Mr. World and Miss Church-Member: A Twentieth Century AllegoryHarris, W. S. (William Shuler)
Religion
Mr. World and Miss Church-Member: A Twentieth Century Allegory
Harris, W. S. (William Shuler)
Christian fiction
“Take four globules every hour,” he directed, as he gave her the
medicine, “and I would further advise that you travel for your health.”
“What climate would be most helpful to me?” she asked, for she was a
lady of considerable means and could go where she wished.
“A colder climate where you will be free from the noonday sun, and
breathe in a new atmosphere. This medicine will do the rest.”
She passed out of the door just as a feeble man was entering. He was
an old pilgrim and evidently suffering much.
The doctor seized him by the hand with a strange vigor not even
understood by Mr. World.
“So you are under the power of ‘La Grippe,’” saluted the doctor.
“Under the power of something, I am sure, for everything is wrong with
me, and everything seems wrong to me,” was the slow answer.
The doctor soon diagnosed his case, and gave him powders with
directions.
“It did not take you very long to attend to him,” said Mr. World, after
the aged man left the office.
“I deal with so many of that class that I keep the medicine ready. La
Grippe is a splendid thing for my trade. It is affecting more pilgrims
just now than any other disease. Some churches are more than decimated
by the ravages of this plague.”
The manager then conducted Mr. World into another office where the
doctor was just giving medical attention to a young lady who was
suffering with spiritual quinsy. It was so severe that she could not
testify for Christ, and she wilfully passed by the “Great Physician”
who could have healed her blessedly. She also passed by all the angels
of mercy who throng the King’s Highway. She turned a deaf ear to all
the singers who sang, “Then why will ye die?” Finally she was heavily
pressed by her disease and, seeing a physician’s office which she could
enter without climbing a step, she went in and chose rather to be
treated by a doctor of the Devil, as if dead to all the offers of mercy
which she had rejected.
She accepted his treatment without question, and even felt at ease in
conscience, thinking that the easy, bland method of this physician was
in every way preferable to the searching methods adopted by the Healer
Divine.
She regained her voice, but it lost that sweet accent of heaven which
once had characterized it. It was now difficult and embarrassing for
her to pronounce the name of Jesus.
All this proved painful and intolerable, so she took a by-path to the
left called “Unchastity” where she found a whole vocabulary of speech
more suited to her utterance.
She spent the rest of her days in the habitations of immorality along
the Broad Highway, unmindful of the tears and kindly solicitude of her
entreating friends.
Into the third medical wing the two went only to see the fiendish
program carried on there as in the other offices. The first patient
they saw was a young man who, through the misguidance of a weakling,
was persuaded to enter the office.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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