Page:Medicine and the church; being a series of studies on the relationship between the practice of medicine and the church's ministry to the sick (IA medicinechurchbe00rhodiala).pdf/207

 denotes 'to restore to health or sanity.' A protest may here be entered against the very prevalent opinion that God sent sickness upon man, by an Almighty fiat, in order to discipline him into patience and other Christian virtues. Such a view, crudely stated, has led to much perplexity and distress of faith, and it is not warranted by the teaching of the New Testament. God can bring good out of evil, even in its worst forms. But that is not to say that God by a deliberate act designs and causes evil. More than once in the New Testament sickness is attributed to Satanic agency, in the case of 'the woman which had a spirit of infirmity eighteen years,' and in that of St. Paul's 'thorn in the flesh.' Disease is a disturbance of the balance of human powers, mental and bodily, a derangement of faculties and functions. Consider the bearing of this upon life. Modern science teaches us the doctrine of the persistence of matter; in Sir Oliver Lodge's words, 'a really existing thing never perishes, but only changes its form'—in the case of our complex human constitution, that change of form is what we call death. It is vital force which maintains that inner harmony which we call health: it