his progress in bodily and spiritual health, in another case He knew that this was not so. So it was in the case of the leper of St. Mark i. 44. And, again, this difference of treatment may have been 'grounded,' as Archbishop Trench says, 'on the different moral conditions of the persons healed.' It is so still, for human nature remains constant to certain broad types. Some overwrought people require the absolute isolation of a 'rest cure'; others, who are moody and self-centred, can only rally their disused powers in contact with invigorating companionship. They are the unhappy victims of that numbness of spirit of which R. L. Stevenson writes so pathetically in his essay entitled 'Ordered South.'[1]
(iii) This brings us naturally to consider the special value which Christ attaches in His teaching to a corporate act of prayer. For this is the meaning of the words 'If any two of you shall agree on earth as touching anything that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of my Father which is in Heaven; for where two or three are gathered together in My Name, there am I in the midst of them.' And this it is which has moulded the form of the Lord's Prayer, and that of the great
- ↑ Cp. the medieval complaint of 'accidie.'
