Page:Medicine and the church; being a series of studies on the relationship between the practice of medicine and the church's ministry to the sick (IA medicinechurchbe00rhodiala).pdf/234

a spiritual offence of itself acts upon the bodily organism, by a mysterious law of the Divine government.^[1] (Here again we must not say that God sent the disease.) Surely, then, it may be argued, per contra, that a reverent reception of the Eucharist makes for health and life, for it brings the failing bodily and spiritual powers of the sick into contact with the Divine and immortal life which animates the mystical Body of Christ. This line of argument may be illustrated by the words of the late F. W. H. Myers: 'To keep our chemical energy at work, we live in a warm environment and from time to time take food. By analogy, in order to keep the spiritual energy at work, we should live in a spiritual environment, and possibly from time to time absorb some special influx of spiritual life.'^[2] It remains only to add that the words of administration in our Communion Office embody the truth for which we are pleading. 'The Body of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was given for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life.'

1. In the Cambridge Bible, note ad locum, Dr. Lias says we can well understand how a crime against His Body and Blood would deprive any Christian, who committed it, of His presence, and predispose it to sickness and even death.
2. Human Personality, i. 218; quoted by Dearmer, Body and Soul, p. 123.