Connecticut western news., 1890-04-23
SERMON BY DIR. TALMAGE,
CHRIST THE ALL POWERFUL SUR
 GEON OF THE WORLD.

BROOKLYN, April 2O-The audiences Dr. Talmage has had on Sunday even ings, since the burning of the ,Taber- nacle drove his congregation to the shelter of the Academy of Music, have been something phenomenal. This evening the spacious building was filled in every part Tho popular preacher discoursed on the profession of healing. His text was Matthew xxi, 5: The blind receive their sight, and the laine walk. the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear" He said:
 THE MERCIFUL ART OF THE SURGEON.
 Doctor" I said to a distinguished surgeon, do you not get worn out with constantly seeing so many wounds and broken bones and distor. tions of the human body2' "Oh, mo-" he answered, ''all that is overcome by my joy in curing them" A sub Timer or more merciful art never came down from heaven than the art of sur gerry. Catastrophe and disease entered the. earth so early that one of the first wants of the world was doctor. Our crippled and agonized human race called for surgeon and family phy- sician for many years before they came. The first surgeons who an- .swered this call were ministers of re- ligion, namely, the Egyptian priests. And what a grand thing if all clergy men were also doctors all D. D. were M D. s, for there are so many eases where body and soul need treat 5ment at the same time, consolation and medicine, theology and therapeutics. AS the first surgeons of the world were also ministers of religion. may these two professions always be in full sympathy! But under what disad vantages the early surgeons worked, from the fact that the dissection of the human body was forbidden, first by the pagans and then by the early Christians! Apes being the brutes most like the human race, were dis sected, but no human body might be unfolded for physiological and ana tomical exploration, and the surgeons had to guess what was inside the tenn pie by looking at the outside of it. If they failed in any surgical operation of the city, as was Archagathus be- tempt to save patient.
  ming kept calling for surgeons, and their first skill is spoken of in Genesis, where they employed their art for the incisions of sacred rite, God mak- ing surgery the predecessor of bap- tism; and we see it again II Kings, where Ahaziah, the monarch, stepped on some cracked lattice work in the palace, and it broke, and he fell from the upper to the lower floor, and he was so hurt that he sent to the village of Ekron for aid; and Esculapius, who wrought such won ders of surgery that he was deified, and temples were built for his worship at Pergamos; and Epidaurus and Pc delirius introduced for the relief of the world phlebotomy; and Damocedes cured the dislocated ankle of King Da- rius, and the cancer of his queen; and Hippocrates put successful hand on fractures, and introduced amputation and Praxagoras removed Instructions; l; and Herophilus began dissection; and Erasistratus removed tumors; and Celsius, the Roman surgeon, removed cataract from the eye. and used the Spanish fly; and Heliodorus arrested disease of the throat and Alexander. of Tralles, treated the eye; and Rhazas cauterized for the prevention of hy drophobia; and Percival Pott came to combat diseases of the spine; and in our own century we have had a Roux and Lasray in France, an Ast. ley Cooper and an Abernethy in Great Britain, and 8 Valentine Mott and Willard Parker and Samuel D. Gross in America, and galaxy of living surgeons as brilliant as their predeces- sors. What mighty progress in the bafhing of disease since the crippled and sick of ancient cities were laid along the streets, that people who had ever been hurt or disordered in the same way might suggest what had bet ter be done for the patients; and the priests of olden time, who were con stantly suffering from colds received in walking barefoot over the temple pavements, had to prescribe for them selves, and fractures were considered so far beyond all human cure that in- stead of calling in the surgeons the people only invoked the gods!
 THE PAINLESS SURGERY OF JESUS. But notwithstanding all the surgical and medical skill of the world, with what tenacity the old diseases hang on to the human race, and most of them are thousands of years old, and in our Bibles we read of them: the car buncles of Job and Hezekiah; the pal pitation of the heart spoken of in Deuteronomy; the sunstroke of child carried from the fields of Shunem, crying. My head my head" King Asa's disease of the feet. which was l~f~ '~Ek ko~
 that called for dental surgery, the skill of which, quite equal to anything modern, is still seen in the filled mo- lars of the unrolled Egyptian mum mics; the ophthalmia caused by the juice of the newly ripe fig, leaving the people blind at the roadside; epi- lepsy, as in the case of the young man often falling into the fire, aud oft into the water; hypochondria, as of Nebu- chadnezzar, who imagined himself an OK, and going out to the fields to pas ture; the withered hand, which in Bible times, as now, came from the destruction of the main artery or from paralysis of the chief nerNe; the wounds of the man whom the thieves left for dead on the road to Jericho, and whom the good Samaritan nursed, pouring in oil and wine-wine to cleanse the wound, and oil to soothe it. Thank God for what surgery has done for the alleviation and cure of human suffering.
 But the world wanted a surgery without pain. Drs. Parre and Hick man and Simpson and Warner and Jackson, with their amazing genius. came on, and with their an@sthetics benumbed the patient with narcotics and ethers as the ancients did with hasheesh and mandrake, and quieted