It was perhaps this negation in the
Doctor which made his neighbors call him hard-headed and dry-witted;
conditions of texture which were also held favorable to the storing
of judgments connected with drugs. At all events, it is certain
that if any medical man had come to Middlemarch with the reputation
of having very definite religious views, of being given to prayer,
and of otherwise showing an active piety, there would have been
a general presumption against his medical skill.
On this ground it was (professionally speaking) fortunate for
Dr. Minchin that his religious sympathies were of a general kind,
and such as gave a distant medical sanction to all serious sentiment,
whether of Church or Dissent, rather than any adhesion to
particular tenets. If Mr. Bulstrode insisted, as he was apt to do,
on the Lutheran doctrine of justification, as that by which a Church
must stand or fall, Dr. Minchin in return was quite sure that man
was not a mere machine or a fortuitous conjunction of atoms;
if Mrs. Wimple insisted on a particular providence in relation to her
stomach complaint, Dr. Minchin for his part liked to keep the mental
windows open and objected to fixed limits; if the Unitarian brewer
jested about the Athanasian Creed, Dr. Minchin quoted Pope's "Essay
on Man." He objected to the rather free style of anecdote in which
Dr.
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