"Fiat Experimentum in Corpore Vili"

is an old Latin proverb to the effect that the Divine Operator takes only the vilest and the most worthless of men to make His greatest experiments upon them. Now our students of surgery sit apart in their seats and watch with more or less sympathy while the most classical experiments are being made on the poor patients who are strapped down on the operator’s table. But it is only when a student has been overtaken himself with the same deadly disease and is himself strapped down on the same table, it is only then that he fully understands how the diseased part feels, and how the knife feels, and how his new health feels when it begins to come back to him. Now if you have never as yet been laid down on the divine table, nor have come under the divine knife, then sit still and study at a safe distance what all those subjects of His have to undergo at His hands on whom the God of their health makes His most famous experiments and works His most famous cures. At your present stage you can have no idea of the numbers of men, first and last, who have laid themselves down under the knife of the Great Operator, and all saying with the prophet and the pilgrim father, ‘ From the sole of the foot even to the head.’ And saying with the Stoic Emperor also, ‘From scalp to sole one slough and crust of sin. Some of the names of those many sufferers must come to your mind at this moment. But — is your own name among them? That is the one question in this whole world for you and for me. Because there is another world just at the door where the inhabitant shall not say I am sick; a world such that all they who dwell therein shall be forgiven their iniquity. But to begin with, what correctly and exactly is here meant by ‘ the sole of the foot, with all its wounds and bruises and putrefying sores? Well, surely this. As our outward man stands upon his foot, and upon the sole of his foot, so does our inward man stand first upon his mind, upon his understanding, and upon his power of thought. ‘From his deepest foundations upwards, says Pascal, ‘man is made to think. His whole manhood, his whole duty to God and to man, is simply to think about God and about man and about himself as he ought to think. That is the whole obligation and merit and dignity of man.’ And again, the same deepest of thinkers says: ‘ How great and how grand is the mind of man! And how vile and how hateful is the mind of man in its corruptions and in its pollutions!’ ‘Think much,’ says Teresa also to her thinking readers: ‘meditate much on the terrible hurt that your mind has received from the fall.” And surely no man who has a mind within him, and who attends to what goes on within him, can but think continually, and with the most solemnising thoughts, on the great disaster that has somehow befallen his mind. For what a doleful fountain of selfish thoughts is the mind of every man, and of foolish thoughts, and of disordered thoughts, and of mistimed and misplaced thoughts, and of brutish thoughts, and sometimes of absolutely diabolical thoughts! Who among us could endure for a single day that all his secret thoughts should be known to any of his fellow men? Rather would we cry with the lost at the last day: Rocks! fall on us, and hide us and these our evil thoughts from the face of God and man! Now the one point in all this world for a truly wise man is to find out how his so wounded and so bruised mind is to be closed and bound up and mollified with ointment. Well, surely, the first step to a perfect cure is to see and to admit that all this that the prophet says about himself and about all Israel is true of ourselves and of our own mind and the thoughts of our own mind. And then we must be humbled to the dust every day we live because of our condition simply as thinking men. We

must be like Agur, that wise man of the East, of whom it is recorded that he said to himself every day and every night after every day: ‘ Thou, Agur, hast again thought evil thoughts, thou hast again spoken evil words, and therefore thou hast again to lay thy hand upon thy mouth. Yes, wise Agur, thou hast divine wisdom with thee. For silence, absolute silence from all self-esteem

and all self-defence is the proper part of all such —

sinful men as we are. A silence only broken by constant confession and by constant prayer. Humility of mind, and a daily and hourly endeavour to fill his mind with the wisest and the holiest thoughts: that is the true part, and the becoming part, for every man who by the enlightenment of God has discovered somewhat of the disorders, and the corruptions, and the pollutions of his own mind. ‘ His sole delight,’ says the first of the Psalms, ‘is in the law of the Lord, and in His law doth he meditate day and night.” And working in that way at the healing of his mind, ‘he shall more and more become like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his thoughts, and his words, and his deeds in due season. His leaf also shall not wither, and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper.”

Sight, riches, healing of the mind,
O Lamb of God, I come!

Now we are all following that with our understanding. But it is just here that our will comes in either to make what we have just heard our salvation or our condemnation. One of us will hear what has been said and will assent to the truth of it and will with his whole will determine to do it and will be blessed in the deed. Another of us will hear all that has been said about the state of his mind, and, though he cannot deny the truth of it, he will turn away from the truth and will start objections to what has been said or to the way it has been said, in order to justify himself in not doing the truth he has heard. In other words, his will is all wrong. His understanding is not wholly right, but his willis far worse than his understanding. A man’s will is himself; it is his very self. And by his will he is able willingly and resolutely to turn away from the truth. A man’s will is as it were the helm of his whole life. And when the helm is moved the wrong way, the vessel is steered straight to destruction. ‘Our wills are ours, sings Tennyson, “to make them Thine.’ Christ’s will was His to make it His Father’s. And He made His own will His Father’s will when at that tremendous crisis-hour for Himself and for us He took the cup from His Father’s hand and said, Not My will but Thine be done! His will was a submissive will and a holy will and a sonship will long before that, and all along; but it became a still more submissive and a still more holy and a still more sonship will in Gethsemane and on Calvary. And we all have our Gethsemanes and our Calvarys offered to us and placed right on our path, in order that we may say what He said and may do what He did. In our Lord’s words — that we may take up His Cross upon our own will every day and then follow Him to where He now is. I worship Thee, sweet Will of God! And all Thy ways adore, And every day I live I seem To love Thee more and more.

Thou wert the end, the blessed rule
Of Jesus’ toils and tears;

Thou wert the passion of His heart
Those three and thirty years.

He always wins who sides with God,
To Him no chance is lost;

God’s will is sweetest to him when
It triumphs at his cost.

Ill that He blesses is our good,
And unblest good is ill;

And all is right that seems most wrong,
If it be His sweet Will!

But neither the mind nor the will nor anything else that is within us is so wounded and so bruised and so putrefied as is our sinful conscience. Our sinful conscience makes our country desolate like Isaiah’s country; and our city to be burned with fire like Jerusalem; it makes our city to be almost like Sodom to us and almost like unto Gomorrah. Now I will speak to the man with the most torn and tortured conscience in this house of God this night, and he will hear me. What was it, sir, that so tore your conscience to such wounds and bruises and putrefying sores as these? Come, and let us reason together — what was it? What was your very worst and. most conscience-exasperating sin? Was it your breaking some one’s heart; some one whose name has for long years been written in letters of hell-fire on your forehead? Was it ruining some one’s life? Was it beggaring some man that trusted you? Was it bringing your father’s and your mother’s grey hairs with sorrow to the grave? Or was it some still more scarlet and crimson sin than all these? For the sinfulness of some men’s sins is simply unspeakable and unthinkable to any one but themselves and their victims. Well, sir, there is only one ointment in all the world that will close and bind up and mollify such a conscience as yours. But blessed be God there zs such an ointment. And Paul entrusted the name of that ointment to the elders of Ephesus; and perhaps he did so because there may have been one man like you in that session of saints who needed that ointment every day he lived. And the name of that conscience-healing ointment is nothing less than the Boop or God. Not all the blood of beasts, On Jewish altars slain,

Could give the guilty conscience peace,
Or wash away the stain.

Thy work alone, O Christ!
Can ease this load of sin;

Thy blood alone, O Lamb of God,
Can give me peace within.

His blood can make the vilest clean;
His blood availed for me.

So sang Charles Wesley.

On one occasion a professor of surgery was taking a company of students round the beds of an incurable hospital when he came to a couch on which a man lay who was full of wounds and bruises and putrefying sores. Referring to some last and despairing operation that was to be performed on that living corpse the professor said to his students, ‘ Fiat experimentum in corpore vili!’? ‘Too true, gentlemen, said the dying man, ‘too true. But, pro hoc corpore vili, Jesus Christus mortuus est. That is to say: ‘Too true, gentlemen, but Jesus Christ died for this vile and worthless body and soul of mine.” The dying outcast was a graduate and a prodigal son of his Alma Mater the University of Cambridge. “Pro hoe corpore vili, he said, in a Latin that startled the students.

So much as to the mind and the will and the conscience. As to the imagination I shall let the prophet Ezekiel speak: ‘ Furthermore, He said to me, Son of man, seest thou what they do? And when [I looked, behold a hole in a secret wall. And He said to me, Go in, and see, and tell abroad, what they do in the chambers of their imagery. So I went in, and I saw’ — you all know what he saw. It is as our own Carlyle has it: ‘his imagination is either the hell-gate or the heaven-gate of every man’s heart. And then, in that man whose imagination has been the gate of hell, his whole head is sick and his whole heart faint. From the sole of his foot even unto his head there is no soundness in him, but wounds

— — and bruises and putrefying sores. But even to that most miserable of men the heaven-gate of his soul is not yet closed forever. And if he will henceforth use his mind aright, and his will, and his conscience, and his imagination — behold, a ladder set up on the earth, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon it. And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said, Surely, the Lord is in this place! This is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven. Speaking about Santa Teresa Pascal says that what so commended that wonderful woman to the men of her day and to all men ever since was her splendid mind; whereas what so commended her to God was her so utterly broken heart. And how broken her broken heart was you all remember who have ever read about her deathbed. She saw everything put into its proper place, and every one answering to their proper order, after which she attended to the divine offices of the day, and then went back to her bed and summoned her daughters around her. ‘ My children,’ she said, ‘ you must pardon me much. Do not imitate me. Do not live as I have lived. For I have been the greatest sinner in all Spain. I have not kept the laws that I laid down for others.’ And then she turned her face to the wall and said; ‘O Lord, the hour I have so much longed for has surely come at last. It is surely time that I was taken out of this banishment. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and a contrite heart Thou wilt not despise.

Create in me a clean heart, O God. A broken and a contrite heart’ was her continual cry till she died with these words on her lips, ‘ A broken and a contrite heart Thou wilt not despise.’ My brethren, it is a heart like David’s heart and Teresa’s heart and your heart that God binds up with His own hands: pouring into its wounds His best wine and His best oil. He closes all such wounds with His own hands; binding them up. and mollifying them with that one ointment, the name of which you know.

Well then, before you go down to your own house — How is all this with you? What is your wound? What is your bruise? What is your putrefying sore? Is it a secret tumour of swelling pride? Is it a secret abscess of brutish impurity? Is it a secret and an ever-gnawing envy? Or is it some malformation of the heart that you have inherited from those who went before you? Well all that taken together will not be able to kill you. All that taken together will only make your cure all the more classical and all the more unparalleled in the ‘Transactions,’ so to call them, of the Church of Christ. Meantime take these first principles of the Divine Hospital home with you. Give your mind and your will and your conscience and your imagination and your heart to these few first principles and make constant application of them to your own case. (1) It is God’s love that so cuts you to the quick. (2) There is to be no myrrh allowed nor chloroform nor any kind of mental or moral insensibility. (3) No pain no cure; little pain little cure; great pain great cure; lifelong pain here everlasting life without any more pain in that land where God Himself shall wipe away all tears from His patients’ eyes. (4) All His divine operations are performed in secret. (5) All His divine operations are performed free and for nothing: for His Hospital is fully endowed for the service of the poor. And (6) A perfect and an everlasting cure is absolutely guaranteed: absolutely guaranteed against all possible relapse. Fiat! Fiat experimentum in corpore vili!