Divine Healing
DR. WOODWARD is really something of a portent, and his book of testimony is a significant sign of the times. For here is a qualified doctor and a Harley Street specialist in the treatment of the kinds of injuries which athletes are apt to incur, who has a passionate con- viction that when our Lord bade His Church heal the sick He meant exactly and literally what He said. To him have been given special gifts not only of healing through faith, but also of communicating the faith by which the healing is done. Thus he has unquestionably been used as the instrument by which very many miraculous acts of healing have been performed, some of which he describes in this book. The first of them was a terrible test of his own faith, for he was called to heal by faith his own small son, stricken with the horrible disease of fulminating meningitis and lying unconscious on the very edge of death.
Thirty, or even twenty years ago, such a testimony from a qualified doctor would probably have labelled him as a crank, and it might even have caused many to doubt his professional competence. But today there is really no danger of that kind. The evidence piles up from every quarter that new visions of what healing really means and new powers (which are really old powers newly recollected) of restoration are coming from God upon all doctors, nurses and clergy who believe that all Christian ministry is, among other things, a divinely empowered attack on disease. Thus, when 1 began to visit the sick as a young curate twenty-five years ago, I supposed in my ignorance that my job was to fortify them to bear what must be borne. Today I never see a sick person without feeling that, if I can't or daren't say, "Take up thy bed and walk," I am somehow failing to do what I ought to be doing, and this through some incapacity or fault of my own. And this has been the experience and the growth of nearly every priest of my own age. For there is no doubt at all that new revelations of divine healing have been showered upon us in these last years, and that the whole pattern of life is being changed and enlarged by them. This is perhaps the greatest and most signifi- cant fact in the religious history of our own time.
The library of spiritual healing, though of quite recent growth, is
by now considerable; and Dr. Woodward's very impressive book is the latest addition to it. It is a testimony of personal experience, not a display of theory, and so it is very moving. Perhaps the most impressive part of it lies in what he says about how the necessary faith on which the healing depends can be created. It is true, of course, that every miracle both creates new faith and raises new questions, such as "Why to X and not to Y ?" and Dr. Woodward wisely does not attempt to find answers to essentially unanswerable questions. It is enough for him that the promise of the Gospel is being manifestly fulfilled on a wider scale than for years past, and that he has been called to take no small share in it.
ROGER LLOYD.
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