Tj Jesus did not treat slight ailments, only the most profound, obstinate, ghastly maladies. He did not concern Himself with simple aches and pains, but proved His Divine authority and efficacy in distinguishing leprosy, palsy, fever, blindness, and terrible psychic derangements. Numbers of reformers are prepared to deal with the superficial ailments of humanity — with its tooth- aches, sores, and scratches ; but only One dares attack the deep, stubborn, chronic diseases of our nature, the fundamental evils of the race. He alone is the grand physician of the world-lazaretto, the healer of the incurable, despairing of no man. Let me, then, seek in Him for the grace that shall root out the most malign morbid humours of the soul. The darkest and deadliest elements of evil He can rebuke and expel. " Lord, that I might be clean ! " x
II.
The Healing Touch.
11 And he stretched forth his hand, and touched him, saying, I will ; be thou made clean."
1. "Touch is the sense which love employs." It means the annihilation of distance between one who loves and that which
1 W. L. Watkinson.
2 I 2
THE LHPER
he loves, so that mere nearness is replaced by contact. Our sense of the significance of touch finds expression in such phrases as "getting into touch," or " living in touch," with people. They stand for sympathetic contact, the sympathy which seeks contact, and does not keep others "at arm's length." Children learn it in their mothers' laps, and are never content to be merely near those they love without actually touching them.
A very little thing was this touch, even as an indication of kindly purpose, but it was just the little thing that a sensitive sick man needed. It is, after all, little things that indicate either sympathy or antipathy. "I will buy with you," says Shylock, " sell with you, talk with you, walk with you, and so following ; but I will not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray with you." Had Jesus held aloof from the afflicted they never would have trusted Him. Nothing so pains a sick person as the sign of shrinking from him. Wear your gloves in any room you like, but not in the sick-room. Bend your ear to the trembling dying lips, and shun not to lay your hands on the diseased, if you are to do them any good, either as nurse or as spiritual adviser and Christian friend.
Tj We may be allowed to insert here a few words from an account sent to us of Dolling's influence with the rough youths of Landport by a lady (then Miss Nance, now Mrs. Cator) who managed a club for those fellows, under his sanction, when he was at S. Agatha's: "Mr. Dolling and S. Agatha's Mission was the only kind of religion that ever appealed to them, and I feel sure I could never have persuaded them to go and talk about their lives to anyone else. They said, ' Oh, he's different ; we don't mind him.' I could tell of miracles of healing under Mr. Dolling's touch. One young soldier said to me, ' He laid his hand on my head, and, I don't know why, I told him all I had ever done.' " x
2. It would have been quite possible for our Lord to heal this leper by a word alone. It would be quite possible for God Almighty to say to all the moral lepers of the world, " Be thou clean!" and the cure would be Divinely perfect. Why, then, does He not ? Just because the cure would be Divinely perfect. God wants it to be humanly perfect, and this can be effected only by a touch. Elijah in the desert may be fed by ravens or he may 1 C. E. Osborne, The J tiling, 269.
ST. MATTHEW vm. 2, 3 213
be fed by man's philanthropy. The physical effect will be the same, but not the moral effect. Elijah fed by the ravens is not a whit nearer to his kind than Elijah faint and hungry; but Elijah fed by human hands becomes himself more human. The greatest calamity of a leper was not his leprosy ; it was his divorce from his fellow-men. It was not his physical disease that divorced him ; it was the belief in his moral contagion. His greatest cry was for some one to touch him — to bridge the river of separation. It was easy to get the touch after he was healed. But the hard thing was to get contact before healing — to receive the touch before receiving the mandate, " Be thou clean ! " His fellow-men would not grant him that boon. Doubtless they prayed for his recovery, but they would not touch him un-recovered. God could have healed him in answer to their prayers, but He wanted to heal him in answer to their contact.
Tj Social reformers are discovering that they can do little good for people of any sort while they hold them at arm's length. " I have learned," says a worker in one of the University settlements, " that you can get access to the people who need you only by living with them. They will not come to you; but Jew and Gentile will make you welcome if you come to them. Our meetings for their benefit are a failure. Our personal intercourse with them, man to man, has been promising great good. It is of no use to come once or twice to see them ; you must live with them if you are to do anything for them." x