The Lord of Glory; Counterfeit Miracles; Revelation and Inspiration

means of seeking to supply our daily necessities and to depend wholly on miraculous gifts from heaven.

It is probable that the common impression received from this passage of the promise of a miraculous healing in large part arises from what seems the extreme formality of the transaction recommended. The sick man is to send for the elders of the church to pray for him, and they are to anoint him with oil. We are apt here to get the emphasis misplaced. There is no emphasis on the anointing with oil. That is a mere circumstantial detail, thrown in by the way. The emphasis falls wholly on the sick man's getting himself prayed for officially by the elders of the church, and the promise is suspended wholly on their prayer, on the supposition that it is offered in faith. The circumstantial clause, thrown in almost incidentally, "anointing with oil in the name of the Lord," is susceptible of two interpretations.^^ The reference may be to the use of oil as a symbol of the power of the Spirit to be exercised in the healing; or it may be to the use of oil as a medicinal agent. In neither view is the employment of medicinal agents excluded; but in the latter view their employment is distinctly alluded to. The circumstance that oil was well-nigh the universal remedy in the medical practice of the day favors the latter view, as does the employment of, as Archbishop Trench puts it, "the mundane and profane" instead of the "sacred and religious word" for the act of anointing."^ The lightness of the allusion to the anointing points in the same direction. It scarcely seems that so solemn an act and so distinct an act as ceremonial anointing could be alluded to so cursorily.^^ If, on the other hand, the allusion is to the use of oil as a medicinal agent, everything falls into its place. The meaning then is in effect, "giving him his medicine in the name of the Lord." The emphasis falls not on the anointing, but on its being done "in the name of the Lord," and the whole becomes an exhortation to Christians, when they are sick, to seek unto the Lord as well as to their physician — nay, to seek unto the Lord rather than to their physician — with a promise that the Lord will attend to their cry. If any is sick among you, we read, let him call for the elders of the church and let them pray for him, rubbing him with his oil in the name of the Lord, and the prayer of faith shall save him that is sick. Where is there promise of miracle in that?^^

What James requires of us is merely that we shall be Christians in our sickness as in our health, and that our dependence then, too, shall be on the Lord. It is Just the truly Christian attitude that he exhorts us to, precisely as Prebendary Re3aiolds describes it. "We avail our-

selves," says he,^^ "of all that science knows, and thank God for it. The resources of civilization are ours, and we use them to the utmost. We labour in wise and kindly nursing, and thankfully call in the medical skill which the devout and learned and experienced physician and surgeon have at command. It is God, however, the real physician, who gives the chief medicine; who makes drugs, operations, kindness, nursing to have true healing power; who takes away sin, sickness, death, giving righteousness, healing, eternal life." Do you say this is a purely clerical

view? It is the physician's view also, if the physician happens to be a Christian. "I dressed the wound and God healed it," wrote Ambroise Pare, the great Huguenot physician — the father of modern surgery — on the walls of the Ecole de Medecine at Paris.^^ Let me read you, however, more at large how a more modern Christian

physician puts it. "In the healing of every disease of whatever kind," writes Doctor Henry E. Goddard,^^ "we cannot be too deeply impressed with the Lord's part of the work. He is the operator. We are the co-operators. More and more am I impressed that every patient of mine who has ever risen up from his sick bed onto his feet again has done so by the divine power. Not I, but the Lord, has

cured him. And it is this fact that the Lord does so much, that gives to different systems of healing their apparent cures. He has healed many a one in spite of medicine, in spite of mental healers, in spite of ignorance, in spite of negligence and poor and scanty food. [Nineteen out of twenty cases of grippe will get well without doing anything for it, if we are willing to bear it until that time. Pneumonia, even, is what the physician calls a self-limiting disease, and many cases will recover alone if we are willing to run our chances with it. The arm may drop into boiling water and become scalded. Nine times out of ten it will take care of itself and heal. But if that arm is mine it is going to have an outward application which will make it feel better the moment it touches it. And more important by far, it is going to be dressed aseptically to prevent blood poisoning. It might get well itself, probably would; but it is going to have my Httle co-operation, the most intelligent that I can render, that the Lord may have the open door through which He can come in and bless it."

It is the very spirit of James, I take it, that speaks in this Christian physician. If you are sick, you will use means, all the means that exist; but you will use the means in the name of the Lord, and to Him you will look for the issue. The scattered passages of Scripture which are appealed to here and there by Faith-Healers to buttress the chief proof texts need not delay us more than a moment. The examples of miraculous cures adduced from the Bible, are, of course, irrelevant. No one of the parties to this discussion doubts that they were truly miraculous. The question at issue is, whether such miraculous works may still be performed, now that the period of revelation has gone by. The appeal to the enumeration of gifts in the twelfth chapter of I Corinthians is equally irrelevant, since the question at issue is precisely whether they are ordinary gifts continued in the church, or extraordinary gifts connected (according to the eighth chapter of Acts) directly with the Apostles. John 14: 12 is worthy of more attention. The Faith-Healers do not even profess, however, to do the great works which Christ did — His miracles on nature, His raising of the dead — and much less can they point to their healings as greater works than these.^^ No miracles, in the strict sense of the word, greater than those which Christ did, have been done by any of His followers. But in and through His followers He has, in fulfilment of this promise, manifested the power of the Holy Spirit, foreshadowed and begun at Pentecost, beyond anything witnessed in His lifetime; and He is thus conquering the world to Himself through the "greater works" of His disciples. That He refers here to these spiritual works is generally agreed.^°

I have reserved to the last the passage which Gordon appeals to first, because its application to the present matter raises a question of doctrine which it seemed more convenient to discuss at the end, rather than at the beginning of a scrutiny of proof texts. When speaking of our Lord's abounding miracles of healing, Matthew says that He did them "that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by Isaiah the prophet, saying. Himself took our infirmities and bare our diseases" (Matt. 8: 17). The passage has, of course, no direct bearing on the assertion that miraculous cures continue to be performed in the church. It speaks only of Christ's own miraculous cures, and does not in the remotest way suggest that His followers were to work similar ones. It can be made useful to the Faith-Healing hypothesis, not directly, but only indirectly, through the doctrine which it is supposed to teach. That doctrine is declared to be this: "That we have Christ set before us as the sickness-bearer as well as the sin-bearer of His people"; "that Christ endured vicariously our diseases as well as our iniquities"; and, it being true "that our Redeemer and Substitute bore our sicknesses, it would be natural to reason at once that He bore them that we

might not bear them." As, then, "we urge the transgressor to accept the Lord Jesus as his sin-bearer, that he may no longer have to bear the pains and penalties of his disobedience," so we should urge the sick " to accept Him as his pain-bearer." ^^ Otto Stockmayer is quoted as teaching^^ "that if our Redeemer bore our sicknesses it is not his will that his children should remain under the power of disease, any more than that, having borne our sins, it is his will that they should remain under condemnation and disobedience." In enunciating the same doctrine, Stanton makes use of the remarkable expressions,^^ "that the Atonement was not only made for sin but for disease, the fruit of sin," and "that in atoning for our diseases of body, just as for our sins of soul, Christ took them upon Himself that He might bear them away, and thus relieve His people from the need of bearing them."

It would be difficult to find more confused expressions than these. What exact meaning can be attached, for example, to the phrase, "atonement for disease"? Is it intended to suggest that disease is fault for which we are responsible? Atonement can be made only for fault. And why should the phrase, "bear disease away" be employed in connection with this text? Does not the word employed here for "bearing sickness" express not bearing away, removing, but bearing, enduring? And by what right can Stockmayer — the "theologian of Faith-HeaHng," as he is called — parallel the "power of disease" with "condemnation and disobedience" as alike taken away by Christ's redemption, unless he means to convey the idea that, as there is now no condemnation to them in Christ Jesus, so there can now be no disease to them that are in Christ Jesus; and as all disobedience is wilful and sinful, so also is all sickness? If so, we can only infer that none of us are in Christ Jesus: our universal physical decay and death are but the external manifestations of our inward corruption and our eternal doom.^^

It will doubtless be more profitable, however, to seek to lay our finger on the source of error in the statement of the doctrine, and to correct it, than to track out all its confusions. This error does not lie in the supposition that redemption is for the body as well as the soul, and that the saved man shall be renewed in the one as well as in the other. This is true. Nor does it lie in the supposition that provision is made in the atonement for the relief of men from disease and suffering, which are fruits of sin. This too is true.^^ It lies in confusing redemption itself, which is objective and takes place outside of us, with its subjective effects, which take place in us; and in failing to recognize that these subjective effects of redemption are wrought in us gradually and in a definite order. Ideally all of Christ's children were saved before the foundation of the world, when they were set upon by God's love, and given by the Father to the Son to be saved by Him. Objectively they were saved when Christ died for them on the tree, purchasing them to Himself by His own precious blood. This salvation was made their personal possession in principle when they were regenerated by the Holy Spirit, purchased for them by the death of Christ in their behalf. It was made over to them judicially on their believing in Christ, in the power of the Holy Ghost thus given to them. But it is completed in them in its full effects only when at the Judgment Day they stand, sanctified souls, clothed in glorified bodies, before the throne of God, meet for the inheritance of the saints in light. Here, you perceive, is a process. Even after we have believed in Christ, and have a title as justified men to the benefits bought for us by His blood and righteousness, entrance into the actual enjoyment of these several benefits remains a process, and a long process, to be completed in a definite order. This is true of the spiritual blessings which come to us through the atonement of Christ. We are no longer under the curse of sin. But we remain sinners. The struggle against indwell-