MR. SPURGEON ON SICKNESS.
MR. SPURGEON sometimes says original things, but it is one of the sources of his influence that he fre- quently embodies in a short colloquial sentence a belief current for ages, but usually expressed in too many and over-solemn words. In the address to ministers which he is now pub- lishing in the Sword and Trowel, we find this month one of these In the matter of faith-healing, health is set before us as if it were the great thing to be desired above all things. Is it so ? I venture to say that the greatest earthly blessing that God can give to any of us is health, with the ezeeption of sielotess. Sickness has frequently been of more use to the saints of God than health. If some men that I know of could only be favoured with a month of rheumatism, it would mellow them marvellously, by God's grace. Assuredly they need something better to preach than what they now give their people; and possibly they would learn it in the chamber of suffering. I would not wish any man a long time of sickness and pain ; but a twist now and then one might almost ask for him. A sick wife, a new-made grave, poverty, slander, sinking of spirit, might teach lessons nowhere else to be learned so well. Trials drive us to the realities of religion." We shall, we fear, horrify Mr. Spurgeon by saying that we believe this to be disputable doctrine,—an idea founded not so much on any teaching from above, or any result of accumu- lated experience, as on that desire which men seem unable to forego, to account in a simple way for the great mystery of pain. That suffering tends in some minds to sanctification, is a proposition too old to be lightly disputed; but Mr. Spurgeon, we suspect, means a great deal more than that, and a great deal more than he could verify by observation of mankind. He means that pain is spiritually good for all; that all are the better, as he says, for rheumatism ; that suffering, in short, especially the suffering of painful disease, mellows the general human heart. That is not true; is so far from true, that if we confine the word "mellows" to its popular sense, which is ripening accompanied by softness— one or two things, notably nuts, ripen into hardness—it is absolutely and demonstrably false. It is true, or true enough for the basis of a hypothesis, that sickness unto death usually softens ; but it is not the pain which softens,
but the closer view of another life, or rather, the more realistic view of the nothingness of this one. Even that effect is, however, limited, for if it were universal, it would be felt by all soldiers under heavy fire, and it is notorious that they often come out of a severe campaign, and especially out of an unusually bloody field, greater brutes than they went in. There are no criminals so cruel as some disbanded soldiers. Familiarity has cared them of a natural awe which seems essential to soundness of character, and even to perfect sanity. It is true, also, that on that large class of shallow beings who are unable to feel the sense of responsibility, or realise the obligations of life any more than birds do, or seem to do, sickness does sometimes exert a steadying effect, making it clear to them, we fancy, that their happiness rests on con- ditions which are accidental, or which, at all events, an aceident may pulverise. A period of poverty, however, does that for such people, as Mr. Spurgeon must have noticed, even more effectually than sickness, perhaps because it is unaccompanied by any lowering of the capacity alike for emotion and for fear. Terror is a great drill-serjeant, and in sickness the liability to terror—at least, that is the experience of the present writer —often dies away. But to say that disease accompanied by pain—for that, we suppose, is the meaning of Mr. Spinveon's special illustration from rheumatism—usually mellows the heart, is a totally unfounded statement. We will not ask Mr. Spurgeon, though we fairly might, whether he himself ever felt himself mellowed by toothache, whether, in fact, twelve hours of that most preposterous of tortures did not leave him consciously less of a Christian, so far as serenity is Christian, than he was before, for that would be to take an unfair advantage ; but we will assert that a large proportion of human beings, probably more than half, are rendered by painful suffering worse persons than they were. Their hearts are not only not mellowed, but are hardened, like Pharaoh's, under a sense, quite irrational it may be, but quite instinctive, of being hardly used. Very few of them go quite as far as Marie Bashkirtseff, and cry aloud, as that baby of genius did when informed that she had phthisis, "It is I, 0 God ! I! I!! I!!!" but their minds go a long way in that direction. Their selfishness is affronted instead of soothed, and they fall into the semi-defiant mood of the soldier or servant who conceives himself oppressed yet is precluded even from remonstrating reply. Their temper is anger in its sullen form, not mellow- ness, an anger which we have known continue in cases where illness has produced disfigurement or incapacity—as, for example, in that commonest of cases, incapacity to ride again —permanently through life. The ill-conditioned do not benefit by suffering, nor the resentful, nor, except in rare cases, the vain; while in an enormous number of cases its only effect is a reduc- tion of vitality, and consequently of the power of the will to overcome repining. We should say, indeed, that among the overstrung nervous city populations of modern times, the millions whose mental interests, or rather the objects pre- sented to their minds, are too numerous and too rapidly changed for their assimilating power, this lowering of vitality and will was the main result of sickness, and that to them one of the material conditions of being good—if we may affront Providence by a remark which seems to impugn its wisdom— is a sufficient supply of health. In the majority, of course, the lowered vitality reveals itself in that disposition to curse inaudibly, and without consciously sinning, which we call in women querulousness and in men temper ; but in a large number it reveals itself in positive harshness, the temper, perhaps, of David when, as he lay dying, he, naturally a man of cheerful soldierly and shepherd temper, ordered his old comrade's execution. Oliver Wendell Holmes read the human heart more profoundly, we suspect, than Mr. Spurgeon, when he made his Calvinist deacon turn suddenly worse, and almost detest instead of loving the whole human race, because a lusty young fellow had trodden heavily on his toe. Mr. Spurgeon may say that at all events the deacon would take more care for the future where and how he himself trod about, and that it is in the development of sympathy that the use of sickness appears ; but we should, with one reserve, demur even to that. It is true that men, being the slaves of experience, have often a difficulty in comprehending the pain they have never felt, Just as children never understand certain mental emotions ; but the majority do not sympathise because they suffer or have suffered. Rather they wish to pass on the pain, and so, however slightly, lessen their own by destroying its apparent limitation to themselves. "Let us all suffer," is the instinctive feeling, "and then we shall all be pitied." So far from pain awakening pity, men have committed murder under its influence, and selected for victims those who had no hand in its infliction. Mr. Spurgeon, we are sincerely grieved to note from published bulletins, is a martyr to gout, and may find that it makes him sympathetic ; but did he ever see that most genuine sign of grace in anybody but himself ? Certainly that is not the popular experience.
We question the sympathy as well as the mellowness pro- duced by pain, and we can, we think, bring forward one argument which the pastor of the Tabernacle will instantly acknowledge. Health, not disease, is Nature's will—that is, God's will—or otherwise whence comes that via raedicatrix naturx, that disposition of the wound to close itself and pro- duce a suture, upon which every doctor most relies P Does God designedly thwart, in Mr. Spurgeon's apprehension, so divine a means of graze, or build up frames allowed to throw off disease in order that its beneficent effect may not be felt? Or how does he himself reconcile it to his conscience to advocate sound hygiene, as we believe he has often done, when unsound hygiene would exercise so fine a spiritual effect ? Surely if his prescription of six weeks' rheumatism is to make of an indifferent pastor a good one, his duty is, so far as he can, to produce the rheumatism, to lecture on the spiritual virtue of damp beds, and preach on the mental soundness to be obtained by sitting in a draught in the rain. In truth, however, it is useless either to joke or argue with him, for he must, with his almost unique experience in disciples, know far better than we do how numerous are those in whom perfect health has pro- duced a certain sweetness- of nature and a readiness to feel for all who suffer, which are not, indeed, the equivalents of Christian character, but are its most promising foundations. The Puritan soldier, who is to him probably one of the noblest figures of earth, was not exactly a sickly man, nor were most of the early martyrs, as they stepped forward to meet the lions. St. Paul had some permanent trouble, which may have been a disease, and he was certainly a weak man ; but St. Peter had been a fisherman, accustomed to row all day, and probably from the hour of his birth to that of his martyrdom, had never had a headache. Some of the most saintly of men and women have passed through long lives singularly unharassed by physical pain, from which, again, many of the great philan- thropists, if we read their memoirs aright, have been much more free than the great scourges of mankind. It was not health which made of Ivan the Terrible such a tyrant, nor did Carlo Borromeo face the plague out of any sympathy derived from rheumatism. Mr. Spurgeon has once or twice repudiated asceticism in the most manly fashion, even, if he is not belied, giving scandal by a declaration that if he had to preach twice a day, he wanted a glass of porter to preach on ; and he must perceive that if his idea about sickness is well founded, it is to asceticism, the mortification of the body in order to benefit the mind, that it must inevitably lead. We do not believe in asceticism either, except possibly for peculiar natures, holding that the body is more perfectly forgotten in an easy-chair than in a hair-shirt ; but still less do we believe in the soul-healing virtues of rheumatism or any other painful disease. Long life is often a misery which does not educate ; wealth is always in some sense a temptation, if only because it is such an easy power to misuse ; and health may tend to the development of the pride of life. But for all that, our ancestors were not blaspheming when they asked of God to permit their Sovereigns "in health and wealth long to live."
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