Page:Medicine and the church.djvu/112

 they been allowed to remain in bodily health and comfortable and happy surroundings. Indeed, St. Paul's affliction was the means of his converting the Galatians, for his illness compelled him to stop with them for a time, and in writing to the Corinthians from them, he could truly say, 'Most gladly, therefore, will I rather glory in my weaknesses that the strength of Christ may cover me.' To repeat, it is our duty, as far as can be, to keep our bodies in health, though we can most of us conceive of circumstances when to lose our life may be indeed to save it.

In a sermon preached for the 'Guild of Poor Brave Things,' the present Bishop of London, who is the president of the Guild, said: 'What made more impression on me as an under-*graduate at Oxford than all the sermons I ever heard in chapel was a young don, insisting, at the risk of his life, on ministering to an under-*graduate dying of a most infectious disease.'

After all, St. Paul's life, as narrated by himself, can hardly have been considered as hygienic. 'Of the Jews five times received I forty stripes save one. Thrice was I beaten with rods, once was I stoned, thrice I suffered shipwreck, a night and a day have I been in the deep; in journeyings often, in perils of rivers, in perils of robbers, in perils of my own