What the influence of Christ's life on earth on the medical art of His time was is a difficult question. It must be remembered that He came to save the souls and not the bodies of men, not to rapidly alter social conditions nor to teach science. The eternal life of man was _the_ subject of transcendent importance, and it is no doubt true that many of the early Christians neglected their bodies for the cure of their souls. As against this, the gospel of love taught that all men are brothers, both bond and free, and this led to mutual help in physical suffering, and to the foundation of charitable institutions. In the times of persecution of the Christians many of them welcomed suffering and death as the portal to eternal bliss. It has been asserted that the _miraculous cures_ wrought by Christ for His own purposes were an intimation to His followers to neglect the ordinary means of natural cure, and that this placed a Christian doctor in the position of having to abandon his calling. This is not so. To St. Luke--a Christian physician and the writer of the third Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles--the performance by Christ of miracles of healing presented no difficulties, for he was the travelling medical adviser of St. Paul, and accompanied him on three journeys, from Troas to Philippi, from Philippi to Jerusalem, and from Cæsarea to Rome (A.D. 62). St. Paul wrote: "For we would not, brethren, have you ignorant of our trouble which came to us in Asia, that we were pressed out of measure, above strength, insomuch that we despaired even of life, but we had the sentence of death in ourselves, that we should not trust in ourselves, but in God, which raiseth the dead: who delivered us from so great a death, and doth deliver: in whom we trust that He will yet deliver us." St. Paul exercised faith, but also used the means of cure prescribed by "the beloved physician." In a very scholarly book published by the Dublin University Press in 1882, the Rev. W. K. Hobart, LL.D., shows that St. Luke was acquainted with the technical medical terms of the Greek medical writers. St. Luke was an Asiatic Greek. Dr. Hobart writes: "Finally, it should not be left out of account that, in any illness from which he might be suffering, there was no one to whom St. Paul would be likely to apply with such confidence as to St. Luke, for it is probable that, in the whole extent of the Roman Empire, the only Christian physician at this time was St. Luke." In later years the pretence of performing miracles to cure diseases had a great effect in advancing superstition and retarding scientific investigation.