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/240

 in the case of the Rabbinical rule of Sabbath observance, the conventional practice was inimical to the freedom of the spirit. Our Lord will never allow the spiritual and essential in things to be overlaid by the material and accidental. Traditionalism was then broken through. The principle, that we must render to Cæsar the things that are Cæsar's and to God the things that are God's, manifests itself in various ways, and this is one of them. But, on the whole, Christianity knows no revolutionary breaches in the established social order, as the history of its attitude towards the institution of slavery shows. Men were encouraged to work out their own salvation under existing political and social conditions.

This spirit of conformity to the existing order in all lawful things, and especially our Lord's attitude towards priestly ceremonial, in the case of the leper, throws a good deal of light upon the relation which should subsist between the clergyman and the doctor in the treatment of sickness. The Christian doctor will gladly subscribe to the words of the favourite physician of Louis XIV, Ambroise Paré, 'I treated the wound, God healed it.' Reverently and thoughtfully he will acknowledge the power of prayer and the tranquillising influences of the spirit, and will yield to the