The next which I offer may involve greater practical difficulties, none I believe which are insurmountable. The medical schools cannot, I apprehend, provide any scheme of education for the students which shall make amends for the want of good early training. It would be absurd to expect, for instance, that a boy commencing student of medicine, who had not learned Greek, should be taught it in a hospital. I have been the more anxious to urge securities for an actual previous education, because I think it must be presumed. However little in general the students may be fitted for such discussions, it is certain that on coming to the metropolis the most difficult questions, ethical and metaphysical, and theological, will at once be presented to them. The medical lecturer must have some opinions on these subjects; nay, it is plain that he cannot talk sensibly on a thousand points directly connected with his own professions, if he has not. It is hardly possible to conceive a man of education, who is brought into contact with human beings in all states of life and feeling, so unreflecting as never to ask himself what is man, or so mad as to suppose that the whole answer to the question could be found in the dissecting room. It is vain, therefore, to interdict our medical professors from having notions, theories, opinions of their own; it is absurd to say these shall not infringe upon any point that we hold of importance to our moral being. Still more impossible is it to prevent young men, in conversations and discussions with each other, from pursuing the reflections which their teacher has only hinted at,-from following out analogies, and deducing consequences which he perhaps never dreamed of. The student who most resolutely confines himself to his own appointed work—who determines that nothing shall enter into his mind, or at least harbour there, which is not directly connected with his profession, must still read numerous books, and follow out numerous trains of thought which touch upon every point of man's state and destiny. Yet, in how very few instances will this rigorous practice be followed! The ordinary medical student will read the newspaper, will converse with men who have every theory and notion about morals, politics, and religion-will hear ethical sophisms, that were propounded and refuted when they had no better names to sustain them than Prodicus and Protagoras, presented to him as startling novelties, upheld by the irresistible authority of Helvetius and Bentham; notions of government, so exquisitely simple and natural, that they must be true, stated to him, without one step in the long series of practical experiments which have demonstrated them to be false; theological tenets, in like manner, divested of all the mystery with which they have been invested by interested priests, set before him in all their intelligible obviousness, only without one allusion to their being intended to satisfy certain cravings of the heart, and to explain certain puzzles in the world, without a hint that they have been tried for both purposes, and found wanting. Now, it is for this state of things that our education is necessary; we may wish that the students were less learned, or that they had a better foundation to sustain their learning; but we must take them as we find them; we must not affect to give them credit for an ignorant innocence which, in their position, it is impossible they can have. If these circumstances be rightly understood, there is much less difficulty in determining what kind of general instruction is requisite. It must not be strictly elementary: if the students need this, they must be led to feel that they need it; you must begin with them at the point which they fancy they have reached. Neither must it have direct reference to subjects in which the students do not directly feel that they are interested. It might be very expedient to give them formal theological instruction, but Johnson's coarse answer to Milton's essay must be recollected, "The horse may be brought to the water," &c.; and certainly the animal will not drink if its thirst has not some way or other been excited previously. A course of lectures, therefore, upon those subjects on which they do like to talk, on which they are certain to be hearing new opinions perpetually, (on moral and We political philosophy, for instance, on history, on general literature,) seem likely to be more useful than that positive religious teaching which, though really what the student wants, is not precisely what he feels that he wants. must remember that we are not forming a model-system of instruction, but providing the best possible remedy for an actual mischief. There ought to be some bodies in a country exhibiting the ideal of an education. Such I think are our universities. There must be other institutions adapted to meet particular exigencies of the community, and the utmost that we can ask of our medical schools is, that they may become such institutions. But in saying this, it must not be supposed that I wish to evade the question which I know would have been suggested if I had proposed a course of theological lectures. Your lecturer must be a man of certain opinions, and those opinions may not be palatable to all the students, or to their parents. Sir, it seems to me perfectly ridiculous to suppose that the lecturer (be his subject ethics, history, what it may,) should not be a man of certain opinions, and that those opinions should not cross and contradict many to which his hearers have been accustomed to yield assent. I will not say that a lecturer cannot be an honest man, of whom it can be said he has no opinions; but I must say, that the persons who could employ such a man as a teacher cannot be either very honest or very wise. A man who lectures before a body of medical students, at any rate, could not afford to be without opinions. He has no chance of being listened to by them unless he has very strong definite feelings and views, and unless he is prepared to assert them, and to shew how they supersede at once and reconcile the loose and fluctuating notions in the minds of his auditors. For the men whom they are wont to hear lecturing on their own peculiar studies, are sensible, well-informed men, who do not make it their rule to mean as little as they can in what they say, but to present facts, and the reasons of facts, with all clearness, definiteness, and decision. And again, those who talk to these young men, or they, when they talk among themselves, do not delight in mere vagueness and generalities, their craving is after something tangible and positive. If, then, the lecturer on ethics is required to keep the peace on all controversies between him who denies the distinction between a right and wrong, and him who believes it to be fundamental,-between those who believe that all the moral affections have a selfish root, and those who believe that man is endowed with them, and that God is educating them for the very purpose of destroying selfishness,-between those who think that man is a machine, under the government of outward and necessary impulses, and those who think that he has a will, and is intended to rise above and to control the impulses of nature,-between those who, granting him a will, believe that his glory is to be independent, and those who think that he is only free when he is subject to another and higher will;-if on all these points he must be undecided or silent, he may be called tolerant and liberal, and he will be laughed at. These young men will know that he will be telling them nothing, and they will argue, rationally enough, that it is because he has nothing to tell. If, again, the lecturer on history does not choose to know that it is a question whether man was created to be a solitary creature, or to be in a society, whether he has fought his way into the happiness of union and fellowship, or whether he has been led into it by an invisible hand, himself, unless submitting to be led by that hand, fighting, not for society, but for independence, for solitude,-whether a nation is a mere aggregate of individuals held together only by self-will, and dissolvable at pleasure, or whether it has, just as much as the family, a pre-ordained constitution, from which a man can only depart to make himself miserable,-whether that universal state which is above the national state be one in which every individual is setting up individual rights, and upon that ground fraternizing with his neighbour, according to the idea of the declaration of rights, or whether it be that in which there is neither Jew nor Greek, barbarian nor Scythian, bond nor free, because all are one in Christ, according to the idea of the gospel,-whether, in short, there is not, or there is, a church universal, and whether all human constitutions do not, or do, depend upon this primal one,—he who will neglect such questions as these, or has no solution of them, will, I am certain, be looked upon by any set of young men, whether anxious for truth, or only impatient of confusion and contradiction, as a person who is not acquainted with one of their thoughts, and to whose words, therefore, it cannot be important for them to listen. The question, then, stated clearly, is this:-the public calls, and has a right to call, upon the conductors of our medical schools and hospitals, to provide some moral education for their students; this moral education must be efficient, practical, suited to the circumstances of the pupils; but if persons are chosen to conduct this education who have no views, or not decided views, it will not be efficient, practical, or suited to the circumstances of the pupils. What then is to be done?-there cannot be half-a-dozen lecturers talking one against the other; such a scheme would be absurd anywhere, monstrous in a place intended primarily for another purpose, and where moral education, if transcendently more important than professional, must yet be subordinate to it. The conductors of the schools or hospitals, then, must not be delicate; if our age vaunts of its liberality, it vaunts also of its common sense; they must decide which they will choose to do what some men may call partial or bigoted, or do what all must call foolish and impracticable. I do not say this to increase their difficulties, but to remove them; something they must do, and if they will throw overboard some idle scruples, they can do it much more easily. And, after all, the difficulty only amounts to this, those who do not approve of the lecturers established in any school, will send their sons elsewhere; and if that particular school maintains its medical reputation, it need not fear incurring a little reproach for adopting the only practicable means of obtaining a moral reputation. The details of the plan which I have suggested would not occasion much difficulty. I should think it very desirable that the lecturers should, if possible, be provided by the school or hospital, or by private subscription, and that the expenses of the students' education, already very great, should not be increased. I think that for a time, at least, attendance on the lectures should be a privilege, and should not be enforced. I think it desirable that for some time they should only be delivered during the summer, when the medical teachers are silent; but on all these points I may be wrong, and at any rate the discussion of them is connected properly with another, and, I conceive, in some respects a more important proposal, with the particulars of which I may venture to trouble your readers in a future letter. I am, Sir, yours, &c. * The dash is used in lieu of the words "by letters dimissory from the Bishop of." College. University. Ordaining Bishop. Norwich Camb. Lincoln-Norwich The Bishop of Exeter will hold an Ordination, in his Cathedral, on Sunday, the 10th of April. The Bishop of Lincoln's next Ordination will be held at Buckden, on Trinity Sunday, the 29th of May. Candidates are required to send their papers to his Lordship before the 17th of April. Camb. Oxford Lincoln Oxford Oxford Catherine Hall Camb. Lincoln Oxford Lincoln Norwich Camb. Camb. Oxford CLERICAL APPOINTMENTS. Everett, G. F... Gardner, B. M........ Gleadall, J. W...... Chaplain to the High Sheriff of Wilts Evening Preacher at the Magdalen Hospital Gordon, W., C. of West Bromwich, a Surrogate for the Diocese of Lichfield and Coventry |