many more diseases are cured now than were formerly. One may say
that the knowledge of medicine is not one hundred years old.
Nothing, my friends, makes me feel more strongly what a wonderful and
blessed time we live in, and how Christ is showing forth mighty works
among us, than this same sudden miraculous improvement in the art of
healing, which has taken place within the memory of man. Any country
doctor now knows more, thank God, or ought to know, than the greatest
London physicians did two generations ago. New cures for deafness,
blindness, lameness, every disease that flesh is heir to, are being
discovered year by year. Oh, my friends! you little know what Christ
is doing among you, for your bodies as well as for your souls. There
is not a parish in England now in which the poorest as well as the
richest are not cured yearly of diseases, which, if they had lived a
hundred years ago, would have killed them without hope or help. And
then, when one looks at these great and blessed plans for what is
called sanitary reform, at the sickness and the misery which has been
done away with already by attending to them, even though they have
only just begun to be put in practice--our hearts must be hard indeed
if we do not feel that Christ is revealing to us the gifts of healing
far more bountifully and mercifully than even He did to the first
apostles.

But you will say, perhaps, the dead are not raised in these days.
Oh, my friends! which shows Christ's mercy most, to raise those who
are already dead, or to save those alive who are about to die? Those
in this church who have read history know as well as I, how in our
forefathers' time people died in England by thousands of diseases
which are scarcely ever deadly now; ay, of diseases which have now
actually vanished out of the land, before the new light of medicine
and of civilisation which Christ has revealed to us in these days.