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stoutest quail. To-day we take for granted the silence of the operating-room, but to reach this Elysium we had to travel the slow road of laborious research, which gave us first the chemical agents, and then brave hearts had to risk reputation, and even life itself, in experiments, the issue of which was for long doubtful. More widespread in its benediction, as embracing all races and all classes of society, is the relief of suffering, and the prevention of disease through the growth of modern sanitary science in which has been fought out the greatest victory in history. ... It is not simply that the prospect of recovery is enormously enhanced, but Listerian surgery has diminished suffering to an extraordinary degree. . . . Man's redemption of man is nowhere so well known as in the abolition and prevention of the group of diseases which we speak of as the fevers, or the acute infections. This is the glory of the science of medicine, and nowhere in the world have its lessons been so thoroughly carried out as in this country. . . . If, in the memorable phrase of the Greek philosopher Prodicus, " That which benefits human life is God," we may see in this new gospel a link betwixt us and the crowning race of those who eye to eye shall look on knowledge, and in whose hand nature shall be an open book.1
II.
Christ the Healer of the Soul.
But, after all, our Lord's supreme purpose was to be a healer of souls. Had the critics of Jesus but accredited Him with the character of a Healer of spiritual maladies, they would not have been scandalized by His habit of associating with the morally and socially degraded. But that Jesus was a physician was just the thing that never occurred to their minds. And why ? Because their own thoughts and ways went in a wholly different direction, and they judged Him by themselves. The Rabbis and their disciples were students of the law, and their feeling towards such as knew not the law was one of simple aversion and contempt. They expected Jesus to share this feeling. Men are ever apt to make themselves the standard of moral judgment. The Kabbi expects all who assume the function of a teacher to share his contempt for the multitude ignorant of legal technicalities and niceties ; the " philosophe," confining his sympathies to the culti-
1 Sir W. Osier, Man's Redemption of Man, 81.
23o THE PHYSICIAN
vated few, regards with mild disdain the interest taken by philan- thropists in popular movements ; the " niystagogue " who invites select persons to initiation into religious mysteries adopts for himself, and expects all others belonging to the spiritual aristo- cracy of mankind to adopt along with him, the sentiment of the Eoman poet : " I hate and abhor the profane rabble." The mass of mankind have eternal reason for thankfulness that Jesus Christ came not as a Eabbi, or as a " philosophe," or as a " hierophant," with the proud, narrow contempt characteristic of men bearing these titles, but as a healer of souls, with the broad, warm sympathies and the enthusiasm of humanity congenial to such a vocation. The fact exposed Him to the censure of contempor- aries, but by way of compensation it has earned for Him the gratitude of all after ages.
T[ Thou speakest of thy sin and miseries, which do indeed make a barrier between God and us : but, if I know Jesus ever so little, I think, when I read or hear such complaints, of practised physicians, when they are confronted with a common disease: they are not unprovided, they have medicines for it that never fail. So say I now: Jesus knows plenty of means of healing, show Him all thy wounds with a weeping heart, ask in humility and confidence for His mighty healing, and that He may heal thee thoroughly; but this may not happen unless He, for a while, increases thy wounds by a deep sense of thy sin, misery, and darkness, which indeed is means in love that thou hereafter, yea, for ever, mayest feel no further need.1
1. That Christ came into the world as a healer of souls is a fact full of didactic meaning. It means, first, that Christianity is before all things a religion of redemption. Its proper vocation is to find the lost, to lift the low, to teach the ignorant, to set free those in bonds, to wash the unclean, to heal the sick ; and it must go where it can discover the proper subjects of its art, remembering that the whole need not a physician, but they that are sick.
(1) There is in the natural heart of man an indifferent selfish- ness and a careless cruelty which make men always let the weak go to the wall, and very often trample savagely on the fallen. They are akin in this to the creatures of the field ; to the hounds that bite their wounded brother in the kennel ; to the sea-gulls
1 Gerhardt Tersteegen.
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that swoop down on the wounded bird as the wave is already beginning to be crimsoned with its blood. Among savage tribes the sick and the injured were killed or left to die. In polished Greece and Imperial Rome children were exposed and slaves were mercilessly tortured. Christ taught the world that this apathy of heart is earthly, sensual, devilish. He taught us once and for ever the sacredness, not of fine gifts and fair and brilliant intellects, but of man as man. It was not for the sake of the rich, the strong, the mighty, the noble, that He took our nature upon Him, but for poor men, for slaves, for carpenters, for tax- gatherers, for fishermen, for daily labourers, for peasant women, nay, even more, for the sake of the sinful, the outcast, the fallen, for all at whom men, who are in most respects the causes of their ruin, point the finger of cruel scorn. He saw the soul of beauty in things ugly, and the potentiality of goodness in things evil.