S. THE BELOVED PHYSICIAN.

THE BELOVED PHYSICIAN.

Luke, the beloved physician. — Colossians 4:14. The eighteenth day of October has long been kept in the Church as the Festival of the Evangelist, Saint Luke. Once every year, upon this day, the Church has chosen to remind us that the third Gospel did not drop down from the stars, and did not spring up out of the earth; but that it was written by a man, and is stamped with his personality; that it is the description of the life of Jesus through a special human medium; and that it is good for us, in our sense of the preciousness of the Gospel, to remember and study and be grateful to the man who wrote it. No doubt the institution of a Saint Luke’s day was meant to be a special commemoration of the evangelist. It is as the author of the Gospel that the Church is mostly interested in Saint Luke. That book is one of the four golden columns on which rest the Christian history. It is one of the four golden trumpets out of which has been blown the summons of Christ to the sons of men. And besides being one of four, it has also its own peculiar character. The reader of the Gospel of Saint Luke, if he has been intelligent and sympathetic, has always felt a sort of human breadth and richness in it which, in kind at least, was peculiarly its own. It was not so Jewish as the others. The very fact that it is the Gospel in which we have most fully told the story of the Lord’s nativity, and in which alone occurs the Parable of the Prodigal Son, is enough to show how well the Church does in commemorating always the man who wrote it. But it is not only as the writer of the Gospel that we know Saint Luke; and though we shall not forget for a moment, while we speak of him, that he is the writer of the Gospel, it is with reference to what is told us of him in other associations that I want to speak today. It is not much. At a certain point in the book of the Acts of the Apostles the writer of the book begins to use the first personal pronoun "we," in telling the story of the missionary journeys. At another certain point he ceases to say "we," and falls back into the use of the third person. The first verse of that same book of Acts identifies its author with the author of the Gospel which bears the name of Luke. Between these two points, then, of which I spoke, Luke was the fellow traveller and fellow-laborer of Paul who is the central figure of the larger portion of the book. During the time when they were thus together Paul wrote several epistles, among them two from his imprisonment at Rome, — one to the Church of the Colossians, and the other to his young disciple Timothy. In his letter to Timothy he says, "Only Luke is with mc." In his letter to the Colossians he uses the expression of my text, — "Luke, the beloved physician." He says, "Luke, the beloved physician, and Demas greet you!" That is almost all. By early tradition or by putting together incidental indications we are able to discern that Lucanus, as he was called in Latin, was a Gentile and a citizen of Antioch. All else is vague. Simply there came from among the men of Antioch one — a physician by profession — who travelled on his missionary journeys with Saint Paul, and by and by, before he died, wrote at Saint Paul’s suggestion the story of that life of Jesus which lay at the back of all the teaching in which the missionary journeys were engaged. And yet there is something more; for careful and ingenious study has seemed to make it clear that Luke’s character as a physician was a genuine and significant thing, and that it remained a strong and influential fact even after he became a missionary. His style, his choice of words, the special events of Christ’s life which he selects for his narration, bear marks of the physician’s habits of thought and speech; and an exceedingly ingenious comparison of times has made it curiously appear that Luke on several occasions came to Saint Paul just when the great apostle was most overcome with weakness, or was just recovering from some one of the severe attacks which every now and then broke down his feeble strength. Indeed I think we feel in these words from the letter to the Colossians, "Luke, the beloved physician," that Paul is speaking not merely of one who once had been, but of one who now was in practice of the art of healing. It is a present fact. It is a fact that excites affection. It is as a physician, among other things, that Luke travels with Paul from land to land or shares his long imprisonment at Rome.

Nothing of this same sort, so far as I remember, is true of any of the other of the early converts and missionaries of Christ. Of the professions of some of them we are told nothing; of others of them it would seem as if they left their former occupation and had no more to do with it after they had been converted. Of Luke alone it would appear as if he still continued to do as a Christian the same thing which he had done before he became Christ’s disciple. In him alone we see what since his time has been the natural and normal type of Christian life, — the inspiration of a definite old occupation by a new spiritual power, so that it continued to be exercised, and showed its genuine capacity and fulfilled its true ideal.

It is of this feature in the dimly-outlined story of Saint Luke that I wish to speak to you to-day. It suggests, I think, certain thoughts with reference first, to the general relation of the Christian life to men’s occupations and professions, and then, to the special profession with which the physician-disciple belonged. The disposition to find the simplicity of motive under the variety of action is one of the most familiar dispositions of our time. The first man, the savage man, the child, looks at the world and fancies as many forces as he sees moving things. The brook running from the hillside, the branch waving in the breezes, the solemn procession of the stars across the sky, the fire bursting from the mountain’s summit, the silent growth of cornfields, and the noisy rush of the tornado, — every one of these to the barbarian is absolutely separate. He fancies a new force for each. He crowns in his imagination one deity for the forest, and another for the fire, and another for the stream. It is one fruitful source of polytheism. And if, behind his multitude of deities, there sits in his thought some mighty lord over all, it is his only to keep in order a distracted universe, and to curb his quarrelsome divinities that he may preserve some sort of disorderly and fragmentary peace. What is the progress from that first barbarism? What is the maturity which comes out from that childishness of thought? Is it not the suspicion first, and then the certainty, of some few great motive forces lying deep in Nature which at least shall take these multitudinous forms of action and combine them into groups? What is the dream of him who watches this great grouping of the forms of action under the inspiration of a few great forces? Is it not that someday — far hence but certainly someday — these few great forces shall themselves be seen to be but utterances of one great force, vital enough to fill them all with vitality, and the complete simplicity of Nature be attained in the dependence of everything on someone first moving force, — when Nature herself shall become almost a real being standing at the centre of all life, and claiming all action out to the budding of the least flower and the waving of the lightest twig as a direct act of hers? And now suppose we turn from the world of Nature to the world of human action. Is not the one a parable of the other? Is not the world of human action, like the world of Nature, a scene of endless superficial variety which by and by we learn to gather into unity under the power of some central inspiration? One at his farm and another at his merchandise, one singing songs, one painting pictures, one pleading causes, one building houses, and one making shoes, — here is this countless diversity of human action. To the first observer that would seem to be everything. Each profession is a life by itself. It will have its own thoughts and standards, its own principles and passions, with which no other profession will have anything in common. So it is in certain crude communities where caste prevails. The caste of the shoemakers and the caste of the cooks have nothing to do with one another. But that is only the first aspect, — the earliest form of human life. Very soon he who lives begins to feel, and he who watches begins to discover, some deeper forces which are working underneath and giving a real unity to all this seemingly incoherent life. The love of independence, the love of family, the love of fame, — these great elemental desires of humanity are what are making the lawyer plead his case, and the mason lay his blocks of stone. As you walk the streets with this truth in your mind the furious discord begins to deepen and condense itself to music. It sounds in various strains to different men, and to the same man at different times, according as this or that one of the great dispositions of humanity is most dominant in the listener’s soul; but it is always rich and deep in proportion to the depths of the motive under which the soul tries to harmonize the discord. The deeper in the mass lies the point which you make your centre, so much the larger will be the portion of the substance of the mass which can group itself into a sphere around the point which you have chosen. And so the question will inevitably come into men’s minds, How will it be if you can reach one point which is the genuine centre of the whole mass and behind all the other forces which come from part way in can feel one supreme force of which they all are only modifications and exhibitions, issuing from the very heart of all? The dream of physics renews itself in morals. The physicist wonders whether perhaps all these special forces of heat and electricity and all the rest are only forms and phases of some great vital force which man shall someday find, and which, when it is found, shall perfectly account for all that goes on in the world of Nature; so the moralist asks himself whether these partial forces, the love of the exercise of powers, the love of independence, the love of family, the love of fame, may not, if they be carried deep enough, be found to meet in and to issue from one central force, — the love of God, — of which they are the utterances, and in their common belonging to which they may find unity. If this could be, if man’s pleasure in the exercise of his powers could be felt as the desire to realize the part of God’s nature which has been put forth in him, and the love of independence could seem to be the desire to relate oneself directly to the source of life, and the love of family could become the echo of God’s Fatherhood, and the love of fame could be made a seeking for God’s glory, — if this could be, would not the unity of life be perfect? Out from one central fountain of force — the soul’s love for God as its Father — would flow the power which would first take form in all the variety of secondary impulses which I have described, and then, at last, create all the endlessly various forms of activity of man; so that everything which man had a right to do at all upon the earth might be ideally done as an expression of it, — this central force, this love of man for God. Does it not change the aspect and feeling of his work in life, of that which we call his profession, when this which I have pictured as taking place someday universally takes place for any man? That which he has to do first, reaches inward to the heart of things — to the source of life — and finds its deepest motive. Then, that deepest motive reaches outward and becomes the inspiring force and the sufficient cause of what he has to do. If it has a real right to take hold of that deepest motive and say, "I am done because of it," is not the man’s profession glorified? Is it not redeemed? If it have drudgery connected with it (and where is the profession which has not?) is not its drudgery enlightened by this impulse from within, by being made part of the working out into utterance of this transcendent force? And is not its real unity with other professions, however absolutely different they may be from it in form, brought out and made vivid in their common relation to the source from which all spring? And, what perhaps is more than all, the man’s own life is harmonized; the general and special come to reconciliation. The glory and the detail of living cease to contend with and destroy each other. They begin to help each other. The talk about the way in which life is hindered by having to get a living is put to silence. These are the things which professional life needs, these three, — the redemption of its drudgery, the establishment of sympathy with other professions, and the harmony of the absolute and universal with the relative and special; and all of these must come when that which a man does in his profession reaches down and lays hold as its motive on the love of God. And now what is conversion? What was it that came to Luke of Antioch when suddenly or slowly by the preaching of Saint Paul he came to believe in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, and all that the Incarnation meant? We have his glowing book to tell us, we have the sweet and loving and triumphant story which he wrote of "all that Jesus began both to do and teach until the day in which He was taken up." But when we want to crowd it into one great word, I think we turn to what Paul the great apostle wrote — perhaps with Luke sitting by him at the time — to the Galatians: " The life which I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God. " Paul must have taught Luke the meaning of those words. Luke must have learned to say them of himself. Luke’s work in life consisted, in part at least, of the physician’s duty. Therefore Luke must have gone among his patients saying, "I do this by the faith of the Son of God." Tell me, when he could say that, was there no holier sacredness in the finger which he laid on the sick man’s pulse? Was there no truer sense of sympathy with the men whom he saw on every side of him engaged in other works than his? Was there no calmer sense of reconciliation between the general conception of existence which must have filled a mind like his and his special labor of the hour, no truer mutual understanding between the vast slow-heaving tide and the light waves which ran their races on its broad bosom when the sea of which they both were parts had given itself completely into the power of the great attraction? This is conversion. Suppose that there is nothing of it in the world to-day. Suppose that not a single man in all the world to-day knows Christ and all the love of God which Christ reveals; yet still the needs of life and the discovered aptitudes of various human creatures have created the professions and the trades, the tasks of life have been distributed and in their different groups, men are engaged in all these well-known occupations, — buying and teaching and digging and building and carving and doctoring, — you know the familiar list. And then suppose that suddenly there is put in at the heart of all this human action, as a totally new thing, the warm fire of the love of God. Suppose it comes in an instant in its full-grown strength. How it will take at once the old chambers and fill them with itself! How it will pour itself forth through the old channels! How they will become transfigured with the fire that will come burning through them! How the old professions, remaining the same things, will be such different things from what they were before! It will be as if you took a group of common men using the common human organs for most ordinary work and poured into each one of them the whole mind of Shakespeare or the whole soul of Saint John. Still the old physical machinery would be in use; but what words now those lips would speak which used to talk only of markets and of weather! What deeds now those hands would do that used to pull the wires of petty tricks! The professions have no more real character in them than the lips or the hands have. They get all their character, all their glory or disgrace, from the purpose and nature of the men who live in them, and send whatever kind of vitality they may possess into effect through them.

See then what are two at least of the effects that a true conversion (which means nothing less than the filling of the man who is within the profession with an entire sense of the love of God and a profound love of answering gratitude in return) must have upon the professional and technical life, — the life in certain arts and occupations of which the world must necessarily be full.

First, it must purify all the professions. It must reject and, as it were, turn away from each profession everything which is not capable of being filled and inspired with this spirit. So it becomes a judgment for us all. It melts away the dross and leaves the gold. It makes the man, first of all, purely the thing he means to be, without admixture of base and foreign elements which are corruption.

Then, secondly. It makes the professions to be no longer means of separation, but means of sympathy and union between men. My profession is totally different from yours. What then? If we fasten our thoughts upon our diverse methods of activity, the harder each works in his profession the more our lives are separated each from each. If both of us feel always beating through our diverse methods of activity the common purpose of the love of God, then the harder we work in different ways the more our lives are one. This is the promise of a future in which specialized action shall not merely be consistent with but shall help forward the realized brotherhood of man.

I look abroad upon the men who are gathered here this morning. I know how almost all of you are closely identified with someone among the many occupations and professions which together make up the active life of men. I know that not one of you who is at all thoughtful has failed to feel how this division of labor has its dangers. You have feared corruption, — that is, the loss or overlaying by baser accretions of the pure idea of your work; and you have feared narrowness, — the loss of broad human sympathy in the inevitable provincialness of what you have to do. Where is your safeguard against these things which you fear? Shall you give up the life of your profession and simply be a man at large? That you cannot do; and if you could it would not be good for most men, however it might answer for a few. Probably it would not be good for you. No, not by deserting your profession but by deepening it, by seeking a new life under it, by praying for and never resting satisfied until you find regeneration, — the new life lived by the faith of the Son of God; so only can your life of trade or art or profession be redeemed; so only can it become both for you and for the world a blessed thing. The necessary labors which the nature of man and his relations to this earth demand, all done by men full of the love of God, and each using to its best the special faculty that is in him, — the world needs no other millennium than that; and that millennium, however far away it looks, is not impossible.

I have spoken at length about professional life in general, and its effect upon the men who live it. Let me say a little, before I close, about the special professional life of Luke, the beloved physician, especially as it is linked to the life of the Apostle Paul. As he and Paul are seen travelling on together over land and sea, those two figures taken together represent in a broad way the total care of man for man. Paul is distinctively a man of the soul, a man of the spiritual life. We know him only in his spiritual labors. If he turns aside to tent-making, it is not for the sake of the tents which he can make, but simply that, earning his own living, he may be in true relations to the men whose souls he wants to save. Luke, on the other hand, is physical. His care is for the body. The two together, then, as we watch their figures, climbing side by side over mountains, sleeping side by side on the decks of little Mediterranean boats, standing side by side in the midst of little groups of hard-won disciples, — may we not say of them that they may be considered as recognizing and representing between them the double nature and the double need of man? Body and soul as man is, the ministry that would redeem him and relieve him must have a word to speak to, and a hand to lay upon, both soul and body. The two missionaries together make a sort of composite copy of the picture which Saint Matthew gives us of Jesus going "about all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and preaching the Gospel of the Kingdom, and healing all manner of disease among the people."

It is interesting, I think, to see how this belonging together of the two activities was so natural and genuine that they were not satisfied with being represented in two separate men, — each activity keeping its own man to itself, and the total being made up only by combination of the two, — but tried to crowd themselves, as it were, both together into each man of the travelling company of two. Thus Luke the physician was a preacher and a teacher also, as well as Paul; and as they journey together Paul is pondering, and no doubt sometimes discussing with his medical companion those great ideas of the sacredness of the body — the body the temple of the Holy Ghost — and the entire man, body, soul, and spirit, needing to be consecrated to God as one entire sacrifice, which he was always writing in his letters to his churches. This need of unity in the care for man is always reasserting itself. There is no true care for the body which forgets the soul. There is no true care for the soul which is not mindful of the body. The pressure of psychology on physiology, the wise and learned, also the unwise and ignorant, methods of reaching physical conditions through the change of mental states which are so prominent in the medical practice of to-day, bear witness to the first fact. All the kind of teaching which a few years ago went by the name of muscular Christianity gives testimony to the second.

It certainly is not aside from the purpose if I beg you to remember how the two ought to go together in your treatment of your own lives. The duty of physical health and the duty of spiritual purity and loftiness are not two duties; they are two parts of one duty, — which is the living of the completest life which it is possible for man to live. And the two parts minister to one another. Be good that you may be well; be well that you may be good. Both of those two injunctions are reasonable, and both are binding on us all. Sometimes on one side come exceptions. Sometimes a man must give up being well in order to be good. Never does an exception come upon the other side. Never is a man at liberty to give up being good in order to be well; but the normal life of man needs to be lived in obedience to both commands. Both Paul and Luke — or rather the whole of Luke and the whole of Paul — must be its masters. The way in which the care for the body and the care for the soul belong together, the way in which Luke and Paul have the same work to do, is indicated perhaps by the similarity of the vices to which both ministries are liable. Theology and medicine, the minister and the doctor, make the same mistakes. Both of them are liable to lose sight of their ends in their means, and to elaborate their systems with a cruel heartlessness, forgetting for the moment the purposes of mercy which are their warrant for existence. Thus theology has driven human souls into exquisite agony with its cold dissection of the most sacred feelings; and medicine has tortured sensitive animals in a recklessness of scientific vivisection which has no relation, direct or indirect, to human good. Again both ministries to man have been misled from time to time into a sacrifice of the plain and primary obligations of truthfulness to what the minister or doctor has dared to think a higher obligation. That which with more or less of justice has been called Jesuitism in religion on the one side, and on the other side the physician’s perversion or denial of the simple truth at the bed-side of his patient, — both of these moral wrongs, both of these indefensible sins, bear close relation to the sense of the sacredness of his trust which is in the heart of the modern Paul or Luke. And yet again, the narrowness of both, the stout and obstinate guard over their orthodoxy, the unwillingness that the work they loved should be done in any but the way that they approved, the anger with irregular practitioners, — who shall say which, the minister or the doctor, has borne the palm in these? But if these close-united ministries share the same vices, and so prove that they are one, what a far richer testimony to their oneness lies in the virtues which they have in common. I have said this morning that every honest occupation was to be considered as a channel of utterance for the divine life in the character and soul of the man who exercised it; but while this is true of all professions, there is still a difference in the degree of readiness and fullness with which different professions may give utterance to the inner fire. In some the crust of technical methods is more transparent than in others. In some the volcano torch, out of which the inner fire is to blaze, is held up supremely high. May we not say this of the two works which we are to-day taking Paul and Luke to represent: that, first, they above all others demand, as of fundamental importance, character in the men who do them; and that, second, the element of merciful feeling and readiness for self-sacrifice which are incidental to most other occupations are essential and indispensable in these two? These are what really mark how divine they are, and how they belong together. Neither of them can prosper with any true prosperity save in the hands of a man of goodness and of strength; and in both of them the fountain of pity is the only source of pure and unfailing life. I add to this that both live constantly in the immediate presence of awful and mysterious forces; that both are always, while they see before them human need, feeling behind them that which, call it by what name they will, is Divine Power — is God; and so are always pressed on by the demand for reverence and piety.

I add again that while each has its immediate appeal to make to terror and the fear of pain, the ultimate address of each must be to ardent courage and enthusiastic hope. I put all these together and then the figures of Paul and Luke walking together through history as the ministers of Christ, — the images of theology and medicine laboring in harmony for the redemption of man, for the saving of body, soul, and spirit, — become very sacred and impressive. May their fellowship become more generous and hearty as the years go on! May each gain greater honor for the other, and both become more humbly and transparently the ministers of Christ! Thus may the two together, working as if they were but one, grow to be more and more a worthy channel through which the helpfulness of God may flow forth to the neediness of man.