Peter Hopkins found that his acquaintance with astrology was sometimes of good service in his professional practice. In his days most of the Almanacs contained Rules Astrological showing under what aspects and positions different modes of remedy were to be administered, and different complections were to let blood. He had often to deal with persons who believed in their Almanack as implicitly as in their Bible, and who studied this part of it with a more anxious sense of its practical importance to themselves. When these notions were opposed to the course of proceeding which the case required, he could gain his point by talking to them in their own language, and displaying, if it were called for, a knowledge of the art which might have astonished the Almanack-maker himself. If he had reasoned with them upon any other ground, they would have retained their own opinion, even while they submitted to his authority; and would neither have had faith in him, nor in his prescriptions. Peter Hopkins would never listen to any patient who proposed waiting for a lucky day before he entered upon a prescribed course of medicine. “Go by the moon as much as you please,” he would say; “have your hair cut, if you think best while it wexes, and cut your corns while it wanes; and put off any thing till a lucky day that may as well be done on one day as another. But the right day to be bled is when you want bleeding; the right day for taking physic is when physic is necessary.” He was the better able to take this course, because he himself belonged to the debateable land between credulity and unbelief. Some one has said that the Devil's dubitative is a negative,—_dubius in fide, infidelis est_;[1] and there are cases, as in Othello's, in which from the infirmity of human nature, it is too often seen that to be once in doubt Is—once to be resolved. [Footnote 1: SEXTUS PYTHAGORAS.] There is however a state of mind, or to speak more accurately a way of thinking, in which men reverse the Welshman's conclusion in the old comedy, and instead of saying ‘it may be, but it is very impossible,’ resolve within themselves that it is very impossible, but it may be. So it was in some degree with Peter Hopkins; his education, his early pursuits, and his turn of mind disposed him to take part with what was then the common opinion of common men, and counterbalanced, if they did not perhaps a little preponderate against the intelligence of the age, and his own deliberate judgment if he had been called upon seriously to declare it. He saw plainly that astrology had been made a craft by means whereof knaves practised upon fools; but so had his own profession; and it no more followed as a necessary consequence from the one admission that the heavenly bodies exercised no direct influence upon the human frame, than it did from the other that the art of medicine was not beneficial to mankind.