SELDEN’S COMPARISON BETWEEN A DIVINE, A STATESMAN, AND A PHYSICIAN.
If a physician sees you eat any thing that is not good for the body, to keep you from it he cries out “It is poison!” If the divine sees you do any thing that is hurtful to your soul, to keep you from it he cries out “You are damned!”
To preach long, loud, and damnation, is the way to be cried up. We love a man who damns us, and we run after him again to save us. If a man has a sore leg, and he should go to an honest and judicious surgeon, and he should only bid him keep it warm, or anoint it with some well-known oil that would do the cure, haply he would not much regard him, because he knows the medicine beforehand to be an ordinary medicine. But if he should go to a surgeon that should tell him, “Your leg will be gangrene within three days, and it must be cut off; and you will die, unless you do something that I could tell you,” what listening there would be to this man! “Oh! for the Lord’s sake, tell me what this is:—I will give you any contents for your pains.”
This ingenious antiquary has also made some quaint comparisons between doctors of the body and doctors of the public interests. “All might go on well,” he says, “in the commonwealth, if every one in the parliament would lay down his own interest and aim at the general good. If a man was rich, and the whole college of physicians were sent to him to administer to him severally; haply, so long as they observed the rules of art, he might recover. But if one of them had a great deal of scammony by him, he must put off that; therefore will he prescribe scammony; another had a great deal of rhubarb, and he must put off that; therefore he prescribes rhubarb: and they would certainly kill the man. We destroy the commonwealth, while we preserve our own private interests and neglect the public.”
Grotius called John Selden “the honour of the English nation;” and Bacon had such an implicit faith in his judgment, that he desired in his will that his advice should be taken respecting the publication or suppression of his posthumous works.