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but your interest and sympathy. I pray you to keep the school in mind as the nursing-place for God's little ones out of many a family amongst us, and to do all you can to make it prosper. I would ask you to remember it, and all who have to do with it, pastor, teachers, and pupils, in your prayers.

And may He, without Whom all our doings are nothing worth, bless our efforts to bring up in this place a people to His praise-a godly, honest, useful generation! May He grant that the young here brought to Him betimes, and early instructed in His holy religion, may, as they grow in years, grow in grace, and daily increase in His Holy Spirit more and more, till they come to His everlasting kingdom!

SERMON LX.

A HOSPITAL SERMON.

ST. LUKE XIV. 4.

And He took him and healed him and let him go.

THE case referred to in these words, was that of a poor man sick of the dropsy. Our Lord it appears, had gone into the house of one of the chief Pharisees to eat bread on a Sabbath day, and thither this poor afflicted man had followed Him. The Pharisees, always unfriendly to our Lord, always on the look out for an occasion against Him, watched whether He would venture to heal the man on the Sabbath. Jesus, Who knew what was passing in their thoughts, put to them the question plainly-Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath day? They held their peace. They did not say it was lawful, nor did they say it was unlawful. They were simply silent, waiting for their opportunity, hoping that He would do what was not lawful, and so give them a handle for persecution.

But the Lord defeated their malice, and at the same

time shewed mercy upon the sufferer. He took him and • healed him and let him go. And answered them saying, Which of you shall have an ass or an ox fallen into a pit and will not straightway pull him out on the Sabbath day? And they could not answer Him to these things.

Such is the connection of my text with the Gospel narrative. Taken apart and by itself, it represents to us very simply and truly a marked feature in our Saviour's character-His great tenderness and care for the sick.

Perhaps, we may say, that this was the thing which most of all distinguished Him. From the time that He began His ministry till the hour of His betrayal there was no work in which we see Him more constantly engaged than in this work of healing. Whatever the sickness was under which a human being was suffering, He had a cure for it. Blindness, palsy, deafness, want of speech, leprosy, dropsy, an issue of blood-whatever the complaint, of however aggravated a nature, of whatever duration, however unyielding to the remedies of the ordinary physician, it gave way at once before the word and will of our Lord. What He did in the case mentioned in the text, He did in a thousand other cases-He took the patient and healed him and let him go !

So frequent were His cures, and such the notoriety they had obtained for Him, that His steps were beset by applications for relief. We read in St. Mark vi. 56, that when the people of Gennesaret knew that He was arrived among them, they ran throughout that whole region, and began to carry about in beds those that were sick. And whithersoever He entered into villages, or cities, or countries,

they laid the sick in the streets, and besought Him that they might touch if it were but the border of His garment: and as many as touched Him were made whole!

Indeed, if we consider it, we shall find that the care of the body was hardly less an object with our Lord, than the care of the soul. He was as much the Physician as the Teacher-He came to give health-to make men perfectly whole.

And in so doing, He was really combating with man's great foe-sin. For what is sickness but a consequence of sin? not always of the individual sufferer's own sin, but often of sin in some of those who have preceded him.

There was no sickness in the world before our first parents had broken their Maker's law. Sickness came with other penalties in the train of disobedience. In discharging then the physician's office, in healing all manner of sickness and all manner of disease among the people, Christ was engaged in His proper work-the work of redemption-delivering man from the curse of God's violated law!

And note further-as our Lord was thus active Himself in the cure of sickness, so did He desire His disciples after Him to walk in His steps, and carry on the same work.

When the Twelve Apostles were first sent out by their Master, He gave them power (we are told) against unclean spirits to cast them out, and to heal all manner of sickness and all manner of disease. His words to them at parting were not only preach, saying the kingdom of heaven is at hand, but also heal the sick, cleanse the lepers!

Nor is this all-to testify further His compassion for the sick, and His desire that they should be succoured, Christ has made the care of them, a condition of our acceptance in the last day.

In that awful passage in which the Great Judgment is anticipated, in which, as in a picture, we see what will take place hereafter, the lost and the saved, the blessed and the condemned, are arranged in two divisions on either side of the Judge, marked by separate marks-and one of these marks is, that in their life-time they had visited, or had not visited the sick among their brethren.

Now, if what has been said be borne in mind-if we consider first, what our Lord's conduct itself was in regard to the afflicted in the body-how constant and unwearied He was in coming to their relief-Secondly, if we remember that He laid it as an especial charge upon His chosen apostles to go and do likewise-And thirdly, if we look at what He has announced of the proceeding of the Day of Judgment—we shall be agreed that a great importance is attached by Him to this work of healing and succouring the sick. We shall feel that to pass by, and take no notice of cases of sickness, ill suits with our profession of His religion—we shall feel, that as followers of Him, we ought to do all in our power to restore health to our suffering brethren-that we ought to seek them out, and minister unto them-do what we can to soothe and assuage their pains, lessen— if we cannot altogether remove-the burdens, which broken health, sickness, and disease, may have laid upon them.

And this brings me to the immediate object before us

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