“For having as that study directed him, gone orderly over all the links of that chain by which natural causes are mutually tied to one another, till he found God the supreme cause and first mover at the top; having traced the footsteps of Divine Goodness through all the most minute productions of his handmaid Nature, and yet finding human reason puzzled and at a loss in giving an account of his almighty power and infinite wisdom in the least and meanest of his works; with what pious humility must he needs entertain supernatural truths, when upon trial he had found every the plainest thing in common nature itself was mystery, and saw he had as much reason for his believing these proposals of faith, as he had for trusting the operations of sense, or the collections of reason itself.
“I know there is an unworthy reproach cast upon this excellent study that it inclines men to atheism. 'Tis true the ignorance and corruption of men that profess any of the three honourable faculties, bring scandal upon the faculty itself. Again, sciolists and half-witted men are those that discredit any science they meddle with. But he that pretends to the noble skill of physic, and dares to deny that which doth continually incurrere in sensus, that which in all his researches and experiments he must meet with at every turn, I dare to say he is no Physician; or at least that he doth at once give his profession and his conscience too the lye.”
CHAPTER CXX.
EFFECT OF MEDICAL STUDIES ON DIFFERENT DISPOSITIONS. JEW PHYSICIANS, ESTIMATION AND ODIUM IN WHICH THEY WERE HELD.
Confiesso la digression; mas es facil al que no quisiere leerla, passar al capitulo siguiente, y esta advertencia sirva de disculpa.
LUIS MUNOZ.
If the elder Daniel had thought that the moral feelings and religious principles of his son were likely to be endangered by the study of medicine, he would never have been induced to place him with a medical practitioner. But it seemed to him, good man, that the more we study the works of the Creator, the more we must perceive and feel his wisdom and his power and his goodness. It was so in his own case, and like Adam Littleton and all simple-hearted men, he judged of others by himself.