m_.[39] I send
for the physician, but I will hear him enter with those words of Peter,
_Jesus Christ maketh thee whole_;[40] I long for his presence, but I
look _that the power of the Lord should be present to heal me_.[41]

IV. PRAYER.

O most mighty and most merciful God, who art so the God of health and
strength, as that without thee all health is but the fuel, and all
strength but the bellows of sin; behold me under the vehemence of two
diseases, and under the necessity of two physicians, authorized by thee,
the bodily, and the spiritual physician. I come to both as to thine
ordinance, and bless and glorify thy name that, in both cases, thou hast
afforded help to man by the ministry of man. Even in the new Jerusalem,
in heaven itself, it hath pleased thee to discover a tree, which is _a
tree of life there, but the leaves thereof are for the healing of the
nations_.[42] Life itself is with thee there, for thou art life; and all
kinds of health, wrought upon us here by thine instruments, descend from
thence. _Thou wouldst have healed Babylon, but she is not healed._[43]
Take from me, O Lord, her perverseness, her wilfulness, her
refractoriness, and hear thy Spirit saying in my soul: Heal me, O Lord,
for I would be healed. _Ephraim saw his sickness, and Judah his wound;
then went Ephraim to the Assyrian, and sent to King Jareb, yet could not
he heal you, nor cure you of your wound._[44] Keep me back, O Lord, from
them who misprofess arts of healing the soul, or of the body, by means
not imprinted by thee in the church for the soul, or not in nature for
the body. There is no spiritual health to be had by superstition, nor
bodily by witchcraft; thou, Lord, and only thou, art Lord of both. Thou
in thyself art Lord of both, and thou in thy Son art the physician, the
applier of both. _With his stripes we are healed_,[45] says the prophet
there; there, before he was scourged, we were healed with his stripes;
how much more shall I be healed now, now when that which he hath already
suffered actually is actually and effectually applied to me? Is there
any thing incurable, upon which that balm drops? Any vein so empty as
that that blood cannot fill it? Thou promisest to heal the earth;[46]
but it is when the inhabitants of the earth _pray that thou wouldst heal
it_. Thou promisest to heal their waters, but _their miry places and
standing waters_, thou sayest there, _thou wilt not heal_.[47] My
returning to any sin, if I shoul