THE recently published statement of the dean of a well-known Protestant cathedral, that "God never intended His people to have immunity from those ills to which flesh is heir; but that sickness, like all other disciplines of life, is to be treated as a means of spiritual education," is thrown into striking relief when put over against the word of the Lord to our fathers, saying, "I will take sickness away from the midst of thee," and the specific command of Christ Jesus to his disciples that they "heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils."
When we recall the unnumbered assurances of the Bible that it is the will of God that those who accept His government should be well, and the corroborative fact that Christ Jesus constantly healed the sick of "all the ills to which flesh is heir;" when we read how the people came to him by the thousand, bringing the suffering and the diseased, and it is said again and again that he "healed them all," and then find those who are known as the ministers of Christ practically declaring that in all this blessed work the Master was defeating the divine purpose by robbing the beneficiaries of his ministry of the "means of spiritual education," then surely we have come upon an anomaly of colossal proportions.
All who are sufficiently free from the domination of dogma to be disposed to think a bit for themselves, will not fail to see that if God has ordained sickness to be the "means of spiritual education," then Christ Jesus could not have separated the sick from this divinely provided "discipline" without interfering with his Father's purpose and plans, and that he was certainly doing wrong if he knowingly resisted the processes of right. He was either working in harmony with the divine will or he was not, and they who hold with the dean that sickness pertains to a normal Christian life, and who further affirm that Christ Jesus in all his doings acted in harmony with divine law, even as he claimed, have certainly placed themselves in the vortex of an abysmal contradiction.
