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/94

 a sick child, also, seems to me a very sensible and beautiful piece of writing. I find, also, a prayer for a sick person, 'when there appeareth small hope of recovery.' I have heard it read over one at the point of death, when there was no hope at all of recovery. 'We know,' it says, 'that, if Thou wilt, Thou canst even yet raise him up.' I hope that I shall not, when I am dying, hear this phrase. It rings false, to my thinking: it offends the natural dignity of a dying man. We doctors are blamed, now and again, for not telling the truth to patients hopelessly ill: but here is the Prayer-book, at the last moment, hardly more straightforward. All the same, this Order for the Visitation of the Sick is admirable; and I desire to contrast it with the following instance, how Christian Science treats the dying:

'Mrs. is a widow, and an old friend of mine. In February 1905, her only child, a boy of eleven, was in the last stage of a hopeless illness—mitral valvular heart disease, with rheumatism and dropsy. I had an opportunity of a few minutes' talk with the Christian Science "practitioner"—a sweet, gentle, earnest woman—and asked her if she really thought she would do any good. "Oh yes," she replied, with a smile of confidence; "I have never known a failure." "But," I suggested, "the