These are "the simple annals of the poor," but they illustrate and inculcate great principles which are applicable to any work for the Lord.
Chapter III
Healing the Sick
THE health and happiness of mankind depend in a great degree on faith. Every emotion of the body and every action of the mind is an exhibition of faith. Persons who believe they are well, even if they are ill, will soon recover, and persons who believe that they will not be sick are seldom ill. There is no department of human life so dependent on belief as that connected with health. Millions would arise, take up their couches and walk, if they could be made to believe that they could do so. To believe a falsehood has cured many people, and consciences waver between the duty to tell a patient the clear truth when he is very ill and to make him believe a lie in order that he may get well.
It must also be stated, in fidelity to the truth, that the subject of healing by faith has called out a host of the half-insane classes who proclaim with trumpet tones some cases of divine healing which are unworthy of a moment's consideration. Hence, out of a collection of possibly sincere letters, many have been rejected altogether as foolish or misleading. Eleven hundred written testimonies to cases of healing in direct answer to prayer at the Baptist Temple have been carefully examined and the trustworthy testimonies tabulated. Those "years of healing" to which reference is so often made were years of prayer and years of faith. After deducting all the questionable cases, and after a wide allowance for the naturally health-giving and health-preserving power, the normal human belief is that there remains an overwhelmingly convincing amount of evidence that healing is directly brought about by sincere prayer.
Through several years cases were reported to the church or pastors which convinced all who knew the people and the circumstances that some intelligent power, higher than human knowledge, had interfered to heal the sick. But when the knowledge of those trustworthy cases came to be known, and especially when they had awakened much excited comment, then the "cranks" and monomaniacs crowded to the front and vociferously proclaimed the most absurd miracles, to the disgust of reasonable men and women and greatly to the damage of the beneficent work.
Sometimes all references to healing were omitted in the pulpit and shut out from the meetings for prayer until the wild advocates of divine healing settled down and dispassionate views could be taken. Many intelligent devout men repudiated the whole experiment, believing that the excitement over it was doing much more harm than good. But the larger part who saw the people who had been cured by the unexplainable means were steadfast and went on sincerely thanking God for his wonderful works among the children of men.
A digest of the written testimonies showed that cataracts had unrolled without the touch of a surgeon's knife, although the greatest number of the restoration of sight to the blind were with the aid of apparent means. The methods by which the Lord restored their sight did not make their gratitude to him for restoration any the less commendable. Mysterious and evidently dangerous internal tumors disappeared slowly or suddenly in a manner unexplainable by the most learned physicians.
By far the greatest number of the eleven hundred cases selected for consideration out of the multitude of testimonies were cases in some way directly connected with the nervous system. Patients long confined in an insane asylum were brought home and cured of what had been considered hopeless insanity. There were many cases of various forms of brain diseases, while in all these cases a specially conservative examiner could declare that they might have been cured by the special or wise treatment.