Medical Missions, Plea for – Charles Spurgeon

OUR Lord was a medical missionary: he not only preached the gospel, but he opened the eyes of the blind, cured those who were afflicted with fevers, made the lame to leap as a deer, and the tongue of the dumb to sing. You may say that all this was miracle. I grant it, but the mode of performing the cure is not the point in hand, I am speaking of the thing itself. True enough is it that we cannot work the miracles, but we may do what is within human reach in the way of healing, and so we may follow our Lord, not with equal footsteps, but in the same track. I rejoice to see in Edinburgh and in Glasgow, and also in London, the establishment of Medical Missions. I believe in some parts of London nothing would be so likely to do good to the people as to make the vestry a dispensary, and the godly surgeon a deacon of the church, if not an evangelist. It may one day be thought possible to have deaconesses whose self-denying nursing of the sick poor shall introduce the gospel into the meanest hovels. At any rate there should be associated with the city missionary, with the Bible-woman, and with home missions everywhere, to as great a degree as may be possible, the earnest aid of beloved physicians and men learned in the healing are, who should seek to do good to men’s eyes, and ears, and legs, and feet, while others of us look to their spiritual infirmities. Many a young man who goes forth as a minister of Christ would do much more good if he understood a little of anatomy and medicine. He might be a double blessing to a remote hamlet, or to a district crowded with the poor. I pray for a closer connection between the surgeon and the Savior. I would invoke the aid of truly believing members of the faculty. May there be many who, like Luke, are both physicians and evangelists. Perhaps some Christian young man walking the hospitals, and fearing God, may find in these hints a guide as to his future career.