We have so refined away the simplicity of the patriarchal times, that it is almost necessary to apologise for alluding to the reverential awe with which all matters relating to the seed of Abraham were regarded. It was a solemn and impressive act when the Patriarch, believing that the time was come for his son Isaac to have a wife, sent for his chief servant, and said, “Put, I pray thee, thy hand under my thigh, and swear by the Lord that thou wilt choose a wife for my son out of mine own kindred;” and the servant, with his hand on his master’s genitals, took the required oath; and we all know how faithfully he performed it. Whilst this simple, but deeply significant ceremony was being enacted, the heart of the father of the faithful was doubtless filled with contemplations of the great purposes for the accomplishment of which the organs of generation were appropriately considered as the direct agents.
This mode of taking the oath is further adverted to in the 47th chapter of Genesis, when Jacob is taking his farewell of his children.
In our blind adoration of classical heathenism we undervalue the sublime and not less poetical incidents which mark the rise, progress, culmination, and decay of that people with whom our highest interests are identified. If, for instance, the Book of Job had not been written under inspiration, and had been accidentally discovered among the ruins of the first Babylon, our antiquarians would have regarded it as the loftiest of epics; and especially so if, instead of inculcating the worship of the true God, its subject had been the glorification of whatever false deity might have been in the ascendant when this most ancient poem was composed.
The prejudices of education subjugate the judgment, and the gross and sensual attributes with which the Greek poets invested their deities, are accepted with complacency, if not with admiration; even Pope, their great panegyrist, describes their heroes thus:—
“Gods, partial, changeful, profligate, unjust,
Whose attributes were rage, revenge, and lust.”
This, of course, will be set down for rank blasphemy against the canons of taste. We are exuberant in our praises of the genius of Homer, and not to worship his inventive powers is an offence of the deepest dye; but when we are barbarous enough to critically examine this wonderful mythology, and to determine the claims to applause—say of supreme Jove—we are rather troubled by the difficulty of reconciling the ways of the first intelligence with our commonplace notions of decency. The intrigues of the father of the gods, the artifices by which he eludes the jealousy of his wife Juno, his incestuous, and, if they were not classical, we should call them filthy debaucheries, draw largely upon our faith in the beauties of these records of high Olympus; and our admiration for the poet is sadly tinctured with disgust for the images in which his creative powers are developed.
Thus much of the ceremonial laws. Of the moral law, the law of God, it becomes me not to speak; its obligations are as eternal as its author; the everlasting truths of the decalogue have been incorporated more or less into every system of religion and ethics which has been enunciated during the ages interposing between us and the period in which they were first promulgated on Mount Sinai.
In dismissing Moses and his times, I crave your particular attention to the manner in which the characters of priest and physician met in the same person. As we proceed we shall find that this junction of attributes continues through all the variations of time and circumstances. The terrors of the unseen, overawing the ignorant, placed them at the mercy of those daring minds which in every age have assumed the office of interpreters of the will of the demon, or the behests of the benign Deity. To deal as a mediator between the threats of the terrible avenger and the awe-stricken victim of his own bewildered imagination, to avert the consequences of the threatened storm, or to turn aside any other manifestation of approaching evil is the office of the medicine-man of the North American Indian and the Obeah doctor of the African. Shrewd observers of nature, these wretched impostors monopolize the whole of the intelligence, such as it is, of the hordes of the human race upon whom the light of reason has never dawned, or has dawned in vain.
There is yet another aspect of the medical character, infinitely more agreeable and important, and the consideration of it will bring us to the times immediately preceding the days of the father of medicine. I do not propose to penetrate into the story of Esculapius and his divine origin, which probably, in an esoteric sense, merely meant that the Giver of all good had inspired him with a knowledge of the healing art; but (with a passing glance at Homer, the greatest poet of his own or any subsequent age), proceed to offer some general observations on the position which the study of medicine acquired under the tutorship of the philosophers.