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Testimonies for the Church Volume 1
the charity fund. I do not see the wisdom of making great calculations
for the future and letting those suffer who need help now. Move no
faster, brethren, than the unmistakable providence of God opens the
way before you.
The health reform is a branch of the special work of God for the
benefit of His people. I saw that in an institution established among
us the greatest danger would be of its managers’ departing from the
spirit of the present truth and from that simplicity which should ever
characterize the disciples of Christ. A warning was given me against
lowering the standard of truth in any way in such an institution in order
to help the feelings of unbelievers and thus secure their patronage.
The great object of receiving unbelievers into the institution is to lead
them to embrace the truth. If the standard be lowered, they will get the
impression that the truth is of little importance, and they will go away
in a state of mind harder of access than before.
But the greatest evil resulting from such a course would be its
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influence upon the poor, afflicted, believing patients, which would
affect the cause generally. They have been taught to trust in the prayer
of faith, and many of them are bowed down in spirit because prayer is
not now more fully answered. I saw that the reason why God did not
hear the prayers of His servants for the sick among us more fully was
that He could not be glorified in so doing while they were violating the
laws of health. And I also saw that He designed the health reform and
Health Institute to prepare the way for the prayer of faith to be fully
answered. Faith and good works should go hand in hand in relieving
the afflicted among us, and in fitting them to glorify God here and to
be saved at the coming of Christ. God forbid that these afflicted ones
should ever be disappointed and grieved in finding the managers of the
Institute working only from a worldly standpoint instead of adding to
the hygienic practice the blessings and virtues of nursing fathers and
mothers in Israel.
Let no one obtain the idea that the Institute is the place for them to
come to be raised up by the prayer of faith. That is the place to find
relief from disease by treatment and right habits of living, and to learn
how to avoid sickness. But if there is one place under the heavens more
than another where soothing, sympathizing prayer should be offered
by men and women of devotion and faith it is at such an institute.
Those who treat the sick should move forward in their important work