Page:Devotions - Donne - 1840.djvu/135

 spiritual physician. I come to both, as to thine ordinance, and bless and glorify thy name, that, in both cases, thou hast afforded help to man by the ministry of man. Even in the new Jerusalem, in heaven itself, it hath pleased thee to discover a tree, which is a tree of life there, but the leaves thereof' are for the healing of the nations. Life itself is with thee there, for thou art life; and all kinds of health, wrought upon us here, by thine instruments, descend from thence. Thou wouldst have healed Babylon, but she is not healed. Take from me, O Lord, her perverseness, her wilfulness, her refractoriness, and hear thy Spirit saying in my soul, Heal me, O Lord, for I would be healed. Ephraim saw his sichkness, and Judah his wound; then went Ephraim to the Assyrian, and sent to King Jareb, yet could not he heal you, nor cure you of your wound. Keep me back, O Lord, from them who misprofess arts of healing the soul, or of the body, by means not imprinted by thee in the church, for the soul, or not in nature for the body. There is no spiritual health to be had by superstition, nor bodily by witchcraft; thou, Lord, and only thou, art Lord of both. Thou in thyself art Lord of both, and thou in thy Son art the physician, the applier of both. itk his stripes we are healed, says the prophet there; there, before he was scourged, we were healed with his stripes; how much more shall I be healed now, now when that which he hath already suffered actually is actually and effectually applied to me? Is there any thing incurable, upon which that balm drops? Any vein so empty as that that blood cannot fill it 7 Thou promisest to heal the earth ; but it is when the inhabitants of the earth pray that thou wouldst heal it. Thou promisest to heal their waters, but their miry