Is he not witnessing for God, when he shows by his acts that he believes God to be a God of Life, not of death; of health, not of disease; of order, not of disorder; of joy and strength, not of misery and weakness?

Is he not witnessing for Christ when, like Christ, he heals all manner of sickness and disease among the people, and attacks physical evil as the natural foe of man and of the Creator of man?

Is he not witnessing for the immortality of the soul when he fights against death as an evil to be postponed at all hazards and by all means, even when its advent is certain?  Surely it is so.  How often have we seen the doctor by the dying bed, trying to preserve life, when he knew well that life could not be preserved.  We have been tempted to say to him, ’Let the sufferer alone.  He is senseless.  He is going.  We can do nothing more for his soul; you can do nothing more for his body.  Why torment him needlessly for the sake of a few more moments of respiration?  Let him alone to die in peace.’  How have we been tempted to say that?  We have not dared to say it; for we saw that the doctor, and not we, was in the right; that in all those little efforts, so wise, so anxious, so tender, so truly chivalrous, to keep the failing breath for a few moments more in the body of one who had no earthly claim upon his care, that doctor was bearing a testimony, unconscious yet most weighty, to that human instinct of which the Bible approves throughout, that death in a human being is an evil, an anomaly, a curse; against which, though he could not rescue the man from the clutch of his foe, he was bound, in duty and honour, to fight until the last, simply because it was death, and death was the enemy of man.

But if the medical man bears witness for God and spiritual things when he seems exclusively occupied with the body, so does the hospital.  Look at those noble buildings which the generosity of our fellow-countrymen have erected in all our great cities.  You may find in them, truly, sermons in stones; sermons for rich alike and poor.  They preach to the rich, these hospitals, that the sick-bed levels all alike; that they are the equals and brothers of the poor in the terrible liability to suffer!  They preach to the poor that they are, through Christianity, the equals of the rich in their means and opportunities of cure.  I say through Christianity.  Whether the founders so intended or not (and those who founded most of them, St. George’s among the rest, did so intend), these hospitals bear direct witness for Christ.  They do this, and would do it, even if—­which God forbid—­the name of Christ were never mentioned within their walls.  That may seem a paradox; but it is none.  For it is a historic fact, that hospitals are a creation of Christian times, and of Christian men.  The heathen knew them not.  In that great city of ancient Rome, as far as I have ever been able to discover, there was not a single hospital,—­not even, I fear,