The efforts to corrupt the youth of unhappy France by means of bad education in its higher branches, have been not less energetic and wide-spread. The lectures of the School of Medicine of Paris were inaugurated in 1865, amid shouts of "_Materialism forever_,"[D] and on the thirtieth of December a candidate for degrees was permitted by the Medical Faculty to advance the following revolutionary doctrine, grounded on the materialistic principles he had been taught: "Who still speaks to us of free-will? As the stone which falls to the ground obeys the laws of weight, man obeys the laws which are proper to him.... Responsibility is the same for all, that is to say, _none_." And again: "Physicians must not be accomplices of the magistrates and judges, who punish men for acts for which they are not responsible"--pp. 32, 33. Here we have a sample of the teaching of the School of Medicine of Paris, not only the first medical school of France, but among the first schools of Europe. And this sample is, unfortunately, not a solitary one. The Medical Faculty of the University of Paris gave medals in 1866 for two dissertations, in one of which we find a denial of the act of creation and of God the Creator, and a rejection of every metaphysical idea, _as useless and dangerous_; while human thought is set down as produced _by heat!_ In the other we read the following propositions: "Matter is eternal." "The action of a _First Cause_ is useless and irrational--_it is chimerical!_" Again: "It is absolutely impossible to explain the existence of a creative power"; and "an immaterial being is not necessary for the production of life." And, "to attribute the phenomena of life to an immaterial soul, is to substitute a chimerical being for the hypothesis of machinists." "Materialists have done good service to physiology by eliminating metaphysical entities from this study. The idea of the soul, as an immaterial power, is a mere abstraction; in fact, nothing of the kind exists." Unhappily these principles, subversive of all morality, are not advanced by the aspirants only to academical distinctions; most certainly the students would not advance these theories had they not learned them from their masters. Hence we find one of the Professors of the University of France, in Bordeaux, asserting, that "even among civilized nations moral ideas are so relative, contradictory, and dependent on exterior and individual relations, that it is impossible, and will always be impossible, to find an absolute definition of goodness."--p. 38, _note_. And the "Medical Review" published the discourse pronounced by one of the physicians of the Faculty of Paris, M. Verneuil, over the grave of a member of their learned body, Dr. Foucher, in which we find the following: