gracious saving efforts, which are designed to lessen the miseries of earth, to mitigate the pains and sufferings of men, to assuage the griefs of wretched humanity, and, at the same time, to increase the sum of human happiness, and to give comfort, well-being, and satisfaction to our fellow-creatures. Such words, from Scripture, warrant, too, our joy in an occasion of this kind, and justify a proper pride and satisfaction on the part of the projector of, and the co-workers in, this labor of love. Every consideration suggests these happy feelings, and prompts such pleasurable emotions. There is no jar here, to-day, of selfish pride, or dissonance of injurious and boisterous passions. We are not a crew of base malignants; nor are we the agents of dark disaster to our fellow-men.
We have met with no sinister purposes before us; nor do we aim at objects that are to bring woe and anguish to any portion of our kind. On the contrary, every thing here designed, contemplated and expected in this undertaking, is for good and blessedness. We would lessen pain. We would end suffering. We wish to neutralize bodily anguish; to arrest the deadly progress of disease =; to mitigate inevitable decay, and, where the grave lies surely before him, and death is certain, to pave the way of the sufferer to the tomb, with as much of quiet, comfort, and ease, as skill and benevolence can possibly effect.
Nor are the aims here contemplated, those only which are bodily or medicinal. The body is but the machinery and instrument of the immaterial essence which inhabits it; and while, indeed, desirous, both
