reminded that suffering is in its nature transitory--that it is against
the first and final will of God--that it is a means only, not an end?
Is it nothing to be told that it will pass away? Is not that what you
would? God made man for lordly skies, great sunshine, gay colours, free
winds, and delicate odours; and however the fogs may be needful for the
soul, right gladly does he send them away, and cause the dayspring from
on high to revisit his children. While they suffer he is brooding over
them an eternal day, suffering with them but rejoicing in their future.
He is the God of the individual man, or he could be no God of the race.

I believe it is possible--and that some have achieved it--so to believe
in and rest upon the immutable Health--so to regard one's own sickness
as a kind of passing aberration, that the soul is thereby sustained,
even as sometimes in a weary dream the man is comforted by telling
himself it is but a dream, and that waking is sure. God would have us
reasonable and strong. Every effort of his children to rise above
the invasion of evil in body or in mind is a pleasure to him. Few, I
suppose, attain to this; but there is a better thing which to many, I
trust, is easier--to say, Thy will be done.

But now let us look at the miracle as received by the woman.

She had "a great fever." She was tossing from side to side in vain
attempts to ease a nameless misery. Her head ached, and forms dreary,
even in their terror, kept rising before her in miserable and aimless
dreams; senseless words went on repeating themselves ill her very brain
was sick of them; she was destitute, afflicted, tormented; now the
centre for the convergence of innumerable atoms, now driven along in an
uproar of hideous globes; faces grinned and mocked at her; her mind
ever strove to recover itself, and was ever borne away in the rush of