Rensselaer Republican, Volume 25, Number 39, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 May 1893 — CHRIST'S MAGNETISM. [ARTICLE]

CHRIST'S MAGNETISM.

The Sublime Circuit of Healing Power. The Origin of Christian Science—Medicine '~fSr Nervous Invalids—Dr. Tai. Rev.'Dr. Talmage preached at the Brooklyn Tabernacle last Sunday. Text: “Who touched me?”— Mark v, 31. A great crowd of excited people elbowing each other this way and that and Christ in the midst of the commotion. They were on the way to see him restore to complete health a dying person. Some thought he could effect the-cure, others that he could not. At any rate, it would be an interesting experiment. A very sick woman of twelve years’ invalidism is in the crowd. Some say her name was Martha, others say it was Veronica. Ido not know what her ram? was, but this is certain—she had tried all styles of cure. Every

cine on it. Shejiad employed many of the doctors of that time when medical science was more rude and rough and ignorant than we can imagine in this time, when the word physician or surgeon stands for potent and educated skill. Professor Lightfoot gives a list of what he supposes may have been the remedies she had applied. I suppose she had been blistered from head to foot and had tried the compress and had used all styles of astringent herbs, and she had been mauled and hacked and cut and lacerated until life to her was a plague. Besides that, the, Bible indicates her doctors' bills had run up frightfully, and she had paid money for medicines and for surgical attendance and for hygienic apparatus until-her purse was as exhausted as her body. What, poor woman, are you doing in that jostling crowd? Better go home and to bed and nurse your disorders. No! Wan and wasted and faint she stands there, her face distorted with suffering, and ever and anon biting her lip with some acute pain, and sobbing until her tears fall from her hollow eyes upon the faded dress, only able to stand because the crowd is so close to her pushing her this way and that. Stand back! Why do you crowd that poor body? Have you no consideration for a dying woman? But just at that time the crowd parts and this invalid comes almost up to Christ, but she is behind him and his human eye does not take her in. She has heard so much about his kindness to the sick, and she does feel so wretched she thinks if she can only just touch him once it will do her good. She will not touch him on the sacred head, for that might be irreverent. She will not touch him on the hand, for that might seem too familiar. She says: “I will, I think, touch him on his coat, not on the top of it nor on the bottonpjf the main fabric, but on the border, the blue border, the long threads of the fringe of that blue border; there can be no harm in that. I don’t think he will hurt me; I have heard so much about him. Besides that, I can stand this no longer. Twelve years of suffering have worn me out. This is my last hope. ” And she presses through the crowd still farther and reaches for Christ, but she cannot quite touch him. She pusnesstill further through the crowd and kneels and puts her finger to the edge of the blue fringe of the border. She touches it. Quick as an electric shock there thrilled back into her shattered nerves and shrunken veins and exhausted arteries and panting lungs and withered muscles health, rubicund heilth, God-given and complete health. Christ recognizes somehow that magnetic and healthful influence through the medium of the blue fringe of his garment had shot out. He turns and looks upon that excited crowd and startles them with the interrogatory of my text. “Who touched me?” - - -

Are you curious to know how that garment of Christ should have wrought such a cure for this suppliant invalid? I suppose that Christ was surcharged with vitality. You know that diseases may be conveyed from city to city by garments, as in case of epidemic, and I suppose that garments may be surcharged with health. I suppose that Christ had such physical magnetism that it permeated all his robe down to the last thread on the border of the blue fringe. But in addition to that there was a divine thrill, there was a miraculous potency, there was an omnipotent therapeutics, without which this twelve years’ invalid would not have been instantly restored. Now, if omnipotence cannot help others without depletion, how can we ever expect to bless the world without self-sacrifice? Notice also in this subject a Christ sensitive to human touch. We talk about God on a vast scale so much that we hardly appreciate his accessibility— God in magnitude rather than God in minutiae, God in the infinite rather than God in the infinitessimal. We talk about sensitive people, but Christ was the impersonation of all sensitiveness. The slightest im print of the smallest finger of human disability makes all the nerves of his head and heart and hand and feet vibrate. It not a stolid Christ, not a phlegmatic Christ, not a preoccupied Christ, not a hard Christ, not an iron-cased Christ, but an exquisitely sensitive Christ th it my text unveils. Is your trouble a home trouble? Christ shows himself especially sympathetic with questions of domesticity, as when at the wedding in

Cana be alleviated a housekeeper's predicament,, as when tears rushed forth at the broken home of Mary and Martha and Lazarus. Men are sometimes ashamed to weep. There are men who if the tears start will conceal them. They think it isun manly to cry. They do not seem tc understand it is m a nAi n ess an d evidence of a great heart. I am afraid of a man who does not know how to cry. The Christ of the text was not ashamed to cry out over human misfortune. Look at that deep lake of tears opened by the two words of the evangelist, “Jesus wept!” Behold Christ on the only day of his early triumph marching on lerusalem, the domes obliterated by the blinding rain of tears in his eyes and on his cheek, for when he beheld the city he wept overit. Oman of the many trials, O woman of the heartbreak, why do you not touch him? When I see this nervous woman coming to the Lord Jesus Christ, I say she is making the way for ah nervous people. Nervous people do not get much sympathy. If a man breaks his arm, everybody is sorry. and they talk about it all up and down the street. If a woman has an eye put out by accident, they say, “That’s a dreadful thing.” Everybody is asking about her convalescence. But when a person is suffering under the ailment of which I am now speaking they say, “Oh, that’s nothing; she’s a little nervous; that’s all,” putting a slight on the most agonizing of suffering. A Christian woman went to the Tract House in New York and asked for tracts for distribution. The first day she was out on her Christian errand she saw a policeman taking ah intoxicated woman to the station house. After the woman was discharged from custody this Christian tract distributer saw her coming away, all unkempt and unlovely. The tract distributer went up, threw her arms around heh neck and kissed her. The woman said, “Oh, my God, why do you kiss me?” “Well,” replied the other, “I think Jesus Christ told me to.” “Oh, no,” the woman said, “don’t you kiss me. It breaks my heart. Nobody has kissed me since my mother died.” But that sisterly kiss brought her to Christ—started her on the road to heaven. The world wants sympathy. St. Yoo of Kermartin one morning went out and saw a beggar asleep on his doorstep. The beggar had been all night in the cold. The next night St. Yoo compelled this beggar to come up in the house and sleep in the saint’s bed, while St. Yoo slept all night on the cold doorstep. Somebody asked him why that eccentricity. He replied: “It isn’t an eccentricity. I want to know how the p00r... suffer. I want to know their agonies that I may sympathize with them, and therefore I slept on this cold stone last night." That is the way Christ knows so much about our sorrows. He slept on the cold doorstep of an inhospitable world that would not let him in. He is sympathetic now with all the suffering and all the tried and all the perplexed. Oh, why do you not go and touch Him? I preach a Christ so near you can touch him—touch him with your guilt and get pardon—touch him with your trouble and get comfort —touch him with your bondage and get manumission. You have seen a man take hold of an electric chain. A man can with one hand take one end of the chain, and with the other hand he may take hold of Hie other end of the chain. Then a mmdred persons taking hold of that chain will altogether feel the electric power. You have seen that experiment. Well, Christ with one wounded hand takes hold of one end of the electric chain of love, and all earthly and angelic beings may lay holc| of that chain, and around and around in sublime and everlasting circuit runs the thrill of terrestial and celestial and brotherly and saintly and cherubic and seraphic and archangelic and divine sympathy. So that if this morning Christ should sweep his hand over this audience and say, “Who touched me?” there would be hundreds and thousands of voices responding; “I! I! I!”