they are not earnest in blessing. Again: If people really believed that it was the Lord Jesus Christ who cured their sicknesses for them, they would behave, when they got well, more as the Lord Jesus Christ would wish them to behave. They would show forth their thankfulness not only with their lips, but in their lives. You who believe—you who say—that Christ has cured your sicknesses, show your faith by your works. Live like those who are alive again from the dead; who are not your own, but bought with a price, and bound to work for God with your bodies and your spirits, which are His—then, and then only, can either God or man believe you. Again: There is a third reason which makes one suspect that people do not mean what they say about this matter. I think too many say, “It has pleased God,” merely as an empty form of words, when all they mean is, “What must be, must, and it cannot be helped.” Else, why do they say, “It has pleased the Lord to send me sickness?” What is the use of saying, “It has pleased the Lord to cure me,” when you say in the same breath, “It has pleased the Lord to make me ill?” I know you will say that, “Of course, whatever happens must be the Lord’s will; if it did not please Him it would not happen.” I do not care for such words; I will have nothing to do with them. I will neither entangle you nor myself in those endless disputings and questions about freewill and necessity, which never yet have come to any conclusion, and never will, because they are too deep for poor short-sighted human beings like us. “To the law and to the testimony,” say I. I will hold to the words of the Bible; what it says, I will say; what it does not say I will not say, to please any man’s system of doctrines. And I say from the Bible that we have no more right to say, “It has pleased the Lord to make me sick,” than, “It has pleased the Lord to make me a sinner.” Scripture everywhere speaks of sickness as a real evil and a curse—a breaking of the health, and order, and strength, and harmony of God’s creation. It speaks of madmen as possessed with evil spirits; did _that_ please God? The woman who was bowed with a spirit of infirmity, and could not lift herself up—did our Lord say that it had pleased God to make her a wretched cripple? No; he spoke of her as this daughter of Israel, whom Satan had bound, and not God, this eighteen years; and that was His reason for healing her, even on the sabbath-day, because her disease was not the work of God, but of the cruel, disordering, destroying evil spirit which is at enmity with God. That was why Christ cured her. And _that_—for this is the point I have been coming to, step by step—that was the reason why, when John the Baptist sent to ask if Jesus was the Christ, our Lord answered: “Go and show John again those things which ye do see and hear: the blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf