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, a single charitable
institution. Fearful thought--a city of a million and a half
inhabitants, the centre of human civilization: and not a hospital
there! The Roman Dives paid his physician; the Roman Lazarus
literally lay at his gate full of sores, till he died the death of
the street dogs which licked those sores, and was carried forth to be
thrust under ground awhile, till the same dogs came to quarrel over
his bones. The misery and helplessness of the lower classes in the
great cities of the Roman empire, till the Church of Christ arose,