Article January 5, 1952 Issue

Signs of the Times

with contributions from Edward Winckley, Arthur W. McDavitt, Julius Koehler

Rev. Edward Winckley in an address in the Parish Magazine of St. Matthew's Edgeley, Stockport, Cheshire, England

I am deeply impressed by the fact that, whereas the "good news" of the kingdom of God, as preached by Jesus Christ, was largely a gospel of health, popular Christianity has become for many centuries either a method of bearing suffering and disease with resignation, as being something sent by God for our good, or else a method of distracting men's attention from the sorrows and injustices of this world by fixing it upon a life to come, which makes this world comparatively of no account. It is a gospel of the value of disease, of injustice, of disappointment, as the necessary education for the spiritual life.

Jesus regarded this world as, in its nature, good, and saw in the conquest of disease one of the signs of the victory of God's kingdom. He did not teach resignation to disease, much less the welcoming of disease, but always the conquest of the "works of the devil" by the revelation of the power of God, of which the "sign" was health, physical as well as moral.

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