childhood of Christ is adduced as a type of what we should hope and pray for in all our children. Samuel, Timothy, Polycarp, Origen, with others of more modern times, are brought forward as examples. Of these, the most striking case, because most definite in regard to age, is that of Polycarp. When ninety years of age, being threatened with death for his religion, and yet offered his life if he would renounce it by cursing Christ, he replied to his persecutors, "Eighty and six years have I served him, and he hath done me nothing but good, and how could I curse him, my Lord and Saviour? If you would know what I am, I tell you frankly, I am a Christian." At four years of age, therefore, he began the Christian life. Our author's list of examples might be very easily enlarged. Old Fox, in his Book of Martyrs, gives one instance which ought not to be forgotten. At Antioch, in November, in the year 303, a little boy was seized for the crime of confessing Christ and speaking against idols. When the question was put to him by the furious persecutor, "Who taught you this?" he replied, "My mother, with whose milk I drank in this lesson, that I must believe in Christ." This child was scourged till even the heathen spectators wept; yet he bore it all without a murmur. He smiled when the executioner tore the scalp from his head, and died clinging to the blessed truths of the Gospel, which his pious mother had taught him. Was he not a Christian? Yet the historian tells us that he was only seven years old.

In his "Narrative of the Surprising Work of God in Northampton," which occurred in 1735, Jonathan Edwards remarks that "God in his work has shown a remarkable regard to little children. Never was there such a glorious work among per sons in their childhood." During this revival, religious meetings were held by the children, who themselves conducted the exercises. Mr. Edwards approved of these meetings, and in his volume defended them, declaring that many of these children had "more of that knowledge and wisdom that please God, than many of the great and learned men of the world." He relates at considerable length the experience of Phoebe Bartlett, a little girl of four years and four months of age, who, after many prayers, and many seasons of weeping, could at last say with a joyous countenance, "The kingdom of God is

come to me," and who served God sixty-five years, and then "fell on sleep." Who is not ready to conclude, as did Edwards, after he had witnessed these things, that "there is not so much difference, before God, between children and grown persons as we are apt to imagine ?" Dr. Hoge, of Virginia, who died many years ago, was accustomed to declare that "he could not remember the time when he did not love the Lord." Blessed experience! Would that all the children of praying parents might share it.

In conclusion, we wish to repeat the declaration that we deem Dr. Hibbard's book an able discussion of one of the most important themes which the modern Church is called to consider. The volume is worthy to be read by every Christian parent. The subject demands earnest attention and careful study on the part of those who minister in holy things, and who desire to be workmen that need not to be ashamed, and to them we commend this volume. Differing with the author, perhaps, in regard to the application of a technical term, or in some theoretical point, they cannot but admire the religious spirit, the patient research, the thoughtfulness, the earnestness, the love for God, the Church, and souls, apparent on every page, nor will they fail to find much to quicken their own zeal, and guide them in the performance of their own duty to the most attractive and promising portion of the Gospel field.

ART. VI. THE MEDICAL PROFESSION.

The Genuine Works of Hippocrates, translated from the Greek, with a Preliminary Discourse and Annotations. By FRANCIS ADAMS, LL. D., Surgeon. In two volumes, pp. 872. London: Printed for the Sydenham Society. 1849.

PROFESSIONAL life has a tendency to withdraw those devoted to it from sympathy with the general community, by absorbing their attention in interests exclusively their own. This is evident, particularly from the literature, both permanent and periodical, belonging to each of the professions. Few but clergymen read the profoundest theological books; a large

majority of the subscribers to theological reviews are clergymen, and still fewer but physicians and lawyers respectively read the strictly professional legal and medical works. While this is, perhaps, to a degree inevitable, from the shortness of life and the demand of each profession upon its members, yet it cannot be doubted that serious misunderstandings, misappreciations, and under-estimations of each other arise from extreme exclusiveness. The noblest thinkers in all generations have not submitted to the trammels of any profession. Their horizon has embraced the universal field of thought. No man can properly see a part who does not glance over the whole. Bacon was almost as familiar with medicine and theology as with his own profession; such men as Cuvier, Boerhaave, and Sir Humphrey Davy would never have been heard of beyond their immediate neighborhood had they been mere physicians; Sir Isaac Newton was as deeply interested in theology as in astronomy; Jonathan Edwards was a metaphysician and a close observer of nature before he was a divine, while the ablest of divines in all ages have endeavored to make themselves as familiar with the works and words of man as with the works and word of God. Moses Stuart attributed his success as a defender of orthodoxy to his familiarity with the German language, but though he knew it not, it was more the result of his early training as a lawyer; while such men as Whately and Hitchcock, and others of their kind in our own day, exhibit the good effects of the habits of study indicated by the proverb which Dr. Adam Clarke made his life motto: "Through desire a man having separated himself, seeketh and intermeddleth with all wisdom."

We hope yet to see some of the universally applicable subjects of legal and medical science presented in our theological reviews, from a religious standpoint, as frequently the profoundest subjects of morals and religion are discussed with more or less ability in our medical and legal writings, and too often from an anti-religious standpoint.

By a time-honored custom, amounting to common consent, three leading professions in the realm of practical investigation are acknowledged as the indispensable supporters of Christian civilization: Theology, Medicine, and Law. Each can trace a history up to remote antiquity.. All are blended in the FOURTH SERIES, VOL. XVII.—7

earliest developments of society, each assumes its separate foundations and limitations as civilization becomes more matured.

Civilization properly has regard principally to the state. Civilized human beings are united by a social compact. They are protected and developed by laws adopted by common consent. Without these restrictions, human beings are loose fibers shaken by the wind, or promiscuously gathered into irregular knots, decaying often into rubbish; with them, they are twisted into ropes or cables, and woven into fabrics that seem to have almost an organic life. Thus China has had a low order of civilization from earliest times. India has had several successive and many rival inferior civilizations. Ancient Egypt was civilized, and so are modern Mohammedan communities, after

a fashion. Greece was civilized in several distinct and successive types. Rome had the grandest and most powerful social organization of ancient times; in compactness, majesty, extent, and unity, never surpassed. Indeed, its body of law still holds the people of several nations together.

In all of these the medical profession was in a nascent and rudimentary state. Physiology and the healing art suffered from two defects, the want of science and the want of Christianity. The prodigal waste of human life and of human comfort, therefore, was immense.

In ancient Greece physicians were a separate class of men, well educated and useful, according to their standard; and they suffered less than any other class of scholars from the defects of the Aristotelian philosophy, and the want of that system of inductive reasoning which was afterward so ably developed under the influence of the Christian spirit by Bacon, and on which, more than on any other, the true art of medicine is based.

In that knowledge of the human body, which can be acquired by the patient study of the external form, the Greek physicians excelled; in an empirical acquaintance with gymnastics and the regimen requisite for strength, agility, and beauty, they certainly were eminent; but of all that close and minute acquaintance with the internal organism, and with the forces working in it, that constitutes modern medical science, they were almost totally ignorant. No one can notice the

allusions to physicians in the Dialogues of Plato, for instance, without perceiving that some of the profound maxims of modern medicine were well known then, and that in the art of developing and invigorating the healthy man more was demanded then than now; and in the nursing of the feeble, and in the treatment of the diseased, the Greek physicians were far from being unskilled.

In one place Plato remarks that "skillful physicians, when one comes to them with a pain in the eyes, do not attempt to cure the eyes alone, but they attend to the head, and not the head alone, but the whole body."* But he soon after adds an expression which betrays the measureless inferiority of the ancient philosophers to the moderns in accurate observation: "The Thracian physicians are reported to render men immortal." This simple remark betrays the great defect of ancient science, the want of care in collecting and scrutinizing facts. They did not discriminate between rumors and realities. They spun beautiful theories out of their own brains, they had too little careful study of science. Literature they had, poetry, oratory, logic; in arts they excelled, such as architecture, painting, sculpture; even in some material forms of industry they were eminently superior, such as the making of roads, aqueducts, and bridges. But their philosophy was fanciful and theoretical, and often led them to slight the patient study of facts. Nevertheless this charge is not applicable to all of their medical writers. Medicine in Greece was regarded as an art rather than a department of philosophy, and this, though a degradation at the time, was really a great advantage. Practical arts must be cultivated on the inductive system. As has been well remarked by Macaulay: "The inductive method has been practiced ever since the beginning of the world by every human being. It is constantly practiced by the most ignorant clown, by the most thoughtless school-boy, by the very child at the breast. That method leads the clown to the conclusion, that if he sows barley he shall not reap wheat. By that method the school-boy learns that a cloudy day is the best for catching trout."

All this is undeniably true. Even "clowns," or coloni, (etymologically the same,) if such people do in England sow

*Platonis Charmides.