It was admitted that there were good and true soldiers in the clerical ranks--some such pitiful minority of righteous men as those for whose sake Abraham, in his prayerful and pathetic apology, entreated that the Cities of the Plain might be spared. But for the rest?--the time-serving right reverends on the path of promotion, with one foot in the sanctuary and the other in the temple of Mammon; the deans and archdeacons who clung to high benefice, and forgot the solemn ordination vows of their early manhood; the canons whose intellectual vanity found vent in sermons and pamphlets that argued faith in the cardinal doctrines of Christianity to be only a delusion and a snare; the holders of rich livings who had waxed fat and kicked against all the labours of parochial duty; the popular preachers who did not practise what they preached; the faithless stewards of the mysteries who declared there were no mysteries at all; and the flaccid curates who feebly bleated in the pulpit to a congregation of martyrs in the pews--for these, and all of these, the _Epoch_ let loose the chastisement of journalistic whips and scorpions. Somewhat less sweeping was the treatment dealt out to the profession of the healing art; but here, too, condemnation was not spared. The claptrap of the calling was its blight; the “abracadabra” of its Latin prescriptions; the bestowal of long names on short ailments; the fetich of the medicine bottle; the hoodwinking of the patient’s friends; the solemn-faced acquiescence in the patient’s mendacious explanations of his or her symptoms; the decorous delusions indirectly fostered in the best “bedside manner”; the pandering to the egoism and self-importance of opulent “sufferers”; the frequent farce of “second opinions”; the puff paragraphs countenanced by eminent practitioners in relation to their visits to eminent patients; the etiquette that supported the “lumping” of fees, and the continuation of “professional services” long after such services had ceased to be necessary: these, perhaps, were but the stereotyped faults which unthinking men regard as justified by custom or their own necessities. The rank and file of the medical brotherhood, the _Epoch_ admitted, had much work and scanty wage. But the sins of their leading men were more heinous. The selfishness which made them contend for the retention of great hospitals in unsuitable localities; the enormous fees exacted from private patients on the strength of hospital reputation; the too ready use of the operating knife on the human subject, and the tortures of vivisection inflicted in the abused name of science upon the dumb creation: these, indeed, were sins that cried aloud for reproof and repression.