NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 3 



anity on the healing art was twofold ; there was first a blessed 

 impulse the thought, aspiration, example, ideals, and spirit of 

 Jesus of Nazareth. This spirit, then poured into the world, 

 flowed down through the ages, promoting self-sacrifice for the 

 sick and wretched. Through all those succeeding centuries, even 

 through the rudest, hospitals and infirmaries sprang up along 

 this blessed stream. Of these were the Eastern establishments 

 for the cure of the sick at the earliest Christian periods; the 

 Infirmary of Monte Casino in the fifth century, the Hotel-Dieu at 

 Lyons in the sixth, the Hotel-Dieu at Paris in the seventh, and 

 the myriad refuges for the sick and suffering which sprang up 

 in every part of Europe during the following centuries. Vital- 

 ized by this stream, all conceivable growths of mercy bloomed 

 forth. To say nothing of those at an earlier period, we have in 

 the time of the Crusades great charitable organizations like the 

 Order of St. John of Jerusalem, and thenceforward every means 

 of bringing the spirit of Jesus to help afflicted humanity. So, 

 too, through all those ages we have a succession of men and 

 women devoting themselves to works of mercy, culminating 

 during modern times in saints like Vincent de Paul, Francke, 

 Howard, Florence Nightingale, Elizabeth Fry, and Muhlenberg. 



But while this vast influence, poured forth from the heart 

 of the founder of Christianity, streamed through century after 

 century, inspiring every development of mercy, there came from 

 those who organized the Church which bears his name, and from 

 those who afterward developed and directed it, another stream of 

 influence a theology drawn partly from prehistoric conceptions 

 of unseen powers, partly from ideas developed in the earliest 

 historic nations, but especially from the letter of the Hebrew and 

 Christian sacred books. 



The theology developed out of our sacred literature in rela- 

 tion to the cure of disease was mainly twofold : first, there was a 

 new and strong evolution of the old idea that physical disease is 

 produced by the wrath of God or the malice of Satan, or by a 

 combination of both, which theology was especially called in to 

 explain; secondly, there were evolved theories of miraculous 

 methods of cure, based upon modes of staying the divine anger, 

 or of thwarting Satanic malice. 



Along both these streams of influence, one arising in the life 

 of Jesus, and the other in the reasonings of theologians, legends of 

 miracles grew luxuriantly. It would be utterly unphilosophical 

 to attribute these as a whole to conscious fraud ; whatever part 

 priestcraft may have taken afterward in sundry discreditable 

 developments of them, the mass of miraculous legends, century 

 after century, grew up mainly in good faith, and as naturally as 

 elms along water-courses or flowers upon the prairie. 



