of his own, he has been able in the very beginning of his career to witness the treatment approved by the best medical science of his day. It is notorious that a young man who had not "walked the hospitals" would be regarded as unfit to enter the medical profession; so that if you could even be insensible to human suffering we could establish the claims of these institutions as indispensable means of medical education.

And this consideration gives appropriateness to an appeal on their behalf from the University pulpit. This University is justly proud of its Medical School. Great as is the vigour with which other branches of learning are pursued in Cambridge, I do not think that any school in the University has shown more activity or made greater advances in public estimation than its Medical School, which in quite recent years has risen from a position of comparative insignificance to take rank with those foremost in reputation for scientific knowledge. But a medical school without means of efficient hospital training is maimed in a vital part.

I have not thought it necessary to make myself specially acquainted with the working of the particular institution for which I now ask your help, except that I have learned that it deserves particular praise for the excellence of its nursing arrangements.

There are many here who must possess more knowledge of it than any which I as a stranger would be likely to acquire. It is enough for me that I can take for granted that, if you own the duty which lies on those to whom God has given the means to help their poorer brethren in those times of suffering which all the resources of wealth cannot wholly deprive of their terrors, the form in which you in this place can best show your sense of that duty is that which is now presented to you.

V

PAIN AND DISEASE1

"For this cause many are weak and sickly among you, and many sleep."--I CORINTHIANS xi. 30.

IF the collection to be made to-day did not suggest the topic, the subject of sickness is one which it would not have occurred to me to bring before a congregation such as the present, the majority of whom, being in healthy vigorous youth, have had little experience of illness. As a speculative question, however, the problem of disease must have presented difficulties to students of natural theology. Some of the strongest arguments for the wisdom and goodness of the Creator are drawn from the study of the anatomy of the human frame. Man's body is found to be a machine constructed with consummate art, full of what we can describe by no other word than contrivances, mechanical and chemical laws being dexterously taken advantage of, so as in every 1 Preached on Hospital Sunday, 1886.

way to provide for the wellbeing of their subject. That any one of these arrangements could be the result of undesigning chance is intensely improbable; but to suppose that chance could account for such a combination of successful arrangements compressed into a small compass is an outrageous absurdity. Nor can we regard the modern explanation as adequate which regards existing forms as presenting an appearance of perfection only because they are the survivals of failures which have disappeared. It is indeed an interesting and valuable observation that of what may be called the chance variations that take place in species, only those which give the individual an advantage in the struggle for existence are likely to be perpetuated. We can see how in this way provision has been made for the modification of species so as better to adapt themselves to any change in their surroundings. But no predecessor of existing forms of which we have any knowledge can properly be described as a failure. Each, when regarded in connection with the circumstances in which it was destined to live, presents marks of design as apparent as in any existing forms, and might equally be used to give evidence of the wisdom and goodness of its Creator. We must likewise bear in mind the harmony and balance of the organs of existing

creatures. We can conceive a chance variation causing in an individual a beneficial modification of one organ, but if we look to mere chance the chances are enormous that favourable modifications of other organs would not take place in the same individual. The individual in which the organ of sight had developed itself would not be likely to be capable of rapid motion or gifted with exceptional power to seize its prey. No hypothesis of the origin of living creatures which excludes the notion of plan and design can possibly be modified so as not to be equally at variance with all we know of the history and with antecedent probability.

But then we come face to face with the difficulty, How is it that a machine constructed with so much skill should be so liable to get out of order? The very delicacy and art of its construction multiplies the unfavourable chances to which it is exposed. How easy it would be for an arraigner of Providence to draw a picture of the sorrows and sufferings of human life; to tell of the privations endured by families whose main support has been prostrated by disease; to speak of tortures endured by the sufferer himself, which if inflicted by human hands would stamp their author as a monster of cruelty. In the book of Job, for instance, we have description of pains