Page:The Necessity of Atheism (Brooks).djvu/143

Rh its entirety, does he trust to the Lord to halt this pernicious development? No, the surgeon does not consult God, but resorts to his own knowledge and skill to save a human life.

The diphtheritic child who is strangling to death with a diphtheritic membrane in its throat is not permitted by the physician to be left to the benevolent being's will, nor to the prayers of the parents. The physician's prayer is the diphtheria antitoxin, which in his hands is the lifesaving device.

When the physician administers quinine for malaria, or salvarsan for syphilis, he effects cures for these diseases by using agents to. which the clergy strenuously objected "when they were first introduced. And when the ecclesiastic attributes to the Deity whatever laws man has been able to evolve out of his own experience and wisdom, he establishes, fallaciously, the corollary that if "God is responsible for the cures, He is also responsible for the non-cures. Then what of the countless number that died of disease before man evolved those cures, and what of the wholesale murder of His children in the past ages?

Do certain diseases still baffle the physician? Surely it is less often than the pestilences of old which baffled sacrifice and prayer. The cruelest laws ever devised by man have more equity and benevolence in them than the appalling and irrational jurisprudence of the Deity.

Do certain diseases as yet remain to plague man? Then it is only because religion has for the past 2000 years been the greatest obstacle in the development of cures for these diseases. Every single individual, in the past 2000 years, who has succumbed to a disease, for which medical science has no cure, has died directly at the hands of religion. The obstruction which religion has placed on the development of medical science has laid at