must endure as much as the poorest beggar
That cannot change his money,—this is the equality
In our impartial essences!1
Death is not a more inexorable leveller than his precursors age and infirmity and sickness and pain.
1 BEAUMONT and FLETCHER.
Hope and fear and grief and joy act with the same equitable disregard of conventional distinctions. And though there is reason for disbelieving that the beetle which we tread upon feels as much as a human being suffers in being crushed, it is yet undoubtedly true that except in those cases where individuals have so thoroughly corrupted their feelings as to have thereby destroyed the instinctive sense of right and wrong, making evil their good, what may be termed the primitive affections exist in as much strength among the rudest as among the most refined. They may be paralyzed by pauperism, they may be rotted by the licentiousness of luxury; but there is no grade of society in which they do not exhibit themselves in the highest degree. Tragic poets have been attracted by the sufferings of the great, and have laid the scene of their fables in the higher circles of life; yet tragedy represents no examples more touching or more dreadful, for our admiration or abhorrence, to thrill us with sympathy or with indignation, than are continually occurring in all classes of society.
They who call themselves men of the world and pride themselves accordingly upon their knowledge, are of all men those who know least of human nature. It was well said by a French biographer, though not well applied to the subject2 of his biography, that il avait pu, dans la solitude, se former à l'amour du vrai et du juste, et même à la connoissance de l'homme, si souvent et si mal à propos confondue avec celle des hommes; c'est-à-dire, avec la petite experience des intrigues mouvantes d'un petit nombre d'individus plus ou moins accrédités et des habitudes etroites de leurs petites coteries. La connoissance des hommes est à celle de l'homme ce qu'est l'intrigue sociale à l'art social.
2 The ABBE SIEYES.
Of those passions which are or deserve to be the subject of legal and judicial tragedy, the lawyers necessarily see most, and for this reason perhaps they think worse of human nature than any other class of men, except the Roman Catholic Clergy. Physicians on the contrary, though they see humanity in its most humiliating state, see it also in the exercise of its holiest and most painful duties. No other persons witness such deep emotions and such exertions of self-controul. They know what virtues are developed by the evils which flesh is heir to, what self-devotion, what patience, what fortitude, what piety, what religious resignation.
Wherefore is it then that physicians have lain under the reproach of irreligion, who of all men best know how fearfully and wonderfully we are made, and who it might be thought would be rendered by the scenes at which they are continually called upon to assist, of all men the most religious? Sir Thomas Brown acknowledges that this was the general scandal of his profession, and his commentator Sir Kenelm Digby observes upon the passage, that “Physicians do commonly hear ill in this behalf,” and that “it is a common speech (but,” he parenthesizes, “only amongst the unlearned sort) ubi tres medici duo athei.” Rabelais defines a Physician to be animal incombustible propter reliqionem.
“As some mathematicians,” says an old Preacher, “deal so much in Jacob's staff that they forget Jacob's ladder, so some Physicians (God decrease the number!) are so deep naturalists that they are very shallow Christians. With us, Grace waits at the heels of Nature, and they dive so deep into the secrets of philosophy that they never look up to the mysteries of Divinity.”
Old Adam Littleton who looked at every thing in its best light, took a different view of the effect of medical studies, in his sermon upon St. Luke's day. “His character of Physician,” said he, “certainly gave him no mean advantage, not only in the exercise of his ministry by an acceptable address and easy admission which men of that profession every where find among persons of any civility; but even to his understanding of Christian truths and to the apprehending the mysteries of faith.