Disciples, and for well on to two hundred years after Jesus' time, the
healing of the sick and the afflicted went hand in hand with the
preaching and the teaching of the Kingdom. There are those who believe
that it never should have been abandoned. As a well-known writer has
said: "Healing is the outward and practical attestation of the power and
genuineness of spiritual religion, and ought not to have dropped out of
the Church." Recent sincere efforts to re-establish it in church
practice, following thereby the Master's injunction, is indicative of
the thought that is alive in connection with the matter today.[A] From
the accounts that we have Jesus seems to have engaged in works of
healing more during his early than during his later ministry. He may
have used it as a means to an end. On account of his great love and
sympathy for the physical sufferer as well as for the moral sufferer, it
is but reasonable to suppose that it was an integral part of his
announced purpose--the saving of the life, of the entire life, for
usefulness, for service, for happiness.

And so we have this young Galilean prophet, coming from an hitherto
unknown Jewish family in the obscure little village of Nazareth, giving
obedience in common with his four brothers and his sisters to his father
and his mother; but by virtue of a supreme aptitude for and an
irresistible call to the things of the spirit--made irresistible through
his overwhelming love for the things of the spirit--he is early absorbed
by the realisation of the truth that God is his father and that all men
are brothers.

The thought that God is his father and that he bears a unique and filial
relationship to God so possesses him that he is filled, permeated with
the burning desire to make this newborn message of truth and thereby of
righteousness known to the world.

His own native religion, once vibrating through the souls of the
prophets as the voice of God, has become so obscured, so hedged about,
so killed by dogma, by ceremony, by outward observances, that it has
become a mean and pitiable thing, and produces mean and pitiable
conditions in the lives of his people. The institution has become so
overgrown that the spirit has gone. But God finds another prophet,
clearly and supremely open to His spirit, and Jesus comes as the
Messiah, the Divine Son of God, the Divine Son of Man, bringing to the
earth a new Dispensation. It is the message of the Divine Fatherhood of
God, God w