John Brown

“ Death would be nothing without sin, no more than falling asleep in the dark to awake to the happy light of the morning. Now, I would have you think of your duty to this great God, our Father in heaven; and I would have you to remember that it is your duty to trust him, to believe in him. If you do not, your soul will be shipwrecked, you will go down in terror and in darkness. ”

“ I mean as soon as they are keeping themselves; for a wife, such a wife as alone I mean, is cheaper to a young man than no wife, and is his best companion.
Then for your duties to yourselves. See that you make yourself do what is immediately just to your body, feed it when it is really hungry; let it sleep when it, not its master, desires sleep; make it happy, poor hard-working fellow! and give it a gambol when it wants it and deserves it, and as long as it can execute it. Dancing is just the music of the feet, and the gladness of the young legs, and is well called the poetry of motion. ”

“ If he finds his patient has brought disease upon himself by sin, by drink, by overwork, by over-eating, by over-anything, it is his duty to say so plainly and firmly, and the same with regard to the treatment of children by their parents; the family doctor should forewarn them; he should explain, as far as he is able and they can comprehend them, the Laws of Health, and so tell them how to prevent disease, as well as do his best to cure it. What a great and rich field there is here for our profession, if they and the public could only work well together! ”

“ If a poor man falls down in a fit on the street, who is it that takes him up and carries him home, and gives him what he needs? it is not the man with a fine coat and gloves on,—it is the poor, dirty-coated, hard-handed, warm-hearted laboring man.
Keep a good hold of all these homely and sturdy virtues, and add to them temperance and diligence, cleanliness and thrift, good knowledge, and, above all, the love and the fear of God, and you will not only be happy yourselves, but you will make this great and wonderful country of ours which rests upon you still more wonderful and great. ”

“ Now, the Doctor has his duties to you, and it is well that he should know them, and that you should know them too; for it will be long before you and he can do without each other. You keep each other alive. Disease, accidents, pain, and death reign everywhere, and we call one another mortals, as if our chief peculiarity was that we must die, and you all know how death came into this world. "By one man sin entered the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned" ”

“ If you were a carter or a coach-driver, and had a horse, would you not take care to give him plenty of corn, and to keep his stable clean and well aired, and to curry his skin well, and you would not kill him with overwork, for, besides the cruelty, this would be a dead loss to you,—it would be so much out of your pocket? And don't you see that God has given you your bodies to work with, and to please him with their diligence; and it is ungrateful to him, as well as unkind and wicked to your family and yourself, to waste your bodily strength, and bring disease and death upon yourselves? ”

“ No child should get meat or hard things till it gets teeth to chew them, and no baby should ever get a drop of whiskey, or any strong drink, unless by the Doctor's orders. Whiskey, to the soft, tender stomach of an infant, is like vitriol to ours; it is a burning poison to its dear little body, as it may be a burning poison and a curse to its never-dying soul. As you value your children's health of body, and the salvation of their souls, never give them a drop of whiskey ”

“ Prayers, you know, are like gravitation, or the light of heaven; they will go from whatever place they are uttered; and if they are real prayers, they go straight and home to the centre, the focus of all things; and you know that poor fellow with the crust of typhus on his lips, and its nonsense on his tongue,—that child tossing in misery, not knowing even its own mother,—what can they know, what heed can they give to the prayer of the minister? ”

“ From the brains we go to the lungs,—you know where they are,—they are what the butchers call the lichts; here they are, they are the bellows that keep the fire of life going; for you must know that a clever German philosopher has made out that we are all really burning,—that our bodies are warmed by a sort of burning or combustion, as it is called,—and fed by breath and food, as a fire is fed with coals and air. ”

“ As to the moral training of children, I need scarcely speak to you. What people want about these things is, not knowledge, but the will to do what is right,—what they know to be right, and the moral power to do it.
Whatever you wish your child to be, be it yourself. If you wish it to be happy, healthy, sober, truthful, affectionate, honest, and godly, be yourself all these. If you wish it to be lazy and sulky, and a liar, and a thief, and a drunkard, and a swearer, be yourself all these. As the old cock crows, the young cock learns. ”

“ A thinking man feels often painfully what a serious thing it is to be a doctor, to have the charge of the lives of his fellow-mortals, to stand, as it were, between them and death and eternity and the judgment-seat, and to fight hand to hand with Death. ”

“ Her whole soul goes out to him in unspeakable gratitude when he brings back to her from the power of the grave her husband or darling child. The Doctor knows many of our secrets, of our sorrows, which no one else knows,—some of our sins, perhaps, which the great God alone else knows; how many cares and secrets, how many lives, he carries in his heart and in his hands! So you see he is a very important person the Doctor, and we should do our best to make the most of him, and to do our duty to him and to ourselves. ”

“ The night cometh in which neither you nor I can work,—may we work while it is day; whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might, for there is no work or device in the grave, whither we are all of us hastening; and when the night is spent, may we all enter on a healthful, a happy, an everlasting to-morrow! ”

“ It is your duty to trust the Doctor, that is, to believe in him. If you were in a ship, in a wild storm, and among dangerous rocks, and if you took a pilot on board, who knew all the coast and all the breakers, and had a clear eye, and a firm heart, and a practised hand, would you not let him have his own way? ”

“ You often hear of the wonders of cod-liver oil, and they are wonders; poor little wretches who have faces like old puggies, and are all belly and no legs, and are screaming all day and all night too,—these poor little wretches under the cod-liver oil, get sonsy, and rosy, and fat, and happy, and strong. Now, this is greatly because the cod-liver oil is capital food. If you can't afford to get cod-liver oil for delicate children, or if they reject it, give them plain olive oil, a tablespoonful twice a day, and take one to yourself, and you will be astonished how you will both of you thrive. ”

“ This, then, is the Doctor's first duty to you,—to cure you,—and for this he must, in the first place, be up to his business; he must know what to do, and, secondly, he must be able to do it; he must not merely do as a pointer dog does, stand and say, "There it is," and no more, he must point and shoot too. And let me tell you, moreover, that unless a man likes what he is at, and is in earnest, and sticks to it, he will no more make a good doctor than a good anything else. ”

“ Thirdly, and not more beautifully than truly, Let him reflect that he has undertaken the care of no mean creature, for, in order that we may estimate the value, the greatness of the human race, the only begotten Son of God became himself a man, and thus ennobled it with his divine dignity, and, far more than this, died to redeem it; and Fourthly, That the Doctor, being himself a mortal man, should be diligent and tender in relieving his suffering patients, inasmuch as he himself must one day be a like sufferer. ”

“ I need not say much about this, you all know it; and we all know what dreadful things happen when a man poisons his brain and makes it mad, and like a wild beast with drink; he may murder his wife, or his child, and when he comes to himself he knows nothing of how he did it, only the terrible thing is certain, that he did do it, and that he may be hanged for doing something when he was mad, and which he never dreamt of doing when in his senses: but then he knows that he made himself mad, and he must take all the wretched and tremendous consequences. ”

“ The great thing in regulating and benefiting human life, is not to find out new things, but to make the best of the old things,—to live according to Nature, and the will of Nature's God,—that great Being who bids us call him our Father, and who is at this very moment regarding each one of us with far more than any earthly father's compassion and kindness, and who would make us all happy if we would but do his bidding, and take his road. ”

“ Laboring men should eat well. They should, if possible, have meat—butcher-meat—ever day. Good broth is a capital dish. But, above all, keep whiskey out of your stomachs; it really plays the very devil when it gets in. It makes the brain mad, it burns the coats of the stomach; it turns the liver into a lump of rottenness; it softens and kills the heart; it makes a man an idiot and a brute. If you really need anything stronger than good meat, take a pot of wholesome porter or ale ”

“ So it is too often when that earthly house of ours—our cottage, our tabernacle—is getting on fire. One moment your finger would put out what in an hour all the waters of Clyde would be too late for. If the Doctor is needed, the sooner the better. If he is not, he can tell you so, and you can rejoice that he had a needless journey, and pay him all the more thankfully. So run early and at once. How many deaths—how many lives of suffering and incapacity—may be spared by being in time! by being a day or two sooner. ”

“ You have only to take your children to the Old or the New Town Dispensaries. It is a real crime, I think, in parents to neglect this. It is cruel to their child, and it is a crime to the public. If every child in the world were vaccinated, which might be managed in few years, that loathsome and deadly disease, the small-pox, would disappear from the face of the earth; but many people are so stupid, and so lazy, and so prejudiced, as to neglect this plain duty, till they find to their cost that it is too late. ”

“ We are forever getting our bills renewed, till down comes the poor and damaged concern with dropsy or consumption, blazing fever, madness, or palsy. There is a Western Banking system in living, in using our bodily organs, as well as in paper-money. But I am running off into another sermon.
Health of mind and body, next to a good conscience, is the best blessing our Maker can give us, and to no one is it more immediately valuable than to the laboring man and his wife and children; and indeed a good conscience is just moral health, the wholeness of the sense and the organ of duty ”

“ One word more; you should call your Doctor early. It saves time; it saves suffering; it saves trouble; it saves life. If you saw a fire beginning in your house, you would put it out as fast as you could. You might perhaps be able to blow out with your breath what in an hour the fire-engine could make nothing of. So it is with disease and the Doctor. A disease in the morning when beginning is like the fire beginning ”

“ Just as a farthing candle, twinkling out of a cotter's window, and, it may be, guiding the gudeman home to his wife and children, sends its rays out into the infinite expanse [30] of heaven, and thus returns, as it were, the light of the stars, which are many of them suns. You cannot pass any one on the street to whom you are not bound by this law. If he falls down, you help to raise him. You do your best to relieve him, and get him home; and let me tell you, to your great gain and honor, the poor are far more ready and better at this sort of work than the gentlemen and ladies. ”

“ His work is heavy, and his heart is often heavy, too, with misery of all kinds,—his heart weary with its burden,—his hands and limbs often meeting with accidents,—and you know if the poor man, if one of you falls ill and takes fever, or breaks his leg, it is a far more serious thing than with a richer man. Your health and strength are all you have to depend on; they are your stock-in-trade, your capital. Therefore I shall ask you to remember four things about your duty to the Doctor, so as to get the most good out of him, and do the most good to him too. ”

“ It is the most wonderful little pump in the world. There is no steam-engine half so clever at its work, or so strong. There it is in every one of us, beat, beating,—all day and all night, year [65] after year, never stopping, like a watch ticking; only it never needs to be wound up,—God winds it up once for all. ”

“ He has given us minds by which we may observe the laws he has ordained in our bodies, and which are as regular and as certain in their effects, and as discoverable by us as the motions of the sun, moon, and stars in the heavens; and we shall not only benefit ourselves and live longer and work better and be happier, by knowing and obeying these laws, from love to ourselves, but we shall please him, we shall glorify him, and make him our Friend,—only think of that! ”

“ You should keep your hair short if you are men; it saves you a great deal of trouble and dirt.
Then, the inside of your head,—you know what is inside your head,—your brain; you know how useful it is to you. The cleverest pair of hands among you would be of little use without brains: they would be like a body without a soul, a watch with the mainspring broken. Now, you should consider what is best for keeping the brain in good trim. One thing of great consequence is regular sleep, and plenty of it. ”