Page:Medicine and the church.djvu/209

 Life upon earth for weariness and pain, none is found for sickness; for, in all things, He conformed to the Will of God for man, which is health, not sickness. Sickness is a violation of that normal condition which God has appointed for man. When infection and disease entered into the world, we must believe that they were part of that general imperfection which God can only be said to will as a means to an end, or as a passing stage in the evolution of good. God does not send sickness to scourge us, but overrules it to purge us. In saying this, we need not deny the possible place of death in a perfect cosmos; a death which should have been the gradual ebbing of physical vitality, not its sapping and undermining by the malignant forces of disease. We should expect, then, that our Lord's healing power would be the action of the life-giving Spirit of God upon the spirit of man, from the very fact that in Christ man was brought into living contact with God.

Recent psychology, especially in the investigations of Professor W. James and the late F. W. H. Myers, has thrown a new light upon those recesses of human nature in which our religious experiences take place. We have learned that there is a subconscious self, a submerged portion of our faculties, which responds to spiritual impressions and accepts