dangerous thing.” Not that knowledge, little or much, if it be real
knowledge, is dangerous; but that many a man considers a mere hazy view of
many things to be real knowledge, whereas it does but mislead, just as a
short-sighted man sees only so far as to be led by his uncertain sight
over the precipice.
Such, then, being true cultivation of mind, and such the literary
institutions which do not tend to it, I might proceed to show you,
Gentlemen, did time admit, how, on the other hand, that kind of
instruction of which our Evening Classes are a specimen, is especially
suited to effect what they propose. Consider, for instance, what a
discipline in accuracy of thought it is to have to construe a foreign
language into your own; what a still severer and more improving exercise
it is to translate from your own into a foreign language. Consider, again,
what a lesson in memory and discrimination it is to get up, as it is
called, any one chapter of history. Consider what a trial of acuteness,
caution, and exactness, it is to master, and still more to prove, a number
of definitions. Again, what an exercise in logic is classification, what
an exercise in logical precision it is to understand and enunciate the
proof of any of the more difficult propositions of Euclid, or to master
any one of the great arguments for Christianity so thoroughly as to bear
examination upon it; or, again, to analyze sufficiently, yet in as few
words as possible, a speech, or to draw up a critique upon a poem. And so
of any other science,—chemistry, or comparative anatomy, or natural
history; it does not matter what it is, if it be really studied and
mastered, as far as it is taken up. The result is a formation of
mind,—that is, a habit of order and system, a habit of referring every
accession of knowledge to what we already know, and of adjusting the one
with the other; and, moreover, as such a habit implies, the actual
acceptance and use of certain principles as centres of thought, around
which our knowledge grows and is located. Where this critical faculty
exists, history is no longer a mere story-book, or biography a romance;
orators and publications of the day are no longer infallible authorities;
eloquent diction is no longer a substitute for matter, nor bold
statements, or lively descriptions, a substitute for proof. This is that
faculty of perception in intellectual matters, which, as I have said so
often, is analogous to the capacity we all have of mastering the multitude
of lines and colours which pour in upon our eyes, and of deciding what
every one of them is worth.
8.
But I should be transgressing the limits assigned to an address of this
nature were I to proceed. I have not said any thing, Gentlemen, on the
religious duties which become the members of a Catholic University,
because we are directly concerned here with your studies only. It is my
consolation to know that so many of you belong to a Society or
Association, which the zeal of some excellent priests, one especially, has
been so instrumental in establishing in your great towns. You do not come
to us to have the foundation laid in your breasts of that knowledge which
is highest of all: it has been laid already. You have begun your mental
training with faith and devotion; and then you come to us to add the
education of the intellect to the education of the heart. Go on as you
have begun, and you will be one of the proudest achievements of our great
undertaking. We shall be able to point to you in proof that zeal for
knowledge may thrive even under the pressure of secular callings; that
mother-wit does not necessarily make a man idle, nor inquisitiveness of
mind irreverent; that shrewdness and cleverness are not incompatible with
firm faith in the mysteries of Revelation; that attainment in Literature
and Science need not make men conceited, nor above their station, nor
restless, nor self-willed. We shall be able to point to you in proof of
the power of Catholicism to make out of the staple of great towns
exemplary and enlightened Christians, of those classes which, external to
Ireland, are the problem and perplexity of patriotic statesmen, and the
natural opponents of the teachers of every kind of religion.
* * * * *
As to myself, I wish I could by actual service and hard work of my own
respond to your zeal, as so many of my dear and excellent friends, the
Professors of the University, have done and do. They have a merit, they
have a claim on you, Gentlemen, in which I have no part. If I admire the
energy and bravery with which you have undertaken the work of
self-improvement, be sure I do not forget their public spirit and noble
free devotion to the University any more than you do. I know I should not
satisfy you with any praise of this supplement of our academical
arrangements which did not include those who give to it its life. It is a
very pleasant and encouraging sight to see both parties, the teachers and
the taught, co-operating with a pure _esprit-de-corps_ thus
voluntarily,—they as fully as you can do—for a great object; and I offer
up my earnest prayers to the Author of all good, that He will ever bestow
on you all, on Professors and on Students, as I feel sure He will bestow,
Rulers and Superiors, who, by their zeal and diligence in their own place,
shall prove themselves worthy both of your cause and of yourselves.
Lecture X.
Christianity And Medical Science. An Address to the Students Of Medicine.
1.
I have had so few opportunities, Gentlemen, of addressing you, and our
present meeting is of so interesting and pleasing a character, by reason
of the object which occasions it, that I am encouraged to speak freely to
you, though I do not know you personally, on a subject which, as you may
conceive, is often before my own mind: I mean, the exact relation in which
your noble profession stands towards the Catholic University itself and
towards Catholicism generally. Considering my own most responsible office
as Rector, my vocation as an ecclesiastic, and then again my years, which
increase my present claim, and diminish my future chances, of speaking to
you, I need make no apology, I am sure, for a step, which will be
recommended to you by my good intentions, even though it deserves no
consideration on the score of the reflections and suggestions themselves
which I shall bring before you. If indeed this University, and its Faculty
of Medicine inclusively, were set up for the promotion of any merely
secular object,—in the spirit of religious rivalry, as a measure of party
politics, or as a commercial speculation,—then indeed I should be out of
place, not only in addressing you in the tone of advice, but in being here
at all; for what reason could I in that case have had for having now given
some of the most valuable years of my life to this University, for having
placed it foremost in my thoughts and anxieties,—(I had well nigh said) to
the prejudice of prior, dearer, and more sacred ties,—except that I felt
that the highest and most special religious interests were bound up in its
establishment and in its success? Suffer me, then, Gentlemen, if with
these views and feelings I conform my observations to the sacred building
in which we find ourselves, and if I speak to you for a few minutes as if
I were rather addressing you authoritatively from the pulpit than in the
Rector’s chair.
Now I am going to set before you, in as few words as I can, what I
conceive to be the principal duty of the Medical Profession towards
Religion, and some of the difficulties which are found in the observance
of that duty: and in speaking on the subject I am conscious how little
qualified I am to handle it in such a way as will come home to your minds,
from that want of acquaintance with you personally, to which I have
alluded, and from my necessary ignorance of the influences of whatever
kind which actually surround you, and the points of detail which are
likely to be your religious embarrassments. I can but lay down principles
and maxims, which you must apply for yourselves, and which in some
respects or cases you may feel have no true application at all.
2.
All professions have their dangers, all general truths have their
fallacies, all spheres of action have their limits, and are liable to
improper extension or alteration. Every professional man has rightly a
zeal for his profession, and he would not do his duty towards it without
that zeal. And that zeal soon becomes exclusive, or rather necessarily
involves a sort of exclusiveness. A zealous professional man soon comes to
think that his profession is all in all, and that the world would not go
on without it. We have heard, for instance, a great deal lately in regard
to the war in India, of _political_ views suggesting one plan of campaign,
and _military_ views suggesting another. How hard it must be for the
military man to forego his own strategical dispositions, not on the ground
that they are not the best,—not that they are not acknowledged by those
who nevertheless put them aside to _be_ the best _for_ the object of
military success,—but because military success is not the highest of
objects, and the end of ends,—because it is not the sovereign science, but
must ever be subordinate to political considerations or maxims of
government, which is a higher science with higher objects,—and that
therefore his sure success on the field must be relinquished because the
interests of the council and the cabinet require the sacrifice, that the
war must yield to the statesman’s craft, the commander-in-chief to the
governor-general. Yet what the soldier feels is natural, and what the
statesman does is just. This collision, this desire on the part of every
profession to be supreme,—this necessary, though reluctant, subordination
of the one to the other,—is a process ever going on, ever acted out before
our eyes. The civilian is in rivalry with the soldier, the soldier with
the civilian. The diplomatist, the lawyer, the political economist, the
merchant, each wishes to usurp the powers of the state, and to mould
society upon the principles of his own pursuit.
Nor do they confine themselves to the mere province of secular matters.
They intrude into the province of Religion. In England, in the reign of
Queen Elizabeth, lawyers got hold of religion, and never have let it go.
Abroad, bureaucracy keeps hold of Religion with a more or less firm grasp.
The circles of literature and science have in like manner before now made
Religion a mere province of their universal empire.
I remark, moreover, that these various usurpations are frequently made in
perfectly good faith. There is no intention of encroachment on the part of
the encroachers. The commander recommends what with all his heart and soul
he thinks best for his country when he presses on Government a certain
plan of campaign. The political economist has the most honest intentions
of improving the Christian system of social duty by his reforms. The
statesman may have the best and most loyal dispositions towards the Holy
See, at the time that he is urging changes in ecclesiastical discipline
which would be seriously detrimental to the Church.
And now I will say how this applies to the Medical Profession, and what is
its special danger, viewed in relation to Catholicity.
3.
Its province is the physical nature of man, and its object is the
preservation of that physical nature in its proper state, and its
restoration when it has lost it. It limits itself, by its very profession,
to the health of the body; it ascertains the conditions of that health; it
analyzes the causes of its interruption or failure; it seeks about for the
means of cure. But, after all, bodily health is not the only end of man,
and the medical science is not the highest science of which he is the
subject. Man has a moral and a religious nature, as well as a physical. He
has a mind and a soul; and the mind and soul have a legitimate sovereignty
over the body, and the sciences relating to them have in consequence the
precedence of those sciences which relate to the body. And as the soldier
must yield to the statesman, when they come into collision with each
other, so must the medical man to the priest; not that the medical man may
not be enunciating what is absolutely certain, in a medical point of view,
as the commander may be perfectly right in what he enunciates
strategically, but that his action is suspended in the given case by the
interests and duty of a superior science, and he retires not confuted but
superseded.
Now this general principle thus stated, all will admit: who will deny that
health must give way to duty? So far there is no perplexity: supposing a
fever to break out in a certain place, and the medical practitioner said
to a Sister of Charity who was visiting the sick there, “You will die to a
certainty if you remain there,” and her ecclesiastical superiors on the
contrary said, “You have devoted your life to such services, and there you
must stay;” and supposing she stayed and was taken off; the medical
adviser would be right, but who would say that the Religious Sister was
wrong? She did not doubt his word, but she denied the importance of that
word, compared with the word of her religious superiors. The medical man
was right, yet he could not gain his point. He was right in what he said,
he said what was true, yet he had to give way.
Here we are approaching what I conceive to be the especial temptation and
danger to which the medical profession is exposed: it is a certain sophism
of the intellect, founded on this maxim, implied, but not spoken or even
recognized—“What is true is lawful.” Not so. Observe, here is the
fallacy,—What is true in one science is dictated to us indeed according to
that science, but not according to another science, or in another
department. What is certain in the military art has force in the military
art, but not in statesmanship; and if statesmanship be a higher department
of action than war, and enjoins the contrary, it has no claim on our
reception and obedience at all. And so what is true in medical science
might in all cases be carried out, _were_ man a mere animal or brute
without a soul; but since he is a rational, responsible being, a thing may
be ever so true in medicine, yet may be unlawful in fact, in consequence
of the _higher_ law of morals and religion having come to some different
conclusion. Now I must be allowed some few words to express, or rather to
suggest, more fully what I mean.
The whole universe comes from the good God. It is His creation; _it_ is
good; it is all good, as being the work of the Good, though good only in
its degree, and not after His Infinite Perfection. The physical nature of
man is good; nor can there be any thing sinful in itself in acting
according to that nature. Every natural appetite or function is lawful,
speaking abstractedly. No natural feeling or act is in itself sinful.
There can be no doubt of all this; and there can be no doubt that science
can determine what is natural, what tends to the preservation of a healthy
state of nature, and what on the contrary is injurious to nature. Thus the
medical student has a vast field of knowledge spread out before him, true,
because knowledge, and innocent, because true.
So much in the abstract—but when we come to _fact_, it may easily happen
that what is in itself innocent may not be innocent to this or that
person, or in this or that mode or degree. Again, it may easily happen
that the impressions made on a man’s mind by his own science may be
indefinitely more vivid and operative than the enunciations of truths
belonging to some other branch of knowledge, which strike indeed his ear,
but do not come home to him, are not fixed in his memory, are not
imprinted on his imagination. And in the profession before us, a medical
student may realize far more powerfully and habitually that certain acts
are _advisable in themselves_ according to the law of physical nature,
than the fact that they are forbidden according to the law of some higher
science, as theology; or again, that they are accidentally wrong, as
being, though lawful in themselves, wrong in this or that individual, or
under the circumstances of the case.
Now to recur to the instance I have already given: it is supposable that
that Sister of Charity, who, for the sake of her soul, would not obey the
law of self-preservation as regards her body, might cause her medical
adviser great irritation and disgust. His own particular profession might
have so engrossed his mind, and the truth of its maxims have so penetrated
it, that he could not understand or admit any other or any higher system.
He might in process of time have become simply dead to all religious
truths, because such truths were not present to him, and those of his own
science were ever present. And observe, his fault would be, not that of
taking error for truth, for what he relied on _was_ truth—but in not
understanding that there were other truths, and those higher than his own.
Take another case, in which there will often in particular circumstances
be considerable differences of opinion among really religious men, but
which does not cease on that account to illustrate the point I am
insisting on. A patient is dying: the priest wishes to be introduced, lest
he should die without due preparation: the medical man says that the
thought of religion will disturb his mind and imperil his recovery. Now in
the particular case, the one party or the other may be right in urging his
own view of what ought to be done. I am merely directing attention to the
_principle_ involved in it. Here are the representatives of two great
sciences, Religion and Medicine. Each says what is true in his own
science, each will think he has a right to insist on seeing that the truth
which he himself is maintaining is carried out in action; whereas, one of
the two sciences is above the other, and the end of Religion is
indefinitely higher than the end of Medicine. And, however the decision
ought to go, in the particular case, as to introducing the subject of
religion or not, I think the priest ought to have that decision; just as a
Governor-General, not a Commander-in-Chief, would have the ultimate
decision, were politics and strategics to come into collision.
You will easily understand, Gentlemen, that I dare not pursue my subject
into those details, which are of the greater importance for the very
reason that they cannot be spoken of. A medical philosopher, who has so
simply fixed his intellect on his own science as to have forgotten the
existence of any other, will view man, who is the subject of his
contemplation, as a being who has little more to do than to be born, to
grow, to eat, to drink, to walk, to reproduce his kind, and to die. He
sees him born as other animals are born; he sees life leave him, with all
those phenomena of annihilation which accompany the death of a brute. He
compares his structure, his organs, his functions, with those of other
animals, and his own range of science leads to the discovery of no facts
which are sufficient to convince him that there is any difference in kind
between the human animal and them. His practice, then, is according to his
facts and his theory. Such a person will think himself free to give
advice, and to insist upon rules, which are quite insufferable to any
religious mind, and simply antagonistic to faith and morals. It is not, I
repeat, that he says what is untrue, supposing that man _were_ an animal
and nothing else: but he thinks that whatever is true in his own science
is at once lawful in practice—as if there were not a number of rival
sciences in the great circle of philosophy, as if there were not a number
of conflicting views and objects in human nature to be taken into account
and reconciled, or as if it were his duty to forget all but his own;
whereas
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
I have known in England the most detestable advice given to young persons
by eminent physicians, in consequence of this contracted view of man and
his destinies. God forbid that I should measure the professional habits of
Catholics by the rules of practice of those who were not! but it is plain
that what is actually carried out where religion is not known, exists as a
temptation and a danger in the Science of Medicine itself, where religion
is known ever so well.
4.
And now, having suggested, as far as I dare, what I consider the
consequences of that radical sophism to which the medical profession is
exposed, let me go on to say in what way it is corrected by the action of
Catholicism upon it.
You will observe, then, Gentlemen, that those higher sciences of which I
have spoken, Morals and Religion, are not represented to the intelligence
of the world by intimations and notices strong and obvious, such as those
which are the foundation of Physical Science. The physical nature lies
before us, patent to the sight, ready to the touch, appealing to the
senses in so unequivocal a way that the science which is founded upon it
is as real to us as the fact of our personal existence. But the phenomena,
which are the basis of morals and Religion, have nothing of this luminous
evidence. Instead of being obtruded upon our notice, so that we cannot
possibly overlook them, they are the dictates either of Conscience or of
Faith. They are faint shadows and tracings, certain indeed, but delicate,
fragile, and almost evanescent, which the mind recognizes at one time, not
at another,—discerns when it is calm, loses when it is in agitation. The
reflection of sky and mountains in the lake is a proof that sky and
mountains are around it, but the twilight, or the mist, or the sudden
storm hurries away the beautiful image, which leaves behind it no memorial
of what it was. Something like this are the Moral Law and the informations
of Faith, as they present themselves to individual minds. Who can deny the
existence of Conscience? who does not feel the force of its injunctions?
but how dim is the illumination in which it is invested, and how feeble
its influence, compared with that evidence of sight and touch which is the
foundation of Physical Science! How easily can we be talked out of our
clearest views of duty! how does this or that moral precept crumble into
nothing when we rudely handle it! how does the fear of sin pass off from
us, as quickly as the glow of modesty dies away from the countenance! and
then we say, “It is all superstition.” However, after a time we look
round, and then to our surprise we see, as before, the same law of duty,
the same moral precepts, the same protests against sin, appearing over
against us, in their old places, as if they never had been brushed away,
like the divine handwriting upon the wall at the banquet. Then perhaps we
approach them rudely, and inspect them irreverently, and accost them
sceptically, and away they go again, like so many spectres,—shining in
their cold beauty, but not presenting themselves bodily to us, for our
inspection, so to say, of their hands and their feet. And thus these
awful, supernatural, bright, majestic, delicate apparitions, much as we
may in our hearts acknowledge their sovereignty, are no match as a
foundation of Science for the hard, palpable, material facts which make up
the province of Physics. Recurring to my original illustration, it is as
if the India Commander-in-Chief, instead of being under the control of a
local seat of government at Calcutta, were governed simply from London, or
from the moon. In that case, he would be under a strong temptation to
neglect the home government, which nevertheless in theory he acknowledged.
Such, I say, is the natural condition of mankind:—we depend upon a seat of
government which is in another world; we are directed and governed by
intimations from above; we need a local government on earth.