The prevailing systems of healing on a material basis are committed to the idea, either that God has not the power to heal, or having it, does not see fit to exercise it, excepting in an indirect manner through material means and appliances. The effect of this view, thus far at least, is that God has seen fit in his wisdom to confine his remedial and life-saving methods largely to mineral and vegetable poisons, with all their attendant dangers and difficulties.
If God is the author, mediately or immediately, of material means of healing, the ordinary method of human reasoning would hold him responsible also for the consequences of those means. We say the ordinary methods. There is much human reasoning which would hold him responsible for the ill-effects of such means, but which, on the other hand, would give human skill the credit for all good effects.
If a person gets sick the doctor is called. If the case is a dangerous one, and the patient recovers, the doctor gets unstinted praise, and his reputation is at once added to. Few persons, even among those who believe in the divine, think of ascribing the recovery to God's mediation or power. They ascribe it rather to the supposed skill of the physician. But if the patient dies, the physician is relieved of all responsibility, on the specious plea that the death was inevitable, that no "human power" could have prevented it, and that it was God's will that it should occur. Thus it is that all favorable results are credited to human skill, while all unfavorable and disastrous consequences are charged to the account of the "divine will."
