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reference to physicians in general, men who embodied such skill and knowledge as were then possible. Luke is called " the be- loved physician," and no doubt there were many beloved for their own sakes and honoured for their work's sake. But of exact science there was, of course, little or none, and every chance for quackery, for empiricism, for superstition. That is a terribly suggestive phrase in the story of the woman who touched the hem of Christ's garment : she " had suffered many things of many physicians, and had spent all that she had, and was nothing bettered, but rather grew worse." So is the proverb quoted by our Lord : " Physician, heal thyself." So also is another ancient Jewish proverb: "Even the best of doctors deserves Gehenna." And all who have seen anything of native medicine among primitive tribes know how often the cure is truly worse than the disease. It was into all that chaos and crudity that the Son of Man came with Divine power flowing from Him. Surely there never was a more beautiful story more exquisitely told ! The main incidents are written on all our hearts. Yet perhaps we do not estimate largely enough the amount of His work in this direction, nor the physical and nervous strain it caused Himself as virtue went forth from Him in His manifold acts of healing. " Whithersoever he entered, into villages, or city, or country, they laid the sick in the streets, and besought him that they might touch if it were but the border of his garment : and as many as touched him were made whole." *
T| Christ's healing of the sick can in no way be termed against nature, seeing that the sickness which was healed was against the nature of man, that it is sickness which is abnormal, and not health. The healing is the restoration of the primitive order. We should see in the miracle not the infraction of a law, but the neutralizing of a lower law, the suspension of it for a time by a higher. Of this abundant analogous examples are evermore going forward before our eyes. Continually we behold in the world around us lower laws held in restraint by higher, mechanic by dynamic, chemical by vital, physical by moral ; yet we do not say, when the lower thus gives place in favour of the higher, that there was any violation of law, or that anything contrary to nature came to pass ; rather we acknowledge" the law of a greater free- dom swallowing up the law of a lesser.2
2. Now, this ministry of physical healing was in itself a revelation. De Quincey says that Jesus adopted this line of
1 J. M. E. KosSj The Self-Portraiture of Jesus, 8. s Archbishop Trench, Notes on the Miracles, 16.
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action " chiefly as the best means of advertising His approach far and wide, and thus convoking the people to His instructions." But there was more in it than that, a whole world more, then and now ! It is the Divine justification of all attempts to alleviate the external and physical conditions of human life. It is the Divine justification of medical missions, which have the unique glory of being not only Christ's own work, but His own work done in His own way. It is a rebuke to the unreal and affected way in which we sometimes speak of physical pain as though it were nothing at all. Had pain and sickness not been great realities, Christ would not have spent so much time and strength in fight- ing against them. He stands for ever now in the sight of men as the goal towards which humanity is travelling. And His ministry of physical healing is a proof that pain and sickness are temporary and abnormal things : in God's good time there shall be no more pain because " the former things are passed away."
Tj Within the lifetime of some of us a strange and wonderful thing happened on the earth — something of which no prophet foretold, of which no seer dreamt, nor is it among the beatitudes of Christ Himself ; only St. John seems to have had an inkling of it in that splendid chapter in which he describes the new heaven and the new earth, when the former things should pass away, when all tears should be wiped away, and there should be no more crying nor sorrow. On October 16, 1846, in the amphi- theatre of the Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, a new Prometheus gave a gift [sulphuric ether as an anaesthetic] as rich as that of fire, the greatest single gift ever made to suffering humanity. The prophecy was fulfilled — neither shall there be any more pain ; a mystery of the ages had been solved by a daring experiment by man on man in the introduction of anaesthesia. As Weir Mitchell sings in his poem, The Death of Pain —
Whatever triumphs still shall hold the mind, Whatever gifts shall yet enrich mankind, Ah ! here, no hour shall strike through all the years, No hour so sweet as when hope, doubt and feavs, 'Mid deepening silence watched one eager brain With Godlike will decree the Death of Pain.
At a stroke the curse of Eve was removed, that multiplied sorrow of sorrows, representing in all ages the very apotheosis of pain. The knife has been robbed of its terrors, and the hospitals are no longer the scenes of those appalling tragedies that made the