“Now, please, don’t write me down a pagan if I try to show you what might have been done, and may yet be done.”
“Doctor Evans!”
“Oh, yes, ’tis a fact; you good women are convinced that the setting of a broken limb is a work for human skill, but that the cure of a fault of disposition is for Providence alone to effect, and you say your prayers and do nothing, looking down from great heights upon us who believe that skill and knowledge come in here too, and are meant to do so in the divine scheme of things. It’s startling when you come to think of it, that every pair of parents have the absolute making of their child!”
“But what of inherited failings—such cases as this of ours?”
“Precisely a case in point. Don’t you see, such a case is just a problem set before parents with a, ‘See, how will you work out this so as to pass your family on free from taint?’”
“That’s a noble thought of yours, Evans. It gives every parent a share in working out the salvation of the world, even to thousands of generations. Come, Mary, we’re on our promotion! To pass on our children free from the blemishes they get from us is a thing worth living for.”
“Indeed it is. But don’t think me narrow-minded, doctor, nor that I should presume to think hard things of you men of science, if I confess that I still think the ills of the flesh fall within the province of man, but the evils of the spirit within the province of God.”
“I’m not sure but that I’m of your mind; where we differ is as to the boundary line between flesh and spirit. Now, every fault of disposition and temper, though it may have begun in error of the spirit in ourselves or in some ancestor, by the time it becomes a fault of character is a failing of the flesh, and is to be dealt with as such—that is, by appropriate treatment. Observe, I am not speaking of occasional and sudden temptations and falls, or of as sudden impulses towards good, and the reaching of heights undreamed of before. These things are of the spiritual world, and are to be spiritually discerned. But the failing or the virtue which has become habitual to us is flesh of our flesh, and must be treated on that basis whether it is to be uprooted or fostered.”
“I confess I don’t follow: this line of argument should make the work of redemption gratuitous. Every parent can save his child, and every man can save himself.”
“No, my dear; there you’re wrong. I agree with Evans. ’Tis we who lose the efficacy of the great Redemption by failing to see what it has accomplished. That we have still to engage in a spiritual warfare, enabled by spiritual aids, Dr. Evans allows. His point is, as I understand it, why embarrass ourselves with these less material ills of the flesh which are open to treatment on the same lines, barring the drugs, as a broken limb or a disordered stomach. Don’t you see how it works? We fall, and fret, and repent, and fall again; and are so over busy with our own internal affairs, that we have no time to get that knowledge of the Eternal which is the life of the living soul?”