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How to become like Christ by Marcus Dods
page 42 of 51 (82%)
shame if she cannot step forward and confidently say, You cannot deal
with such things; hand them over to me. There must always be
"distempers of society" which rot the very life out of a nation, and
for which legislation and criminal law are wholly inadequate.
Honest-minded men who will not trifle with alarming abuses, who will
not pretend they have found a remedy, must simply rend their garments
in their presence. And it is well that in our day, as in others,
there are men who, trusting in personal effort and Divine aid,
practically say to Government, "leave these things to us." Christian
charity and practical wisdom have, in our day effected a good deal
more than the healing of one leprous grandee, even if as yet the
spiritual force that resides in the community is only spasmodically
and partially applied to existing evil.

Elisha's treatment of Naaman was intended to bring him into direct
and conscious dependence on God; or, in other words, to produce
humility and faith. Some persons are crushed and mastered by pain and
sickness, and some gain in spiritual worth what they lose in physical
strength. But Naaman's disease had as yet done little to instruct
him. He came as a great man, with his servants, and chariots, and
piles of money, to purchase a cure from a skilled man. He did not see
what Elisha plainly saw, that if this blessing came at all, it must
come from Israel's God, and that with Jehovah no man Could barter or
be on bargaining terms, but must accept freely what was freely given.
Therefore Elisha refuses even to see him, that Naaman might
understand it was with God he had to do; and by refusing a single
penny of payment he compelled the Syrian to humble himself and accept
his cure as a gift.

And probably the incident finds a place in the sacred history because
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