Yet they knew very well that several of their best men were earnest, faithful Christian souls, who found high scholarship and the deepest devotion to their profession accord extremely well with the doctrines they professed. Still, the prevailing tone of the place, of students and of teachers alike, was not in accord with religious feeling. The school atmosphere was prejudicial to the cultivation of the Christian sentiment; and whatever godliness was taken in by the first-year's man had usually left him long before he left St. Bernard's; for there was a new goddess, whose culture was daily in the ascendant, and St. Bernard's was one of her sacred places. Here she was wont to be honoured, and the supreme God in the newer worship was forgotten. Her glory so far outshone His that the men never named Him, except in their expletives, nor was He in any of their thoughts. It was not held so much an error to believe in the God of the Bible and the Creator and Sustainer of the world, as an amiable weakness, a mark of defective education, a lay feebleness of mind, excellent in subscribers to and governors of hospitals, good also for patients as helping to teach them submission, not bad at all for sisters and nurses for a similar reason; but for medical men, the true high priests of science, utterly inconsistent with their training and their mental attitude, which was the demand for--facts! ever facts! and still more facts! Christianity in a medical man meant an imperfect medical man; one who had been arrested in his development,--a sort of _spina bifida_ case, or a microcephalic idiot; want of lime in the bones, defective iron and phosphorus; excellent condition for a subscriber, wofully defective in a user. For it was discovered that the completely developed, the men full of lime, iron, and phosphorus, the men of robust intellect and of the full standard, did not, as a rule, subscribe anything to anything, least of all to hospitals. Hospital contributors all went to church, and read their Bibles, and then wrote cheques Q.E.D.; whereas they, the persons for whose benefit chiefly all these cheques were signed, did neither, because they were above such weaknesses, as became Fellows of Royal Colleges and Bachelors of Science.