork?) prevailed, that the experiment should never be made, and the poor fellow, I suppose, was hanged, to spare their delicacy. My project notwithstanding, as soon as it is heard, will excite no alarms of this sort; but will, it is hoped, be embraced as fraught with utility to mankind, and mercy even to animals, inasmuch as it proposes, that thieves should not be put to death, that they should be dealt with as in the law of God; that they should have time to repent of their sins; and that the residue of their lives, passed under all the circumstances of tenderness, that may be safely shewn to such sort of men, should be employed to the benefit of their country, to which they have forfeited their liberty, if not their lives. For this just and humane purpose, some of them may be given up to coal-pits and other mines, by which the materials thence furnished may be produced at low rates to the consumers and manufacturers. But first, the physical faculty in each capital should have their choice of a certain number, to be kept in a strong house, as convenient as may be to said faculty, with a considerable field, well walled in, where the delinquents may be properly fed and exercised, and where the new medicines sent home by the missionaries, all sorts of indigenous plants, and every species of fossils, under every variety of preparation, may be tried inwardly and outwardly on the constitutions of said delinquents, beginning with very minute doses, when danger may be apprehended, and proceeding to larger, as the symptoms of safety shall encourage a yet freer experiment. In cases where great cause of suspicion may occur, experiments may be previously made on dogs, cats, swine, and tame fowl. But as it is not easy to judge how these are affected, but merely by survival, the prescribers must proceed for recipients to persons capable of describing the effects. That the experiments made on these men may succeed with others, their mode of living should be nearly the same with that of mankind in general, so far as their partial confinement shall permit. If any of these should grow sullen in regard to articles of disagreeable taste or smell, and should not appear to account truly for the internal operations of the medi

cines administered, they must be turned over to the harder life of the mines. The dread of so severe a change will render them as amenable to their directors as can be reasonably wished. There is nothing internally medicinal, at least in my opinion, but so far forth as it is poisonous. In this class the most efficacious medicines must be looked for. In this light experiments require the utmost caution; but, that supposed, these may be made with as much safety as the administration of common food. On these subjects the effects of regimens and diets, howsoever opposite, may be tried. The free use of cold water, and cold bathing, in fevers, so successfully said to be practised in Persia and elsewhere, may be occasionally tried, and the change of one sort of fever to another of a safer kind, may be pushed for. As constitutional fevers are often, if not always, so many efforts of nature, critically to throw off some latent, or apparent chronical disorder, a way may be found of inducing such fevers, as may be most likely to produce this salutary effect. As the missionaries should keep journals, and under the revisal of their respective colleges, should publish them on their return; so each European college or faculty should annually publish, in French, an accurate account of their experiments, faithfully-drawn up for the benefit of mankind at large. Were this, or some such scheme carried into execution, those trees, shrubs, weeds, which now only encumber the earth, might, in some years, be turned to as good account as its most wholesome and esculent productions. How many ages passed before mercury and antimony were found to produce medicines of the greatest and happiest efficacy? Thistles, ragworts, sea-rack, &c. are yet to be tried. The bark of the mangrove, shrewdly suspected by Wafer to contain virtues similar to the Peruvian, ought, by no means, to continue neglected, as it hath done ever since his curious observations made in the Isthmus of Darien were published. On account of their animal likeness to our species, the whole brute creation, especially apes, monkies, and baboons, ought to be carefully attended to, as to their disorders and recoveries. It is probable, there is not a sort of them less sagacious than our dogs, in a recourse to natural cures for their respective distempers. Iron, lead, copper, zinc, &c. have undergone hitherto but a very imperfect examination. By the execution of the project here but barely suggested, the profitable practice of physic in populous cities, and its experimental improvement, might be rendered coincident. At first, all medicines were only what we