It is a hopeful sign, indeed, when a prominent clergyman...

San Jose (Calif.) Mercury Herald

It is a hopeful sign, indeed, when a prominent clergyman selects the cure of disease as a subject of discourse, for the early Christian church concerned itself very vitally with healing the sick, and the fact that the church in modern times has delegated that function to the medical profession may be more responsible for empty pews than is generally suspected.

The clergyman is right when he says that many people regard prayer as the only divine method of healing the sick. Certainly no other method finds warrant in the New Testament, and Jesus the Christ, who was the master Physician and the example for all mankind in things divine, employed no other system. If medicine or drugs are divine remedies, it is rather strange that he absolutely ignored them. It is strange, too, that they should not succeed better than they do, and that the best physician is the one who prescribes them the least.

Despite all the efforts that are made in behalf of medicine, it is proving a disappointment. People are turning from it by the thousands to find relief through spiritual means or, in other words, through prayer. And effectual prayer is not so much a petition to God to heal sickness as it is an intelligent realization of the all-presence and the all-power of God, which destroys the human belief in sickness; and human belief is all there is to sickness. Sickness is not a reality. If it were, then God must have created it, and we should have the impossible spectacle of a God who is Love visiting suffering and death upon His children.

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