Pushed further, the same argument rendered these contentions more absurd and untenable. Man was condemned to die--"dust thou art and unto dust thou shalt return." What right had the physician or surgeon to use his skill to prolong life, at the same time that he conscientiously abstained from the use of anaesthetics on the ground that they obviated pain sent by the Deity? Nay, more; sin itself was the result of the Fall; was not the Church herself erroneously labouring to turn mankind from sin? In a truer and more serious religious spirit he reminded his foolish opponents of the Christian dispensation, and pointed out how the employment of anaesthesia was in strict consonance with the glorious spirit thereof. Some persons broadly stated that the new process was unnatural; even these he condescended to answer. "How unnatural," exclaimed an Irish lady, "for you doctors in Edinburgh to take away the pains of your patients." "How unnatural," said he, "it is for you to have swam over from Ireland to Scotland against wind and tide in a steam-boat." A son of De Quincey in his graduation thesis humorously supported Professor Simpson. He argued that the unmarried woman who opposed anaesthetics on the ground that her sex was condemned by the curse to suffer pains, broke the command herself "in four several ways, according to the following tabular statement":-- "1. She has no conception. 2. She brings forth no children. 3. Her desire is not to her husband. 4. The husband does not rule over her." De Quincey himself supported his son in a letter appended to the thesis thus:--"If pain when carried to the stage which we call agony or intense struggle amongst vital functions brings with it some danger to life, then it will follow that knowingly to reject a means of mitigating or wholly cancelling the danger now that such means has been discovered and tested, travels on the road towards suicide. It is even worse than an ordinary movement in that direction, because it makes God an accomplice, through the Scriptures, in this suicidal movement, nay, the primal instigator to it, by means of a supposed curse interdicting the use of any means whatever (though revealed by Himself) for annulling that curse."