St. Luke’s Day

“Luke, the beloved physician.”—Colossians iv. 14.

The Collect for to-day is grounded upon this verse. St. Luke is spoken of there as a physician of the body, and a physician of the soul. If you felt that this is a forced analogy, a sort of play upon words, it must have grated upon your ears when you heard it in a prayer. I believe that the two ideas are not brought together by any trick of the fancy; that they are actually and essentially related.

We may think of St. Luke as the writer of a Gospel, as the writer of the Acts of the Apostles; but we think of him first as the companion of St. Paul. He acquired his perfect understanding of that which he was to set down in a Gospel specially intended for the Gentiles, by preaching a Gospel to the Gentiles. He saw the Church growing, and was an instrument in making it grow, before he described its growth. And it is in this character especially that his profession as a physician becomes interesting and important to us.

No one can imagine that St. Paul chose his associate lightly; he would have denied that, in the strict sense of the word, he could choose at all. He himself was appointed to his work; a dispensation was committed to him; it was woe to him if he did not preach the Gospel. Those who were joined with him must have the like vocation. He was to exercise the spiritual discernment that was given to him in deciding whether they had. We know that he suffered what was probably the greatest loss and sorrow of his whole life, his separation from Barnabas, rather than be attended by one whom he judged unfit. John Mark, whom he opposed, must have had many merits; was himself, like St. Luke, if a similarity of names does not mislead us, destined to be an historian of our Lord’s acts upon earth. For one disqualification, St. Paul would not endure him as a fellow-labourer; surely the man who was taken in his place must have been supposed to have special endowments for that special function.

And yet it must strike many that this one circumstance of his being a physician—whether he was so when he undertook his mission, or became so afterwards—was a more serious objection than any temporary access of Jewish prejudice and timidity which caused Mark to return from Perga to Jerusalem could possibly have been. According to the common theory respecting spiritual gifts, it was of the greatest moment to the success of St. Paul’s preaching that he should prove himself capable of breaking through the laws of nature in all ways, but especially in the act of healing the sick. The great difference, we are often told, between the power of an Apostle and that of a modern missionary is, that he could work sudden and surprising cures on the bodies of men. Now, think how it must have interfered with the impression which these acts were to make on the beholders, to have had continually by his side a man whose business was known to be that of a healer; who professed to cure men, not by breaking through the laws of the human frame, but by understanding more of those laws than his fellows. Would not you have said, “Of all persons in the world, this is the one whom an Apostle having such powers as are attributed to him—pledged to use these powers for the recommendation of his doctrines—would not suffer to be one of his most insignificant subordinates, far less his honoured and constant colleague”?

Possibly it was this consideration which led the inventors of legends to determine, in spite of the Apostle’s express words, that St. Luke should be a painter rather than a physician. It was an ingenious compromise. They would grant that he practised some art—one of the ordinary human arts—if they could but relieve him from the imputation of being in any sense scientific. The hint once given it was sure to be prolific. The early chapters of St. Luke’s Gospel contain the fullest records of the Virgin Mother; why should he not have made a picture of her? Why should not that be the original of all after-pictures of her? Why should not he be the beginner of picture and image-worship in the Church? Those know little of the faculty of the fancy, as it has displayed itself in hagiologies, who would attempt to prescribe any limit to their speculations, or who should doubt that each possible guess, starting from an originally false assumption, would in process of time become a record of history, at least as closely associated with the popular conception of the Evangelist as any words which he wrote respecting the Teacher of the Gentiles, or respecting our Lord Himself.

But we, who have learnt to attach more importance to the words of Scripture than even to the most elaborate and best attested traditions, are bound to ask ourselves how this simple unstudied assertion of St. Paul, occurring in the midst of greetings to friends, that St. Luke was a physician, accords with the notions which we Protestants, no less than Romanists, attach to an inspired Preacher and Evangelist of the first age. If we cannot reconcile these presumptions with direct statements and with the general tenor of the Apostolic History, must they not be abandoned? If we should be compelled to abandon them, will it be a loss to our faith? May not our faith be much deepened if we should find that it stands in no opposition to science, but, from the beginning, in an intimate necessary alliance with science? Will our hope of the spread of the Gospel in our days be weakened? May we not discover that some of the hindrances which we have imagined to its diffusion are hindrances which we have created; that none of the mighty helps which God vouchsafed to His servants and heralds in the primitive times have been withdrawn from us? May we not thus be led to a profitable humiliation for our own faithlessness and feebleness; to an acknowledgment that it is not God who straitens us, but that we have resisted His designs of love to us and to mankind?

I. I have observed to you more than once that the wonderful powers which are described in the Acts of the Apostles as gifts of the Holy Spirit are said to have been exercised in places where enchanters had been busy; very commonly, indeed, for the express purpose of confounding enchanters. This is a characteristic circumstance in the Biblical narratives which no thoughtful or conscientious student can venture to overlook. I say in the Biblical narratives, for this is one of the points in which the relation between the records of the Old and the New Testament is most conspicuous. The rod of Moses is stretched over the river and over the air, to be a witness of the Lord God, the Deliverer of Captives, against the magicians who are practising tricks to confirm the tyranny of the Pharaohs. Elijah forbids the rain and raises the dead, because he is engaged in a warfare with the ministers of Baal, the servants of a cruel superstition which enslaved their minds and bodies to all the capricious influences of the outward world, to the worse caprices of a priest-ridden King and Queen. The Roman Empire, in the days of Claudius and Nero, swarms with the workers of miracles. Among them are found Jews—like Elymas and, probably, Simon—who bring the knowledge which they have derived from the Scriptures to aid in practising frauds upon the people. At Philippi, at Ephesus, magicians are driving a most successful trade. The rich are interested in it. The Government protects it. The old worship is shaken by the scepticism which the Greek teachers have spread through all the cities. These miracle-workers uphold it, or at least keep alive the dread of something mightier than man—something which may do him mischief,—far more effectually than the regular priests. Fear and curiosity gather about them. The materialists laugh at them in vain; the sense of the invisible in the hearts of human beings will not yield to any ridicule. Often the scoffer goes in secret to consult the prognosticator—to seek aid of the diviner. He has no certainty for anything. Why may not these arts be tried as well as any others? Why not trust lies about the demons just as well as the lies that pass current in ordinary society?

St. Paul had no doubt that these workers of miracles were in communion with a Spirit of Falsehood, the self-same spirit who prompted the falsehood of the tradesman, the politician, the state-augur. He had no doubt, therefore, that one part of the convictions which brought men to the feet of these spiritual gamblers was true. He did not come to Philippi and Ephesus with the message that our world and the unseen world are severed from each other; that a thick veil is between them which cannot be rent asunder. On the contrary, the tidings he brought were, that the veil had been rent asunder; that the Son of God, by His death in our nature, had consecrated a new and living way between earth and heaven. “And the witness,” he said, “of this union, the blessed fruit of it, is, that the Spirit of Him Who smote in pieces the tyranny of Pharaoh, and triumphed over the gods of Jezebel, is come to dwell among men; to set them free from their bondage to spirits of sea, or earth, or air; to claim them as the children of the Righteous and True Being—the Father of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. That Spirit dwelt in Him Who went about doing good, delivering the souls and bodies of men from plagues and torments—from the power of the Unclean Spirit. According to the promise which He made before He ascended, what He did He enables us to do also. We go forth in His Name preaching Redemption, manifesting Redemption; showing that men are not the slaves of those powers to whom the magicians would make them slaves, that they have a Father and a Deliverer, that the Spirit of Power is emphatically the Spirit of Truth.”

II. You will see that I am not twisting the language of the New Testament. I am quoting it literally, and illustrating one portion of it by another. But is it inconsistent with this language that Luke the Physician should be the chosen companion of Paul the Apostle? Would it interfere at all with this testimony that he should be attended by a man whose function was to heal? Was it necessary for this object that St. Paul’s acts should be supposed to be subversive of the Divine order, worked in defiance of science; not illustrations of the Divine order, proofs that we are under a righteous, not under a capricious Ruler, confutations of those who were subjecting the world to chance, to tyranny, to lying? Was not the deliberate selection of Luke by one who felt that it was the most awful, responsible duty which could devolve upon him to select a companion for such a work—that if he departed a hair’s-breadth from the Divine indications, to please any friend, to gratify any instinct of his own, he was committing a sin; was not this selection the most significant method of declaring to the world, “I do not come among you as an enchanter, sporting with laws, performing cures on human bodies by some legerdemain which may make you wonder at me and think I am some great one. I come in the name of the God of Truth, in the name of Jesus Christ, the true witness, in the name of the Spirit of Truth, to vindicate immutable laws; to draw contempt on all who would set up their own miserable wit or skill, or their own wicked inspirations, in opposition to them. I come to claim all true powers of healing, all honest studies, now and to the end of time, as the gifts of God’s Spirit, as the rightful and intended instruments in proclaiming God’s kingdom over men”?

III. On St. Luke’s day I have a right to ask that this clear indication of St. Paul’s mind—of his doctrine respecting the gifts which were committed to him—should be thoughtfully and earnestly pondered. For is it not true that St. Paul has been considered, is considered, by many who profess to regard him with the profoundest reverence, not as the foe of magicians, but as only a superior magician, working in another name and recommending another religion? You will admit, perhaps, that there are persons to whom this charge applies; that the miracle-workers in the Middle Ages, that the bishops and priests who, in our days, commend the vision of the Lady of Salette to the faith of their flocks, must hold the most exalted saint and the most perfect juggler to be exactly alike. But I do not dwell on such cases; I would only make one remark in reference to them. They are put forward as a trial of men’s faith. I think that they serve that end admirably. Any persons who do not believe that the Spirit of Truth has been given to men and dwells with men, to guide their consciences and reasons into truth and away from fictions——those persons who from any reason reject this part of Christian doctrine as fanatical or impossible—may, I think, be brought in due time, if not at once, to accept these stories, ancient and modern,—to accept also the general rule which has been so manfully propounded, that the merit of faith increases in the exact ratio that the external evidence for that which is to be believed diminishes. Any one who confesses such a Spirit of Truth as his abiding Preserver will hate these stories most for their own sake, more for the withering Atheism which is involved in the apologies for them.

My object however is, not to flatter our self-love by the condemnation of men with whom we are at variance, but to consider whether the habit of mind which takes one form in them does not take another scarcely less mischievous form among ourselves. What means the complaint that we have no power of recommending the Gospel to nations which have not yet received it by the gifts which wrought conviction in the hands of St. Paul and St. Luke? Do we not think in our hearts that those gifts were not spiritual gifts, as St. Paul said they were,—not gifts which testify of an invisible agency proceeding from Him Who gave laws to the sea that it should not pass; Who revealed Himself to the Israelites as their Lawgiver; Who sent His Son to fulfil His law and make it honourable,—but magical gifts, the truth of which consisted in the impression which they produced on the senses; which proved certain men to have a peculiar power and holiness, whereby they were able to violate laws, and so to outrage the name from which St. Peter declared that all health and life proceeded? If we did think that these gifts were spiritual and not magical at the first, what should hinder us from thinking that every cure effected without the aid of enchantment or quackery, but wisely, honestly, scientifically, is a proof that the Spirit of God is at work, now as then; is guiding the mind of the Physician out of darkness into light, out of falsehood to truth, now as then; is using him to bear witness of His gracious, health-giving, health-restoring purposes towards the sons of men? Is not the abandonment of such a belief by us clergymen a practical denial of the special lesson which the apostolical signs were to teach us, a determination not to own Him as a King in the highest, noblest region of His dominion, over the thoughts, judgments, energies of the human spirit? But whether we persist in this rebellion or not, physicians, I trust, will discern the necessity of asserting that for themselves which we have ignorantly or proudly refused them. I do not see how they can maintain their ground in the great battle which they have to fight with superstition and trickery; how they can vindicate the right and the duty of discarding every theory of their own or of other men, however sanctioned by prescription or anything which interferes with the acknowledgment of facts and the steadfast investigation of their significance; how they can pass by the temptations which will be perpetually presented to them of making their own conceits the measure of what is true in their studies, their own wills the supreme authority in their practice; how they can keep the highest ends before them amidst the continual motives to pursue lower ends, unless they confess that all gifts of insight into the condition of their fellow-men, all powers of ministering to them, are gifts of a Spirit of Truth Who watches over them at every moment, and can make them in the truest sense His agents and witnesses.

IV. In all I have said, I have wished to keep the thought prominently before you, that Luke the beloved Physician was a missionary as much as St. Paul himself. I have hailed the return of this day in the midst of our Indian troubles, because I believe it points out to us one of the most useful, one of the most obvious solutions of some of the difficulties by which the subject of Christianizing that part of our Empire is beset. You go into a land where the religion occupies every corner of life. Can you suppose you can prevail by preaching a doctrine? You go into a land which is possessed by all manner of charms and enchantments. Can you suppose that the mere announcement that you in the West have a religion in which there are no charms and enchantments will break them? You go into a country where malignant powers are believed to exercise a malignant influence over the bodies of men; and can you suppose that they who are actually suffering and groaning will listen to you and come to you, merely because you speak certain words, without showing that there is any power in them to remove those influences? You maintain that when Christ’s Gospel was preached in the world, 1800 years ago, to the worshippers of idols, those who preached it did reverse the wand of the enchanter; did heal sicknesses; did declare that they came as messengers of a God of health, Who cared that men should be set free from the plagues by which they are bound. You know from experience that the most inveterate prejudices of the Hindoos have given way before the proclamation of certain physical laws, because they had proofs that the observance of those physical laws leads, in a number of cases, to the removal of disease and pestilence. This has been a kind of interference with old superstitions which governments are not able to prevent—nay, in which they take part,—though, standing alone, it does threaten all that is good, all that may be restraining in these superstitions, as well as that which is evil and hateful.

Why could not the word and the act be joined? Why could not the missionary declare that the God of Whom he bears witness, is the God Who sent His Son to redeem the bodies as well as the souls of men, to take their nature, that He might bear their infirmities and hold conflict with their enemies? Why could he not say, “We come in His name to defy the enchantment of evil men and evil spirits; we come to you as messengers of health; we come to you bringing the sign and pledge that health is possible for you, that health is intended for you”? No doubt the cures would be imperfect, temporary, followed in a few years by death. So was it with those of the Apostles. And the imperfection helped instead of marring their message. They were sent to preach, not escape from death, but a Resurrection from it. They themselves bore about in their bodies the dying of the Lord Jesus; they themselves were glad to depart and be with Him. But their message throughout was a message of restoration, a message of life.

I have asked, Why must we put asunder things which God has joined together? I might have asked, Has it been possible to separate them? Has not the missionary, just because he preached of salvation just because he opened the New Testament, which spoke of Christ’s cures of the sick—been obliged to recognize the connection? Have not the converts he has made felt it? Has not even the surrounding population of Hindoos and Mussulmans felt it? What hinders, then, the same hearty co-operation of the teacher of the Gospel with the healer of the sick man, as in the early days of the Church? I answer, Our faithlessness at home; our low thoughts of God’s goodwill to mankind; our determination to separate the redemption of the soul from the redemption of the body; above all, our refusal to connect the discovery of truth in any direction with the gift of a Spirit of Truth. If we habitually thought of God in the way the Bible teaches us to think of Him, as the God of deliverance and salvation; if we believed that He is, and was, and is to come; that He is unchanged in that Will and Purpose which Christ revealed; if we took the acts of Christ on earth as the simplest, most decisive witnesses that that unchangeable Will and Purpose concerns the whole man; if we studied, with open eyes, the whole history of the Apostle Paul, as bearing upon that passage of it which I have considered to-day, we could not hesitate to believe that the promise of the day of Pentecost has been fulfilled in every new light that has been thrown on the laws of language, the relation of languages to each other, their mysterious connection with the life and being of man; in the patient efforts of every physical student; in the discoveries that have rewarded them; in the power of benefiting human beings, which accompanies that knowledge. Till we believe this we shall be in continual danger, on the one hand, of regarding the acts of God as capricious, of supposing that He makes Himself manifest chiefly in the contradiction or supersession of His own laws; on the other hand, of turning science into a kind of abstract divinity, the ground of a new superstition.

But when we do heartily and inwardly accept this faith; when it warms our hearts as well as enlightens our understanding; when we keep it alive by doing the works which God has prepared for us, what a new day will dawn upon our land and upon its most distant possessions! There is something too dazzling for our eyes in the brightness of it, even when it is seen afar off: perhaps we shall be wiser to think how we may hasten it than to dwell upon its splendours, which God will let us behold or not, as He knows to be best. But this I will say, that there are signs, and cheering signs, that such a day may be approaching. In every department of science and of art there are, I trust, men who have a sense of the awfulness of the powers which have been committed to them; a still deeper sense of the awfulness of truth. In this day and in our country the enemy of science would take little by his experiment of converting St. Luke from a physician into a painter. Our artists would turn upon him and say, If he was that and also a righteous man, he must have been a man of science; he must have sought the truth in the forms of Nature, truths in the human countenance,—in the Virgin’s, or any other. He must have been a protester on behalf of that which is, against everything that is counterfeit, that is idolatrous. Many a one, I believe, will be ready to add, He must have claimed his gift of painting as a gift from the Spirit of Truth—we must claim ours; or he must have abused it—we must abuse it—to the injury instead of the blessing of mankind. More and more firmly, brethren, may we all—clergymen, lawyers, physicians, artists—lay hold on that conviction; more and more steadily may we act upon it! Even the direst, the most overwhelming sorrows, which lead the citizens of our land to feel that each of them has a gift from God, that it must be submitted to His guidance, that it must be used for His glory and for the good of His children, will prove blessings for which Englishmen may give thanks from generation to generation.