Practically, as I have repeatedly found from experience, priest and doctor can combine to the great advantage of the patient. Medical practitioners need have no fear that, with wise and experienced priests, they will find their special province interfered with; on the contrary, their hands will be strengthened, the patients calmed, and their fortitude increased. It has been my lot many times to find the irritable patient resentful of her illness, and of God’s dealing with her, brought to a calm, hopeful, restful frame of mind, and that by the ministrations and prayers of a wise and tactful priest. Perhaps St. Catherine of Siena expresses what is meant by all this in speaking of praying for others. ‘It is toil for him ... to hold him in the presence of God.’ And it is here that the priest can so greatly assist us in our labours on behalf of those weak or sick ones who have been entrusted to our care. FAITH AND MENTAL INSTABILITY BY THEO. B. HYSLOP, M.D., SUPERINTENDENT OF BETHLEM HOSPITAL FAITH AND MENTAL INSTABILITY BY THEO. B. HYSLOP, M.D. _The Tendency for Insanity to increase on Account of the Stress of Life._ That there is a tendency for insanity to increase on account of the stress of competition and all the complexities of modern civilisation few will deny. The burden of taxation upon the nerve tissues and the drain upon their stores of energy must necessarily go on increasing as the uses for the physical mechanism of the body and limbs diminish and become replaced by the more complex nervous activities essential to brain and mental avocations. The influences of rural and urban life, trades and occupations, &c., as favouring the occurrence of insanity, have been dealt with in an exhaustive manner in various reports, treatises, and innumerable papers, and the result has been to apprise us of the fact that the percentage of individuals who are incapable by reason of mental perversion or defect from taking active and useful parts as citizens far exceeds our previous conceptions as to the extent of the degeneration in our midst. It is well-nigh impossible to obtain a complete census of the physical and mental states of the people. Statistics furnish us with so many fallacies that for present purposes I prefer to omit them, and deal only with broad issues which seem to have direct bearings upon the mental health of the community. It is now an accepted fact that civilisation, with its tendencies towards the aggregation of individuals into dense communities, favours the occurrence in those communities of overcrowding, pauperism, crime, and degeneration. For those designed by habit and heredity to rural life, migration to cities where the struggle for life is continued under totally different circumstances is disastrous, and for them the step from country to town is but one of the commonest of all the steps towards mental and physical deterioration, the accidents of civilisation finding in them merely the readiest victims.