A Spiritual Clinique

Those upon whom falls the somewhat unenviable responsibility of teaching on the Keswick platform and at similar gatherings, frequently come into contact with persons who have been for years much oppressed and troubled with some chronic form of spiritual ailment. The ordinary teaching in Conventions does not always reach those serious cases of spiritual disease. They have to be dealt with individually, sometimes with very specific treatment. I have personally come into such frequent contact with this class of cases, that it occurred to me, and I believe was laid upon me by the Holy Spirit, to conduct during four consecutive morning meetings at the Keswick of 1907, a kind of spiritual clinique, selecting four of the most desperate sorts of spiritual difficulty, and seeking to show how the Master Physician, in the Word of God, treats these chronic ailments. This booklet is the outcome of this endeavour in His Name, skilfully to

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diagnose and deal with these spiritual diseases.

The four selected ailments are: unsubdued sin; unanswered prayer; persistent DARKNESS; and habitual unbelief. All the brethren who have anj’thing to do with Convention teaching will agree that these are some of the most desperate kinds of difficulty we have to deal with, and we are perpetually coming into contact with them.

Somewhat as a physician puts before his class a series of representative cases of disease, and seeks to show how, according to the highest authorities they must be dealt with, I desire to indicate the symptoms of each disease and how they should be met by the application of the Divine remedy.

By way of justification of this method, I may call attention to the fact that in the Word of God we have indications that the Lord Jesus looked upon all sin as a desperate and deadly disease, to be dealt with as such.

In Jer, viii. 22, the prophet represents God as asking: “Is there no balm in Gilead; is there no physician there? Why, then, is not the health of the daughter of my people recovered?” In Matthew ix. 6, 12, 13, a most memorable passage in the New Testament, our Lord referring probably to this

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passage in Jeremiah, says, “That ye may know that the Son of Man hath power on earth to forgive sins (then saith He to the sick of the palsy), Arise, take up thy bed, and go unto thine house.”

Here He teaches that His prime purpose in healing all manner of disease and sickness among the people, and restoring the dead to life, was not simply .to do mighty works, such as became Him, as the Son of God, or even to vindicate or authenticate His claim to the Messiahship, but rather to illustrate and demonstrate that He could deal with all spiritual difficulties, by dealing with those physical ailments which were types of the spiritual.

This opens up a vast field of thought. There are somewhat over thirty distinct cases of healing narrated in the Gospel narratives, no two being exactly alike, but all having differentiating features. Together they cover the whole range of physical ailments, and illustrate, therefore, the whole department of spiritual difficulty. The Lord Jesus thus shows Himself perfectly competent to deal with all spiritual troubles by thus healing all physical ills.

In the 12th verse of that same ninth chapter, He interprets His own language.

“They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick.” “The righteous’* are the wJiole, “sinners” are the sick. Thus He is Himself our authority for regarding all forms of spiritual ills as diseases, and looking to Him as the great soul Physician for their relief and cure.

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