There are many reasons for this, outside of yourselves, and there is no need of your being proud of it or indeed of anything else; but it is something to be thankful for, in the midst of all your hardships, that you in this have more of the power and of the luxury of doing immediate, visible good. You pay this debt in ready-money, as you do your meal and your milk; at least you have very short credit, and the shorter the better. Now, the Doctor has his duties to you, and it is well that he should know them, and that you should know them too; for it will be long before you and he can do without each other. You keep each other alive. Disease, accidents, pain, and death reign everywhere, and we call one another _mortals_, as if our chief peculiarity was that we must die, and you all know how death came into this world. "By one man sin entered the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned"; and disease, disorder, and distress are the fruits of sin, as truly as that apple grew on that forbidden tree. You have nowadays all sorts of schemes for making bad men good, and good men better. The world is full of such schemes, some of them wise and some foolish; but to be wise they must all go on the principle of lessening misery by lessening _sin_; so that the old weaver at Kilmarnock, who at a meeting for abolishing slavery, the corn laws, and a few more things, said, "Mr. Preses, I move that we abolish Original Sin," was at least beginning at the right end. Only fancy what a world it would be, what a family any of ours would be, when everybody did everything that was right, and nothing that was wrong, say for a week! The world would not know itself. It would be inclined to say with the "wee bit wifiekie," though reversing the cause, "This is no me." I am not going to say more on this point. It is not my parish. But you need none of you be long ignorant of who it is who has abolished death, and therefore vanquished sin. Well, then, it is the duty of the Doctor in the first place, to _cure us_; in the second, _to be kind to us_; in the third, to be _true to us_; in the fourth, to keep _our secrets_; in the fifth, to _warn us_, and, best of all, to _forewarn us_; in the sixth, to _be grateful to us_; and, in the last, to _keep his time and his temper_.