1. The Natural History of Immortality, by Joseph William Reynolds, M.A., rector of St. Anne and St. Agnes with St. John Zachary, Gresham St., London, and prebendary of St. Paul’s Cathedral, 1891, p. 286.
2. These facts are taken from a paper by R. Keiso Carter, The Century Magazine, March, 1887, vol. XI, p. 780.
3a P13”
4. January, 1884; vol. V, p. 40.
5. How natural this attitude is, in the circumstances, is interestingly illustrated by its appearance even among the pre-Christian Jews. A. Schlatter, in his Der Glaube im Neuen Testament, 1885, when discussing the conception of faith in the synagogue, remarks upon the tendency which showed itself to push the duty of faith (for faith was conceived in the synagogue as a duty, and therefore as a work) to extremes. The Jerusalem Targum on Gen. 40: 23 blames Joseph for asking the chief butler to remember him; he should have depended on God’s grace alone. Any one who, having food for to-day, asks, What am I to eat? fails in faith (Zanch., fol. 29, 4). All means are to be excluded. He then continues (pp. 46 ff.): “Philo blames the employment of a physician as lack of faith; if anything against their will befalls doubters, they flee, because they do not believe in a helping God, to the sources of help which the occurrence suggests—to physicians, simples, physics, correct diet; to all the aids offered to a dying race; and, if any one suggests to them, Flee in your miseries to the sole physician of the ills of the soul, and leave the aids falsely so-called to the creature subjected to suffering, they laugh, and scoff, and say, Good Morrow! —and are unwilling to flee to God if they can find anything to protect them from the coming evil; to be sure, if nothing that man does suffices but everything, even the most highly esteemed, shows itself injurious, then they renounce in their perplexity the help of others, and flee, compelled, the cowards, late and with difficulty, to God, the sole Saviour (De Sacrificc Abel, Mang., 1, 176, 23 ff.). In this Philo does not express an idea peculiar to himself; the Son of Sirach, xxxviii, 1 ff., shows that in the Palestinian Synagogue also, from of old, the question was discussed, whether the help of a physician was to be sought in sickness: The Lord has created medicines out of the earth, and he that is wise will not abhor them; was not the water made sweet with a word that the virtue thereof might be known?… My son, in thy sickness be not negligent; but pray unto the Lord and He will make thee whole. Leave off from sin and order thy hands aright, and cleanse thy heart from all wickedness; give a sweet savor and a memorial of fine flour, and make a fat offering, as not being. Then give place to the physician, for the Lord has created Him; let him not go from thee, for thou hast need of him. There is a time when in their hands there is good success, for they shall also pray unto the Lord, that He would prosper that which they give, for ease and remedy to prolong life (38:41, gff.). Sickness, as a judicial intrusion of God into the life of man, presupposes sin and calls therefore the sick to repentance and sacrifice; nevertheless, for the cool intellect of the Son of Sirach, this does not exclude the use of a physician; but the way in which he expressly places medical help in connection with God’s working, and also calls the Scriptures to witness for it, shows that he had before his eyes religious doubts against it, thoughts, as Philo expresses them, that a stronger faith would turn only to God.” 6. ‘P. 703. 7. Jellett, Efficacy of Prayer, p. 41. 8. PP. 103. 9. Op. cit., p. 303. 10. Medicine and the Church, edited by Geoffrey Rhodes, 1910, pp. 209 fi. 11. Inaugural Address, 1891, ed. 2, p. 37.
12. That our Lord’s miracles of healing were certainly not faith-cures, as it has become fashionable among the “Modernists”’ to represent, has been solidly shown by Doctor R. J. Ryle, “The Neurotic Theory of the Miracles of Healing,” The Hibbert Journal, April, 1907, vol. V, pp. 572 fi.
13. See p. 41.
14. Loc. cit, ip. 63.
15. Of course this implication of the passage is not neglected by interested parties. We find for example C. H. Lea in his A Plea for… Christian Science, 1915, pp. 57-58, writing, on the supposition of the genuineness of this passage quite justly: “All Christendom believes that He gave His followers—not only those of His own time but of all succeeding time—the injunction to preach the Gospel and fo heal the sick. Now, the giving of the injunction clearly and definitely implies… that the mark of one’s being a Christian is that he has, or should have, this knowledge and the corresponding power to heal.”
16. See above, p. 22.
17. Op. cit, pp. 22 £1.
18. Pp. 52.11,
19. I have briefly stated the evidence for the spuriousness of the passage in An Introduction to the Textual Criticism of the New Testament, 1886, pp. 199 ff. But see especially F. J. A. Hort, The New Testament in the Original Greek, Introduction, Appendix, 1881, pp. 28 fi. of the Appendix.