The Bishop of Bedford taking the chair at the meeting, May 3 of the present year (1882), of the Social Purity Alliance, alluded to this heavy charge against the medical profession in the following terms: “I know what doctors say, and I here publicly protest against the terrible thing that is often said by doctors to young men,--that sin is good for their health. I say God forgive those who have said it.” But it will be replied: “All these evils have existed for ages. There have always been found selfish, cruel, cowardly, and profligate men, ready to transgress when their inclinations goaded them, willing to rank their own health, life, and enjoyment far before the law of God or the interest of their fellows. What signifies, then, a new formula of selfishness?” It signifies, I venture to say, a great deal. Hitherto, men did evil; but they (or their neighbors for them) had at least the grace to recognize that it was evil. The selfish man was charged with selfishness. The cruel man did not assume the airs of a benefactor of mankind. The coward was kicked as a poltroon, not rewarded with sympathetic smiles for his candor. The man who sought the dens of vice did not go thither with his conscience pacified by his physician’s orders in his pocket. To teach men that “a practice conducive to health is _ipso facto_ morally right” is then, at one and the same moment, to damp every aspiration after the nobler kinds of virtue, and to supply a justification for every meaner kind of vice. Neither selfishness, nor cowardice, nor cruelty, nor unchastity, can be justifiable by the plea that they may conduce to the bodily health of one man or of a thousand men; and he who will save his life by such means will assuredly lose all that makes “life worth living,” all for which life was given. PESSIMISM, AND ONE OF ITS PROFESSORS.