A Limited Supply of Antitoxin
By David Paulson
It is estimated that cancer is now responsible for one out of every eight deaths that occur in women after the age of thirty-five years, yet up to the present time the efforts of our greatest physicians to stay its progress have been just as useless as the simple remedies administered by well-meaning but ignorant neighbors. But during the last few months light has begun to burst in. A New York woman was afflicted with cancer. The growth was removed by a surgeon, but it returned in various other parts of the body, including the liver. Then she began to be dropsical, and her abdomen filled with fluid. It was then observed that the cancerous growths began to disappear. Her physician assumed that this dropsical fluid contained an antitoxin made by her own body which was curing her cancer. The dropsy continued to increase, until it was necessary to withdraw the fluid, and this process has had to be repeated every few weeks. Her doctor, who is one of New York's most eminent physicians, was bright enough to conceive the idea that if there was something in this fluid that was able to cure the woman herself of cancer, it might also cure others; so after trying it first on mice which had cancer, and finding that it promptly cured them, he began4to inject it into the cancerous tumors of other patients, until forty-seven different patients had been treated with it. The result has been most surprising. In some cases the cancers have disappeared entirely, and most of the others have been remarkably benefited. Among the various accounts of this remarkable experiment is an article in the May McClure's, by Burton J. Hendrick. After describing some of these things in detail, he writes concerning this doctor:— “At present the amount of his curative serum is limited,—its continued supply depends upon a single human life, now in the advanced stages of a mortal disease. When this fluid, which for cancerous patients seems a veritable elixir of life, is exhausted, where will it be possible to obtain more? . . . In many ways, his present position is an extremely difficult and pathetic one. He has in his possession tremendous power to dissolve cancer tissue. Whether, after the present supply is exhausted, he will ever be able to get any more, he does not positively know.
“Naturally he is overwhelmed with requests from every side for even small quantities of this precious medicament. His daily mail is large and heart-rending. It seems as if every victim sick with the disease, every man and woman with stricken friends or relatives, every doctor with afflicted patients,—all are begging, imploring Dr. Hodenpyl for his fluid. If he acceded to even a small proportion of these requests, he would soon exhaust the supply. Of course he has to ignore them all.”
It is this last feature that especially impressed me. Here is a terrible disease, and it seems almost certain that the dropsical fluid of this one woman, herself on the verge of the grave, contains enough of a curative principle to go around to forty-seven patients. Others who are equally afflicted are clamoring, but have to be refused. This reminds one of that terrible affliction that broke out among the children of Israel,—not cancer, but the sting of those fiery serpents; and when Moses prayed for the people, the Lord told him to make a serpent of brass and set it up on a pole. “And it came to pass, that if a serpent had bitten any man, when he [any one, not merely forty-seven sufferers] beheld the serpent of brass, he lived.” Num. 21:9. Fortunately, only a few of those who will read this article are afflicted with cancer. But every one of us has at some time or other been bitten by “that old serpent, which is the devil.” Rev. 20:2. And that infection of sin planted in our systems is a more real, and a more terrible, and, from any human standpoint, a more incurable disease than cancer. We may even be so benumbed by its toxins that we actually do not appreciate what a terrible thing it is, but in that case we are in even greater need of treatment than those patients who appreciate their great need of it; and forfortunately this treatment is not limited to forty-seven sufferers, and there is no danger of the source of supply being cut off as long as there are any who will avail themselves of it. For, “as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life.” John 3:14, 15. The Word of God to-day accepted into the soul in humility and with prayer is the “sure-cure” antitoxin for a more horrible disease than cancer,—that is, sin. “The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.” John 6:63. “Thy word have I hid in mine heart [not upon the shelf], that I might not sin against thee.” Ps. 119:11. Are you satisfied with a mere form of the truth, or are you hungering and thirsting to have this antitoxin in your very soul? If you come like a hungry child, beseeching God to be fed at his table, he will satisfy your desire, sin will be killed at its very roots, and you will gain an everlasting victory over sin and its bewitching snares.