In the whole phenomena of malady, nothing is more striking than the accommodation of the mind to the condition of suffering. I remember once--I was then in all the strength and confidence of youth and health--discussing this point with a friend, a physician of skill and eminence, now no more, and was greatly struck by a theory which was new, at least to me. He regarded every species of disease, from the most simple to the most complicated, as a sanatory process, an effort--not always successful, of course--on the part of Nature to restore the system to its condition of health. He instanced maladies the most formidable, some of them attended by symptoms of terrible suffering; but in every case he assumed to shew that they were efforts to oppose the march of some other species of disorganisation. So far from there being any taint of Materialism in these views, he deduced from them a most devout and conscientious belief in a Supreme Power; and instead of resting upon Contrivance and Design as the great attributes of the Deity, he went further, and made the Forethought, the Providence of God for his creatures, the great object of his wonderment and praise. His argument, if I dare trust my memory, was briefly this: The presence of a superintending guardian spirit, ever watchful to avert evil from its charge, is the essential difference which separates every object of God’s creation from the mere work of man’s hand. The ingenuity that contrived the mechanism of a steam-engine or a clock, was yet unable to endow the machinery with latent powers of reparation; secret resources against accident or decay, treasured up for the hour of necessity, and not even detectable, if existent, before the emergency that evoked them. Not so with the objects of creation. _They_ are each and all, according to various laws, provided with such powers; their operations, whether from deficient energy or misdirection, constituting what we call disease. What is dropsy, for instance, save the resolution of an inflammatory action that would almost inevitably prove fatal? Formidable as the malady is, it yet affords time for treatment; its march is comparatively slow and uniform, whereas the disease that originated it would have caused death, if effusion of fluid had not arrested the violence of the inflammation. Take the most simple case--a wounded bloodvessel, a cut finger: by all the laws of hydraulics, the blood must escape from this small vessel, and the individual bleed to death as certainly, though not so speedily, as from the largest artery. But what ensues? after a slight loss of blood, the vessel contracts--a coagulum forms--the bleeding is arrested--the coagulum solidifies and forms a cicatrix; and the whole of these varied processes--a series of strange and wonderful results--will follow, without any interference of the Will, far less any aid from the individual himself, being powers inherent in the organisation, and providentially stored up for emergency.