- He Finds The Fountain Of Youth

The year was 1881. Throughout the Protestant world there was the sound of a going in the top of the mulberry trees, strange stirrings and motions of spiritual life, felt everywhere, but more distinctly noticed in independent fellowships and outside the sacred precincts of conventional Christianity. Laymen were awaking to the work which the clergy had been neglecting. The Salvation Army, a laymen’s movement, had been founded in London some years before by “General” William Booth, and was getting off to a running start in most of the great cities of the English-speaking world. It was the church of the humble, the army of the outcast and the friendless, but it had power, and with that disconcerting persistence of all movements that are born rather than merely organized, it knew where it was going and was on its way. The Holiness Movement, a renaissance of John Wesley Methodism with a few additions of its own, was just coming into notice in this country. Dwight L. Moody, the converted shoe clerk, was traveling up and down the country swaying thousands with his blunt unadorned eloquence, and winning hundreds of converts wherever he appeared. His success was encouraging other gifted soul winners to launch out into huge campaigns of evangelism. Rescue missions were springing up in all of the larger cities; street meetings were common, and religious parades, all equipped with uniforms, brass bands and drum majors, were becoming familiar sights in many places.
Taking it all in all things were moving in gospel circles. America was responding to the urgings of the Holy Ghost, but her response must be after her own genius and in a manner characteristic of the rough and robust spirit of a generation whose fathers had conquered a continent.
Out of the creative spiritual yearnings of those times was born a religious phenomenon, fathered by doctrine which, though never wholly approved by the guardians of formal orthodoxy, has nevertheless been loved by countless eminent saints of every shade of theological thought within the framework of evangelical Christianity from Paul’s day to the present time. We refer to the doctrine of divine healing. The sovereignty of God over the human body was being recognized by some reputable Bible teachers, and the privilege of the believer to take his sicknesses to God in prayer with expectation of relief was being taught by increasing numbers both in Europe and in the United States. Reports of supernatural healings were coming from widely separated parts of the world. Pastor Blumhardt in Germany, with his triumphant battle cry, “Jesus Is Victor!” was having amazing success in praying for the sick. Dr. W. E. Boardman in England, and Dr. Charles Cullis in the United States were seeing remarkable cures wrought in answer to believing prayer. Many less prominent persons were going quietly about their mission of mercy, praying the sick back to health, and humbly refusing to allow their names or their persons to be advertised.
No effort to understand the life and work of A. B. Simpson from this point on can be a complete success if we overlook the part played by Dr. Charles Cullis, the Boston physician. Dr. Cullis had been for some time head of a tuberculosis sanatorium in the city of Boston. His sympathies were deeply stirred by the distress and hopelessness of many of his patients, and being a sincere Christian he was moved to pray for their deliverance. There followed recoveries so speedy and unusual as to hint of the miraculous. Soon he discontinued the use of other means and sought to bring his patients back to normal health through the prayer of faith alone. The outcome was that he became convinced of the scripturalness of this method, and began to teach it as a Bible doctrine. He soon gave up his medical practice and went into full-time Christian work, preaching from place to place and praying with the sick. His work became widely known and many flocked to him for spiritual and physical help.
In the summer of 1881 Mr. Simpson visited Old Orchard, Maine, a famous summer resort and convention ground on the Atlantic Ocean. Heart and nerves had failed him. He moved about slowly in great weakness and bodily pain. Dr. Cullis was conducting a gospel meeting in an amphitheatre near the ocean side, and Mr. Simpson felt a desire to attend. In these meetings he experienced another of the great crises of his life, one of such revolutionizing character that it may be said that his real world ministry began there. All before had been preliminary.
At the Cullis meetings he heard men and women testify to supernatural healing. His own great need compelled him to give close attention to these testimonies. Not the sermons, mind you, nor the eloquence of the evangelist, nor the earnestness of the appeal, but the witness of those who had been healed. “I heard a great number of people testify that they had been healed by simply trusting the word of Christ, just as they would for salvation.”
Here was a sail on the horizon! A light, however dim, in the darkness! With that fine co-ordination of head and heart which always marked the man he went to work on the data before him. Those who testified, he reasoned, had no motive for misrepresenting the facts. They stood to gain nothing by their witness. All evil motive was ruled out. Of course, they could be mistaken, but two facts there were which could not be hurdled on that hypothesis: They had been ill, that was the worst one. They now stood upon their feet completely sound, that was the second. They believed the Lord Himself had touched them and delivered them from their afflictions. If they could be healed, why could not he? He was beginning to hope.
However, common sense advised caution. With all of his propensity for quick intuition and swift flight he was a Scotsman still, a son of canny James Simpson who had to be convinced. He would not be taken in by the enthusiasm of these well-intentioned people. He must know for himself. “It drove me to my Bible,” he testified. “I am so glad I did not go to man. At His feet alone, with my Bible open, and with no one to help or guide me, I became convinced that this was part of Christ’s glorious Gospel for a sinful and suffering world, for all who would believe and receive His word.”
He was running true to form. He now had a conviction, he had discovered a doctrine, but he must have spiritual confirmation or he could not go on. Reason was not enough. He must meet God and experience the power of the doctrine. The Spirit must furnish evidence that he understood the Scripture aright, that he was not mistaken in his position. So one Friday afternoon he walked out under the open sky, painfully, slowly, for he was always weak and out of breath in those days. A path into a pine wood invited him like an open door into a cathedral. There on a carpet of soft pine needles, with a fallen log for an altar, while the wind through the trees played an organ voluntary, he knelt and sought the face of his God.
Suddenly the power of Christ came upon him. It seemed as if God Himself was beside him, around him, filling all the fragrant sanctuary with the glory of His presence. “Every fiber in my soul,” he said afterwards, “was tingling with the sense of God’s presence.” Stretching his hands toward the green vaulted ceiling he took upon himself the vow that saved him from an early grave, and—as subsequent developments revealed—changed the entire direction of his ministry and made him the greatest exponent of divine healing that the Church has seen in a thousand years. Preacher that he was his vow must be divided into “points,” three in all, and they summed up his faith in the Word and his willingness to trust it forever. “It was so glorious to believe,” he said, and he made this vow: 1. He would solemnly accept the truth of divine healing as a part of the Word of God and of the Gospel of Christ. 2. He would take the Lord Jesus as his physical life, for all the needs of his body until all his life-work was done. 3. He solemnly promised to use this blessing for the glory of God and the good of others. All this he earnestly pledged himself to do, as he put it with trembling awful devotion, “as I shall meet Thee in that day.”
He left that piney temple a man physically transformed. A few days later he went on a long hike into the country, did this weakling minister for whom the grave had been eagerly waiting, and climbed a mountain three thousand feet high. “When I reached the mountain top,” he relates joyfully, “I seemed to be at the gate of heaven, and the world of weakness and fear was lying at my feet. From that time I have had a new heart in this breast.” The old trouble never visited him again.
Facts are glorious, tough, stubborn things, and they are fine criteria against which to measure our beliefs. Wesley taught that any doctrine which was found untenable in practice should come under suspicion of being erroneous and should be carefully re-examined in the light of Scripture. If it would not work in real life it was not likely to be the true teaching of the Bible. The converse is also true. Here was a man, weak and broken and hardly able to get about, who discovered in the Scriptures what he took to be a doctrine of hope for the physical body. He could be wrong. But he trusts it and becomes instantly and completely well. That may not be conclusive evidence of the correctness of the doctrine, but it is presumptive evidence of sufficient weight to deserve respectful consideration from every honest investigator.
Simpson soon found that he could not enjoy his new life unmolested. Many who had had no interest whatsoever in the thin sickly young minister so long as he was sickly and thin, leaped forward at once to protest his healing now that he was sound and well again. They assailed him for his belief that God will heal the body, and brought forward unanswerable arguments to show that He will do exactly nothing of the kind.
None of these objections did Mr. Simpson try to answer. He needed no arguments. He had something infinitely better. He had abounding, overflowing health, and he had it with hardly an interruption for the next thirty-five years. Before his healing he had looked so frail as to excite pity. After that experience there in the pine woods he took on much weight and looked the picture of vibrant health. Furthermore, he had found the secret of sustained health, of taking physical strength from the Lord day by day as he took oxygen from the atmosphere. And it was no fancy religious notion. For half a lifetime after this he was enabled to do a work so enormous as to stagger belief. Indeed I can think of none except Paul and Wesley who compare with him for quantity of work turned out. Year after year he kept at his mighty task, with hardly a day out for rest or recreation, up to within a few months of his death. These are stout tenacious facts. They are hard to circumvent. Whatever our beliefs may be the facts are there challenging us, demanding to be explained. Maybe Mr. Simpson’s explanation is as good as any: “I do not desire to provoke argument, but I give my humble testimony, and to me it is very real and very wonderful: I know it is the Lord.”
In all candor, it must be said that not all who opposed him belonged to the scribes and Pharisees. Many men of unquestioned sincerity and genuine Christian character took issue with him. And it cannot be denied that as the years went by much of the criticism he suffered was invited by his persistent support of the doctrine of divine life for the body. For he did not forget point three of his vow there in the pine woods. He would use the truth of healing to bless mankind. For the rest of his life he preached divine healing. Always he subordinated it to the greater truth of salvation through the blood of Christ, but always he kept the charge he felt had been committed to him for the suffering bodies of men.
Whether he would or not the name of A. B. Simpson and the doctrine of divine healing were wedded for life. The Irish have a proverb, “Whoever marries a mountainy woman marries the mountain.” Mr. Simpson soon learned that in embracing divine healing he had opened his arms to all of its relatives, good and bad, for all time, past and present. The disadvantages went with the blessings. Every believer in the doctrine was forced to carry the odium of every fanatical excess which might have been practiced in the name of healing since the dim dawn and abysm of time. Mr. Simpson was not so naive as to be surprised by this. He rather expected it, but it hurt him, nonetheless. He never enjoyed being a martyr. He was willing to be eaten by the lion if God willed it so, but he never sought out a lion and made suggestions to it. He loved people too much to enjoy their enmity.
When he began to hold his great conventions criticism rose like a cloud of locusts and hovered over every city where he appeared. Editorial condemnation in current religious papers was scorching hot. Sarcasm, invective, solemn stupid arguments buttressed by carefully misused texts of Scripture, all were employed in an effort to discredit him in the eyes of the public. Of course the effort succeeded to some extent. For the rest of his days he bore the stigmata of what he called “questionable if not false, teaching.” By many he was rejected outright. They had heard about those crackpot divine healing people and they would have none of it. They are not to be blamed for this. They were rejecting A. B· Simpson for the abuses practiced by others. They could not discriminate. All believers in the doctrine were by them tarred with the same stick. In spite of the obvious sincerity of the man himself, in spite of the thousands won to Christ through his labors, in spite of the Christ-centered, well-balanced message which he preached, and the dignity and decorum manifested in all his public meetings, he still had to endure misunderstanding and suspicion to the end of his days. And the Society he formed has, to some degree, inherited his cross.