OUR LORD’S ATTITUDE TOWARDS SICKNESS
By W. Yorke Fausset, M.A.
(1) Men are commonly influenced by actions and personal example much more powerfully than by abstract teaching; and the Christian tradition conforms to this principle in placing the three Synoptic Gospels in the forefront of the New Testament. For they set before us the mind of Christ in the words and acts of Jesus. Thus when the thoughtful Christian is asked, ‘What is the Gospel view of disease?’ he will be inclined to reply, ‘The question is a difficult one, but we may say with some confidence that our Lord answered it by His miracles of healing.’ A study of these and of their underlying principles may help us towards the definition we seek.
The records are fragmentary. Yet they are warm with living realism. The great facts of our Faith stand out before us in the moving drama of the Synoptic Gospels,[14] just as truly as they are interpreted for us in the spiritual Gospel, the Fourth. Jesus Christ is portrayed as the Son of Man: and whatever else that most significant title denotes, it speaks to us of His human activity, His practical and energetic sympathy with the sins and sorrows of men. And this activity found its exercise in two directions: teaching and healing. The association of the two things is noteworthy, as indicating a great principle. The sins of mankind are not unconnected with their sicknesses; spiritual restoration with bodily relief. A calm of soul may bring rest to the body. He who fulfilled in His earthly ministry the prophetic office was also a ‘Physician of extraordinary achievement.’[15] To render Professor Bousset’s words, though we cannot reproduce their eloquence:
‘How the simple populace must have hailed this Deliverer in every time of need! With what unspeakable confidence they must have thronged him! At his coming, despair lifted its head, dull eyes glistened, weary hands and arms reached forth towards him. They trusted him for everything, all things became possible. Body and soul with all their needs they brought to him for healing. The cries of need and anguish, the confidence which knew no limitations, the craving for help, the faltering prayer, the shouts or sobs of joy, the tears of gratitude—daily he moved in the midst of it all.’
Are we then to conclude that our Lord attached no less importance to the cure of bodily ailment than to the spiritual redemption of men? Much has been written of late years which might seem to imply this. But the whole trend of Christ’s teaching forbids us to emphasise the value of physical well-being at the expense of the master claims of the spirit: witness His words in the Sermon on the Mount about taking thought for the life or the body.[16] And therefore we must avoid mere rhetoric and special pleading.
(i) It is plain, at the outset, that our Lord set certain limits to the exercise of His healing activity. What has often been said of miracles in general[17] may be said of the miracles of healing. There is a severe economy in the exercise of such supernatural, or extranatural, powers. This is illustrated by our Lord’s apparent reluctance to work miracles when it is not certain that a true faith asks for it.[18] In other words, the receptivity of men is necessary to the Divine transaction with the sufferer.
Again, He is slow to exercise His power outside the boundaries of Israel, within which He was pleased to confine His work of preaching and healing. Possibly He knew that there He would be welcomed as a mere wonder-working magician. He makes it a condition of His action that the atmosphere should be one of real faith.[19] He could there do no mighty works because of their unbelief.[20] Was it because of the waning faith of the multitudes that, towards the end of His work on earth, the Healing Ministry almost ceases?[21] Whether on this account, or in the desire to escape the demonstrations of popular interest which the miracles evoked, or because the full evidential effect of these ‘signs’ was now almost attained, He restricts His healing, life-giving power to some four cases, one of them the raising of Lazarus. For each and all a special reason can be found.[22]
(ii) Christ’s healing activity was therefore strictly limited in scope. It may be asked, Was it a ‘unique manifestation of a unique Personality’[23] or did it differ in degree rather than in kind from the wonderful works of human healers, or, at all events, of healers who have wrought ‘in the name of Jesus Christ’? The latter view by no means commits its advocates to a ‘humanitarian’ view of the Person of Jesus Christ: while it amply satisfies the facts. Again, it is not necessary, for the purpose of the present discussion, to digress into the field of New Testament criticism. Renan, in his ‘Vie de Jésus,’ feels himself constrained to apologise for the miraculous action of Christ, on the ground that ‘the rôle of thaumaturge was unwelcome to him, but was imposed upon him by his contemporaries.’[24] To Loisy, a critic of profounder learning and far more reverent temper, it appears that the miracles were in reality ‘works of mercy . . . and not a direct argument in favour of the Messiahship of the Saviour,’ a complexion which was afterwards put upon them more or less unconsciously by the Evangelists.[25] But it is quite consistent with a reverent acknowledgment of the Divinity of our Lord, and an acceptance of the Gospel records in substance as they stand, to hold that the miracles of healing—with the nature-miracles we are not here concerned—were the simple outcome of that all-embracing human pity which, in itself, betokened the expected Messiah; rather than an immediate exercise of Almighty power, and the utterance, within the physical order, of the Eternal Word. We find our Lord proclaiming Himself, in the synagogue of Nazareth, the Fulfiller of that great prophecy of Isaiah in his sixty-first chapter, in which the Messianic mission is set forth in language in which a spiritual and a physical deliverance are inseparably intertwined.[26] Similarly, in answer to the Baptist’s message, the same blending of evangelical teaching and spiritual healing is to be noticed; and, once again, sin and disease stand out as the dominant factors in the condition of this present world.
(iii) But if the source of the miracles is thus to be sought in the Sacred Humanity, that Humanity is, after all, the perfect ideal and norm of all humanity. Whatever exceptional powers of genius, whatever special faculties and latent gifts of mind and will have appeared at rare intervals among men, these we should expect to find exemplified, one and all, in the Life of Christ, had that Life come down to us in a complete form. Now, it cannot be questioned that in every age a few individuals have been found, who were endowed with a preternatural therapeutic power, connected generally with a very subtle power of sympathy, but, in some instances, if we may believe what we are told, inherent in a person who had no wish whatever to exercise it.[27] That some such virtue resided in Christ, and accounts for some part of His healing work, need not be questioned. The records may be said to imply it in two passages,[28] that which relates to the act of the woman who touched the hem of His garment in the crowd, and that which speaks of this method of cure as ofttimes repeated. They besought Him that they might touch if it were but the border of his garment—and as many as touched were made whole.
It is possible, no doubt, to account for such cures on a purely naturalistic hypothesis, such as that which Keim[29] accepts, viz. that they were cases of faith-healing; a phenomenon which recurs in connexion with nearly every form of religious belief, and in every stage of social development. The influence of the spiritual imagination on the bodily state is undeniable. Everyone knows something about the phenomena of Lourdes and Bethshan, healing resorts which, theologically speaking, lie at opposite poles. In a cruder form the same effects are found in connexion with holy wells and relics of the saints.[30] We may go back to the ancients and find wonderful cures reported in the pagan world, from the shrines of Asclepius (the patron deity of physicians). A blind man touches the altar of Aesculapides (as he was called at Rome) on the island of the Tiber and receives his sight.[31] The Emperors Hadrian and Vespasian used to touch for the ‘King’s evil.’[32]
But can anyone study the miracles of our Lord as a whole (for we must not lose sight of those wrought upon inanimate nature) and feel that they are sufficiently explained by a familiar truth in psychology, viz. that the religious imagination is able to stimulate the bodily forces, whatever may be the spiritual soil in which that imagination is bred? Faith, or a conscious receptivity in the mind of the patient, was a frequent factor in the healing process; although there is really nothing in the records to make us predicate it of Jairus’s daughter or the centurion’s slave or the nobleman’s son. It is surely remarkable that our Lord held Himself aloof from all those methods of cure which might have suggested the enchanter and magician, particularly in the case of demoniacs. The Jews, like other ancient nations, resorted to the use of exorcism, incantation, and talismans, which owed their potency to their effect on the imagination. Christ does not hypnotise men or throw them into an ecstasy. Where faith is present, He gladly works through it towards the salvation of the whole man. But often there is a mere flicker of faith, a spark in the flax. In the sick room, when the vital forces are enfeebled, the brain clouded, and the spirits depressed by physical malady, it is a rare thing, surely, for the flame of faith to burn brightly and the imagination to glow with the consciousness of an unseen Presence. And the Church would have but little encouragement to invoke for her own ministries the healing Power of her Master, if it could only be enlisted on behalf of such patients as already possessed ‘comfort and sure confidence in their Lord.’ We believe that the Church has something less elusive to offer her people in their hour of need: and we return to the records of Christ’s miracles in order to discover it.
(iv) The value of what is called ‘mental therapeutics’ is no longer contested; it receives, and has received for some time, the careful attention of the medical profession.[33] We approach the subject from the religious standpoint, we base our study of it upon the teaching and practice of Jesus Christ. Accordingly, we must discriminate between psychic treatment and spiritual treatment. The former term, if applicable to religious treatment, can also denote forms of mental cure which are unconnected with religion, e.g. the use of hypnotism. But Christ addresses Himself to the Spirit (πνευμα), that highest element of our nature, through which the mystics hold that we have kinship with God, and in unison with which the Holy Spirit attests our Divine sonship. His miracles are works of spiritual healing, they are wrought for the whole man, not only for soul, and certainly not only for body. Christ’s view of healing is relative to His view of disease, His view of disease to His view of human nature. Had he attached to bodily health the supreme importance which it is the tendency of our day to assign to it, and regarded bodily pain as a thing at all costs to be effaced, we must suppose that His whole Life upon earth would have been devoted to the relief of sickness and pain, and that the ‘Healing Ministry’ of His Church would have been far more clearly defined. But no more does He abolish disease than He abolishes pauperism. The tendency of His teaching is to inculcate self-sufficingness (the αὐταρκεία, of St. Paul[34] and the Greek philosophers) in the face of all temporary evils and ailments, the conquest of things material by the spirit, its supremacy in the hierarchy of human nature; in a word, the principle of inner control or autonomy, as the birthright of the human spirit. In his great picture of the Transfiguration, Raphael has caught this contrast between the calm of the heavenly Mount above and the ineffective, agonised distraction of suffering humanity here below, in the person of the lunatic boy and his father. But that heavenly calm of spirit is not the self-centred aloofness of the Stoic. The doctrine of the Incarnation brings the Divine Saviour down to men, lifts man up to the peace of heaven,[35] and at the same time bids him find that peace in fulfilling the bodily duties of his corporate Church life. It will not admit of a selfish quietism. But before this peace of God which Christ proclaims, the worry and ‘fear-thought’ of our overstrung modern age, its neurotic sensationalism and morbid self-analysis, would retire abashed. Christ would teach us that human nature is itself only when it is itself in its completeness, when the physical is truly the instrument of the spiritual. There is no dualism, no schism in human nature as Divinely planned. The voluptuary and the ascetic are both at fault, the former more so because he sins against the higher self. Christ is the Saviour of the whole man, and to the sick He restores ‘perfect soundness,’[36] nor does He refuse to be called the Saviour of the body.[37]
(v) It is a significant fact that in the Gospels the word for ‘save’ (σῴζειν) is applied to bodily as well as spiritual salvation; it denotes ‘to restore to health or sanity.’[38] A protest may here be entered against the very prevalent opinion that God sent sickness upon man, by an Almighty fiat, in order to discipline him into patience and other Christian virtues. Such a view, crudely stated, has led to much perplexity and distress of faith, and it is not warranted by the teaching of the New Testament. God can bring good out of evil, even in its worst forms. But that is not to say that God by a deliberate act designs and causes evil. More than once in the New Testament sickness is attributed to Satanic agency, in the case of ‘the woman which had a spirit of infirmity eighteen years,’[39] and in that of St. Paul’s ‘thorn in the flesh.’[40] Disease is a disturbance of the balance of human powers, mental and bodily, a derangement of faculties and functions. Consider the bearing of this upon life. Modern science teaches us the doctrine of the persistence of matter; in Sir Oliver Lodge’s words, ‘a really existing thing never perishes, but only changes its form’—in the case of our complex human constitution, that change of form is what we call death. It is vital force which maintains that inner harmony which we call health: it is disease, an accident, which impairs it. This derangement and discord is but one instance of that general disturbance of the world’s harmony which sin has introduced. Sometimes, as in the case of the impotent man of St. John v., disease is the direct consequence of sinful conduct. It is the work of the Son of Man to restore harmony and repair the breaches in Nature’s order. And this His healing power on its spiritual, which is its essential, side effects. Incidentally, miracles are ‘signs,’ evidences of the Christian Revelation, but their primary character is that of ‘mighty works’ (δυνάμεις), particular manifestations of that Power (δύναμις) which resides in the Person of the Lord. As such they impressed King Herod, though he attributed their authorship to the Baptist risen from the dead.[41]
(vi) This Healing Power of Christ stands in closest relation to His claim to be ‘the Life of them that believe and the Resurrection from the dead.’ It flows from His Personality. Though that Personality is veiled for us in profound mystery, we know that in It the Human will and the Divine will are in perfect accord; and, therefore, it does not surprise us that, while a place is found in the Saviour’s Life upon earth for weariness and pain, none is found for sickness; for, in all things, He conformed to the Will of God for man, which is health, not sickness. Sickness is a violation of that normal condition which God has appointed for man. When infection and disease entered into the world, we must believe that they were part of that general imperfection which God can only be said to will as a means to an end, or as a passing stage in the evolution of good. God does not send sickness to scourge us, but overrules it to purge us. In saying this, we need not deny the possible place of death in a perfect cosmos; a death which should have been the gradual ebbing of physical vitality, not its sapping and undermining by the malignant forces of disease. We should expect, then, that our Lord’s healing power would be the action of the life-giving Spirit of God upon the spirit of man, from the very fact that in Christ man was brought into living contact with God.
Recent psychology, especially in the investigations of Professor W. James and the late F. W. H. Myers, has thrown a new light upon those recesses of human nature in which our religious experiences take place. We have learned that there is a subconscious self, a submerged portion of our faculties, which responds to spiritual impressions and accepts those suggestions of a Higher Power, to which mind and intellect are sometimes deaf, a ‘subliminal self,’[42] in which religious faith and the inspirations of genius are alike rooted, and which is en rapport with another world than that of the senses. We are reminded of Tennyson’s words:
Moreover, something is or seems,
That touches me with mystic gleams,
Like glimpses of forgotten dreams—
Of something felt, like something here;
Of something done, I know not where.[43]
It is through that under-self that mental cures appear to operate.[44]
The theory certainly contributes something to our problem, making it conceivable, even to our finite intelligence, how the Divine Life of Christ should enter into man, sick of body and sad of soul, and this quite in the line of the order and natural law of God’s universe. Christ is one with the Father; He came down from Heaven to do the will of the Father; His works are done in the Father’s name (John x. 25). The Father hath given the Son to have life in Himself (John v. 26). The Divine Life is communicated to those who seek it in Christ. We are not to restrict the thought of that Life to the immaterial part of our nature; it is the more abundant life which floods the being of him who ‘liveth unto God.’[45] We may not fathom its hidden processes: like spiritual teaching, spiritual healing can come home only to the ‘spiritual men’ whose minds are ‘in tune with the Infinite.’[46] But some desire for ‘more life and fuller’ is found in every man. Classical scholars will remember the pathetic lines written by the statesman Mæcenas in his last illness:
Debilem facito manu,
Debilem pede, coxa . . .
Vita dum superest, bene est.[47]
In this universal fact of human nature, this desire to live, which varies infinitely among men from the mere craving of animal existence up to the desire for the life in God, we see man’s response to the Giver of Life.
The appeal of the Good Physician is to human nature, and ‘He knows what is in man.’ He takes a natural emotion or faculty, vitalises and invigorates it. We have had to keep the connexion of spiritual health and physical health constantly before us. There is a parallelism between them which is no mere analogy, but is a sort of pre-established harmony; and therefore a wise interpretation of Scripture has seen in the Miracle an ‘acted parable.’ Thus it is in regard to the ‘desire to live’ which supports our bodily vitality. This categorical imperative or instinctive ‘ought’ of health is a primary instinct. The ‘will to be well’ corresponds with the ‘will to be good’ which is the basis of the moral life.
(2) Bearing these principles in mind, we must turn to a closer examination of some of the miracles, with a view to some practical conclusions in regard to the healing office of the Church of our own day.
(i) Has the age of miracles long ceased? It has long been assumed by religious minds, as a kind of axiomatic truth, that this is so. They have seen in the healing miracles of Christ the unique exercise of a power specifically Divine, a power which was continued for a time, with other extraordinary gifts, to the early Church for reasons which no longer held good when once she had taken firm root in the world. But we have already shown reasons for the opinion that, unique as is our Lord’s Humanity, we are to regard it as conditioned by those laws of nature and material existence which are the expression in the visible sphere of the Creative will. ‘It behoved Him in all things to be made like unto His brethren.’[48] And there is strong reason to hold that the true believer will be permitted, in virtue of his fellowship with Christ, to do ‘greater works’ than those which Christ Himself wrought,[49] greater, that is to say, not in a material but a spiritual way. That the works in question were wrought ‘in the spirit’ is unquestioned. Consider what those ‘spiritual’ methods of the Great Healer were. He wrought His mighty works in the Father’s name. Not only does He lay down for others the principle of intercessory prayer, but as Man He exercises it Himself. Of the demoniac boy He says: ‘This kind goeth forth not but by prayer and fasting.’ St. Luke records the fact that He made the importunity of the multitude, who sought His teaching and healing grace, a fresh occasion for retirement and prayer.[50] The same Gospel tells us of a night spent in prayer before the election of the Twelve Apostles.[51] They received His commission to heal and to teach on the succeeding day, which saw also the vast concourse of people resorting to Him once more from all quarters. In the account of the raising of Lazarus it is clearly laid down that Jesus Christ knew the Father’s will in virtue of fellowship with Him in prayer and meditation, and that He exercised His own life-giving powers in accordance with that Will.
Health in itself is an ideal, the perfect harmony of all the elements, the spiritual and the material, which constitutes a man. One of the greatest living authorities writes: ‘Health, like every other such name, is to be used in a relative sense; absolute health is an ideal conception.’[52] This being so, it is apparent to any religious mind that the true concept of the well-being, physical and even mental, of any person is only to be found in the Mind of God. And that is only an abstract way of saying that, if we follow Christ’s example, we shall seek to enter into His fellowship with the Father. In that Divine fellowship we shall be able to pray for the true health and recovery of our sick people. ‘The prayer of faith shall save the sick,’ for faith implies a whole-hearted acceptance of the Will of God for the uncertain future. This gives a man the tranquillity of soul which is no less needed for prayer than for action. Such an one possesses his own soul. Our Lord promises to those, who ‘have faith and doubt not,’[53] that they shall ‘remove mountains,’ a hyperbolic expression, but yet one which seems to claim a certain power of acting upon inanimate nature.[54] Such a power need not carry with it a positive breach of cosmic law. It is impossible for any really reverent mind to wish, even in the supposed interest of his dearest friend, to bend the Will of God to his own desire. Such a rash prayer involves the fatal flaw of that ‘doubting mind’ which is forbidden us, the mind ‘divided’ between God and self. The spirit which unites us to God, that unfathomed inner self, desires the universal good.
Our wills are ours, we know not how:
Our wills are ours, to make them Thine.
God wills the true health and salvation of each human soul, as He alone can view it, in its relation both to the vast whole of immaterial being and to the order of the material universe. ‘His will He knoweth which way to accomplish.’ Prayer is the act of resignation of our individual desires and thoughts into His all-wise hands. Prayer universalises a personal longing; and so wonderful is the magic of true prayer, fetching up from the deep of our being suggestions, inspirations, forces unperceived by man, that it can never fail to induce a sense of calm, the most favourable for a physical recovery; and many a time it has effectuated that recovery itself. Science may teach the ‘reflex action of prayer’; religion will always find authentic answers to prayer.
Prayer is the spiritual instrument on which our Lord in His Human Nature relies, and on which He encourages His Church to rely—‘a mighty engine of achievement.’[55] His method was grounded in prayer, the prayer of that Divine fellowship, which is His, as it cannot belong to any of the sons of men, and yet in Him, ‘in the Name of Christ,’ the Church must still expect to accomplish the miracles of faith, in proportion to the degree of her own spirituality. Who, indeed, would have looked for miracles of healing in the English Church of the eighteenth century, unless it were among the non-jurors, who actually revived the apostolic rite of unction,[56] and the pious followers of John Wesley?[57]
(ii) But that spiritual power, thus resident in the Healer, has to communicate itself to the subjects of His grace; subjects they must be rather than objects. And His first purpose is to excite the dormant energies of life and action. He does it as a wise physician will do it, by concentrating the patient’s mind upon Himself.[58] This is done by a question, or other means, adapted, with His profound insight into character, to the individual case. In the case of the deaf man who had an impediment, He effected this by isolating him,[59] and then using physical means (with finger and saliva). Exactly parallel is the case of the blind man, which, like the former, is recorded by St. Mark alone.[60] He asks blind Bartimæus, ‘What wilt thou that I should do unto thee?’[61] And this is one of several cases in which the sovereign faculty of will leaps forth, and the confession of faith attends it.[62] In the cure of the lame man by St. Peter (in Acts iii. 4, 5) this concentration of the thought of the patient upon the healer is reciprocal (ἀτενίσας . . . ἐπει̑χεν).
The tonic influence of a healthy personality upon the hysterical, neurotic, and mentally diseased, not to speak of minds depressed in a normal way, is familiar to everyone. In Dinah Morris’s visit of comfort to the widowed Lisbeth, we have a sample of that subtlest perception and ‘subduing influence of the spirit’ which we may call inspiration.[63] In the New Testament it appears at its highest in treatment of those strong cases of dual personality, mental disorder, or hysteria, which we know as demoniacal possession. We cannot here discuss the question, whether the sufferer was the victim of the lower elements in his own nature or of a malignant outside influence (known in the language of the day as a ‘demon’). On the other hand, it has to be remembered that the Jews personified ordinary diseases; and our Lord conformed to popular ideas when ‘He rebuked the fever’ of Simon’s wife’s mother, unless we hold that the evangelist has coloured the record of His action by his own mentality.[64] On the other hand, we know little as yet of the psychological problems of civilised humanity and less of those of half-civilised or uncivilised peoples, such as the Galileans of our Lord’s day. But if we should allow that the demon was merely the sufferer’s lower ego, the marvel of the cure is not lessened. There is a great power of evil in the world; and the lower self was entirely dominated by it until Christ emancipated the man by His sovereign demand upon his spirit. Inner harmony was restored. They find the man ‘sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind.’ The bodily and the mental well-being are combined in the cure. The sufferer’s enfeebled will is braced up to respond to the Will of the Healer, that ease shall expel disease. Within the man’s being, as truly as without it, ‘imperavit ventis, et facta est tranquillitas magna.’[65]
(iii) An analysis of the miracles of Christ indicates His attitude towards the material and outward means, on which the physician still so largely relies. The letter of King Abgarus to our Lord (preserved by Eusebius), genuine or not, indicates, we may believe, the feature in His treatment which most impressed the men of His day. ‘The story hath reached my ears of Thee and Thy healings as wrought by Thee without drugs and simples.’ Though this was so, He did not eschew the use of material and visible signs, such as clay and saliva, which were adapted to convey to sick folk that ‘mental suggestion’ of returning health, which was His constant method of healing. In the following miracles the use of such material means is recorded: the case of the deaf man with an impediment (Mark vii. 33), of the blind man at Bethsaida (Mark viii. 24), of the man blind from his birth (John ix. 6), who also was sent to wash in the pool of Siloam. Of the Apostles, on their first mission, it is said that they anointed with oil many that were sick, and healed them (Mark vi. 13). Probably this element, which was in frequent medicinal use, was in their hands ceremonial, a symbol of that healing power of their Master which they were allowed in His name to exercise. He Himself is found, in the great majority of instances, to rely on the touch of the hand alone.[66] He knew that it spoke to the heart of a Divine effluence of power as well as a human sympathy. In one of the frescoes of the Creation, on the roof of the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo has pictured the form of the first man, perfect as a statue, but lifeless until the Finger of God quickens it with a touch. And, after all, a universal instinct associates ideas of sympathy and positive relief with the movement of the hand. Thus in the Greek myth, the distracted Io is comforted by the prophecy of Prometheus that the God would restore her by his touch.[67]
(iv) The healing of the nobleman’s son, of the centurion’s slave, and that of the Syrophœnician woman’s daughter stand by themselves as instances of ‘absent treatment.’ The strong impression wrought in the mind of the father, the master, the mother, respectively, is conveyed by a sort of telepathy to the mind of the patient. ‘Why herein,’ surely, is a marvellous thing for those who cannot accept our Lord’s claim to be the Son of Man in a unique sense—that He should thus have possessed, 2000 years ago, a knowledge of the mysterious processes of human nature which modern science is only now beginning to divine. It is in that fact that the ‘glory’ (Luke xiii. 17; John xi. 40), the ‘wonder’ (Matt. xxi. 15), the ‘strangeness’ (Luke v. 26) of the miracles of Christ consist. They are ‘works of power,’[68] ‘outcomings of that mighty power of God which was inherent in Christ,’[69] and which He exerted within a region of human nature then unexplored. We cannot ponder too deeply on that great saying of St. Augustine, ‘Portentum fit non contra naturam, sed contra quam est nota natura.’[70] Who shall attempt to lay down the laws which govern the operation of the spiritual upon the material? and still more to delimit the powers of the Personality and Will of Him, in whose name Apostles, Saints of the Church, and humble Christians unrecorded in history have wrought cures, which only a purblind scepticism can gainsay?
THE PRINCIPLES OF MODERN CHRISTIAN HEALING
BY
W. YORKE FAUSSET, M.A.
VICAR OF CHEDDAR AND PREBENDARY OF WELLS