MAN'S
REDEMPTION
OF MAN
A Lay Sermon,
McEwan Hall Edinburgh,
Sunday July 2nd
1910
BY
WILLIAM OSLER
LONDON
CONSTABLE & CO. LTD
1913
Note.—This address was delivered at a service held for the students ofthe University of Edinburgh, in connection with the Edinburgh meetingof the National Association for the Prevention of Tuberculosis.
And a man shall be as an hiding-place from the wind, and a covert fromthe tempest; as rivers of water in a dry place; as the shadow of agreat rock in a weary land.
And the voice of weeping shall be no more heard in her, nor the voiceof crying. There shall be no more thence an infant of days, nor an oldman that has not filled his days.
(Isaiah.)
To man there has been published a triple gospel—of his soul, of hisgoods, of his body. Growing with his growth, preached and professed ina hundred different ways in various ages of the world, these gospelsrepresent the unceasing purpose of his widening thoughts.
The gospel of his relation to the powers unseen has brought sometimeshope, too often despair. In a wide outlook on the immediate and remoteeffects of the attempts to establish this relation, one eventdiscredits the great counsel of Confucius (who realized what a heavyyoke religion might be) to keep aloof from spiritual beings. Survivingthe accretions of twenty centuries, the life and immortality brought tolight by the gospel of Christ, remain the earnest desire of the bestportion of the race.
The gospel of his goods—of man's relation to his fellow men, iswritten in blood on every page of history. Quietly and slowly therighteousness that exalteth a nation, the principles of eternaljustice, have won acquiescence, at any rate in theory, though asnations and individuals we are still far from carrying them intopractice.
And the third gospel, the gospel of his body, which brings man intorelation with nature,—a true evangelion, the glad tidings of aconquest beside which all others sink into insignificance—is the finalconquest of nature, out of which has come man's redemption of man, thesubject to which I am desirous of directing your attention.
In the struggle for existence in which all life is engaged, disease andpain loom large as fundamental facts. The whole creation groaneth andtravaileth, and so red in tooth and claw with ravin is Nature, that, itis said, no animal in a wild state dies a natural death. The historyof man is the story of a great martyrdom—plague, pestilence andfamine, battle and murder, crimes unspeakable, tortures inconceivable,and the inhumanity of man to man has even outdone what appear to beatrocities in nature. In the Grammar of Assent (chap. x) CardinalNewman has an interesting paragraph on this great mystery of thephysical world. Speaking of the amount of suffering bodily and mentalwhich is our lot and heritage, he says: "Not only is the Creator faroff, but some being of malignant nature seems to have got hold of us,and to be making us his sport. Let us say that there are a thousandmillions of men on the earth at this time; who can weigh and measurethe aggregate of pain which this one