So, too, through all those ages we have a
succession of men and women devoting themselves to works of mercy,
culminating during modern times in saints like Vincent de Paul,
Francke, Howard, Elizabeth Fry, Florence Nightingale, and Muhlenberg.
But while this vast influence, poured forth from the heart
of the Founder of Christianity, streamed through century after
century, inspiring every development of mercy, there came from
those who organized the Church which bears his name, and from
those who afterward developed and directed it, another stream of
influence--a theology drawn partly from prehistoric conceptions
of unseen powers, partly from ideas developed in the earliest
historic nations, but especially from the letter of the Hebrew
and Christian sacred books.
The theology deveLoped out of our sacred literature in
relation to the cure of disease was mainly twofold: first, there
was a new and strong evolution of the old idea that physical
disease is produced by the wrath of God or the malice of Satan,
or by a combination of both, which theology was especially called
in to explain; secondly, there were evolved theories of
miraculous methods of cure, based upon modes of appeasing the
Divine anger, or of thwarting Satanic malice.
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