are sick, to seek unto the Lord as well as to their physician — nay, to seek unto the Lord rather than to their physician — with a promise that the Lord will attend to their cry. If any is sick among you, we read, let him call for the elders of the church and let them pray for him, rubbing him with his oil in the name of the Lord, and the prayer of faith shall save him that is sick. Where is there promise of miracle in that?25
What James requires of us is merely that we shall be Christians in our sickness as in our health, and that our dependence then, too, shall be on the Lord. It is just the truly Christian attitude that he exhorts us to, precisely as Prebendary Reynolds describes it. "We avail our- selves," says he,26 "of all that science knows, and thank God for it. The resources of civilization are ours, and we use them to the utmost. We labour in wise and kindly nursing, and thankfully call in the medical skill which the devout and learned and experienced physician and surgeon have at command. It is God, however, the real physician, who gives the chief medicine; who makes drugs, opera- tions, kindness, nursing to have true healing power; who takes away sin, sickness, death, giving righteousness, heal- ing, eternal life." Do you say this is a purely clerical view? It is the physician's view also, if the physician happens to be a Christian. "I dressed the wound and God healed it," wrote Ambroise Pare, the great Huguenot physician — the father of modern surgery — on the walls of the Ecole de Medecine at Paris.27 Let me read you, however, more at large how a more modern Christian physician puts it. "In the healing of every disease of whatever kind," writes Doctor Henry E. Goddard,28 "we cannot be too deeply impressed with the Lord's part of the work. He is the operator. We are the co-operators. More and more am I impressed that every patient of mine who has ever risen up from his sick bed onto his feet again has done so by the divine power. Not I, but the Lord, has
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cured him. And it is this fact that the Lord does so much, that gives to different systems of healing their apparent cures. He has healed many a one in spite of medicine, in spite of mental healers, in spite of ignorance, in spite of negligence and poor and scanty food. [Nineteen out of twenty cases of grippe will get well without doing anything for it, if we are willing to bear it until that time. Pneu- monia, even, is what the physician calls a self-limiting disease, and many cases will recover alone if we are will- ing to run our chances with it. The arm may drop into boiling water and become scalded. Nine times out of ten it will take care of itself and heal. But if that arm is mine it is going to have an outward application which will make it feel better the moment it touches it. And more im- portant by far, it is going to be dressed aseptically to pre- vent blood poisoning. It might get well itself, probably would; but it is going to have my little co-operation, the most intelligent that I can render, that the Lord may have the open door through which He can come in and bless it." It is the very spirit of James, I take it, that speaks in this Christian physician. If you are sick, you will use means, all the means that exist; but you will use the means in the name of the Lord, and to Him you will look for the issue. The scattered passages of Scripture which are appealed to here and there by Faith-Healers to buttress the chief proof texts need not delay us more than a moment. The examples of miraculous cures adduced from the Bible, are, of course, irrelevant. No one of the parties to this dis- cussion doubts that they were truly miraculous. The question at issue is, whether such miraculous works may still be performed, now that the period of revelation has gone by. The appeal to the enumeration of gifts in the twelfth chapter of I Corinthians is equally irrelevant, since the question at issue is precisely whether they are ordinary gifts continued in the church, or extraordinary gifts con- nected (according to the eighth chapter of Acts) directly
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with the Apostles. John 14 : 12 is worthy of more atten- tion. The Faith-Healers do not even profess, however, to do the great works which Christ did — His miracles on nature, His raising of the dead — and much less can they point to their healings as greater works than these.29 No miracles, in the strict sense of the word, greater than those which Christ did, have been done by any of His followers. But in and through His followers He has, in fulfilment of this promise, manifested the power of the Holy Spirit, foreshadowed and begun at Pentecost, beyond anything witnessed in His lifetime; and He is thus conquering the world to Himself through the "greater works" of His dis- ciples. That He refers here to these spiritual works is generally agreed.30