wants, and He wants, your heart, your sympathy.  Think for a moment of the universe of anguish that may lie within the narrow limits of one human body—­that awful mystery of pain which holds in its red-hot pincers hundreds and thousands of men and women in this city at this moment.  Try to imagine the mass of bodily agony, an enormous percentage of which is utterly innocent, and a still larger percentage of it perfectly remediable, which at this hour, whilst we sit here, is torturing mankind.  And oh! brethren, do not let any thought of the transcendent importance of Christ’s gospel, and what it does to men’s hearts, make us careless about these real, though lesser, evils which lie beside us, and which we can remedy and help.

Only, remember the condition of help for them all.  The newspapers went into raptures some years since, and wisely, over a Roman Catholic priest who shut himself up in a little island with a colony of lepers.  Some Protestant martyrs have done the same before him, without any chorus of newspaper praise.  Whoever did it had penetrated to the secret of Christian help—­identification with the evil.  If we would take away any misery or sin, we must act like that doctor who shut himself up in the wards of an hospital, and kept a diary of the symptoms of his disease, till the pen dropped from his fingers and the film came over his eyes.  Are we ready to do anything like that for our brethren?  Until we are, we have yet to learn and to practise the pattern which He has set, ’Who, though He was rich, for our sins became poor’:  and who, ’forasmuch as the children were partakers of flesh and blood, Himself likewise’—­in their own fashion of weakness, and weariness, and sorrow, and pain, and ultimately death—­’took part of the same.’  ‘He bore our sicknesses,’ therefore He bore them away, and, in so doing, taught us the law of Christian help.

And lastly, let me not pass from this subject without leaving on your hearts, dear friends, the other thought, of the connection and the relative importance of these two hemispheres of Christ’s work.  The sicknesses are symbols of the sins; the removal of the bodily pain and disease is a prophecy and a visible parable proclaiming the removal of all the harassment and abnormal action that afflict intellect, will, or spirit.  Christ Himself has taught us to regard His miracles of healing as the making visible, in the outward sphere, of the analogous miracles of healing in the spiritual realm.  And although I have been saying a great deal about the preciousness and the sacredness of the curative influences which flow from Christ, and deal with outward diseases and evils, let us not forget that a sound body is of small worth as compared with a sound mind; that the body is the servant of the spirit, meant mainly to do its behests, bring it knowledge, and express its will; and that high above, and pointed to by, the lower, though precious work of healing men’s sicknesses, towers that work which we all of us need, and the robustest of us, perhaps, need most, the healing of our sick souls and their deliverance from death.