therefore proved to be working for the good of those for whom He came to die.  Christ had indeed sown good seed in His field.  He had taught men by His miracles, as He had taught them by His parables, to Whom nature belonged, and Whose laws nature obeyed.  And the cessation of miracles after the time of Christ and His Apostles had taught, or ought to have taught, mankind a further lesson; the lesson that henceforth they were to carry on for themselves, by the faculties which God had given them, that work of healing and deliverance which He had begun.  Miracles, like prophecies, like tongues, like supernatural knowledge, were to cease and vanish away:  but charity, charity which devotes itself for the welfare of the human race, was to abide for ever.

Christ, as I said, had sown good seed:  but an enemy—­we know not whence or when—­certainly within the three first centuries of the Church—­came and sowed tares among that wheat.  Then began men to believe that devils, and not their Father in Heaven, were, to all practical intents, the lords of nature.  Then began they to believe that man’s body was the property of Satan, and his soul only the property of God.  Then began they to fancy that man was to be delivered from his manifold earthly miseries, not by purity and virtue, reason and knowledge, but by magic, masked under the sacred name of religion.  No wonder if, in such a temper of mind, the physical amelioration of the human race stood still.  How could it be otherwise, while men refused to see in facts the acted will of God; and sought not in God’s universe, but in the dreams of their own brains, for glimpses of that divine and wonderful order by which The eternal Father and The eternal Son are working together for ever through The eternal Spirit for the welfare of the universe?

We boast, my friends, at times, of the rapid triumphs of modern science.  Were we but aware of the vast amount of preventible misery around us, and of the vast possibility of removing it, which lies in the little science which we know already, we should rather bewail the slow departure of modern barbarism.

There has been no period of the world for centuries back, I believe, in which man might not have been infinitely healthier, happier, more prosperous, more long-lived than he has been, if he had only believed that disease, misery, and premature death were not the will of God and of Christ; and that God had endowed him with an intellect which could understand the laws of the universe, in order that he might use those laws for his own health, wealth, and life.  Very late is society in commencing that rational course on which it ought to have entered centuries ago; and therefore very culpable.  And it is not too much to say, that to the average of persons suffering under preventible disease or defect, even though it be hereditary, society owes a sacred debt, which it is bound to pay by making those innocent sufferers from other’s sins as happy as possible; where it has not yet learnt—­as it will learn, please God, some day—­to cure them.