A WISE PRESCRIPTION

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Sep 28, 1904

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 30, No. 38.

A WISE PRESCRIPTION.

Some years ago a lady who tells the story herself, went to consult a famous physician about her health. She was a woman of nervous temperament, whose troubles—and she had many—had worried and excited her to such a pitch that the strain threatened her physical strength, and even her reason. She gave the doctor a list of her symptoms, and answered his questions, only to be astonished at his brief prescription at the end:—

“Madam, what you need is to read your Bible more.”

“But, doctor,” began the bewildered patient.

“Go home and read your Bible an hour a day,” the great man reiterated, with kindly authority. “Then come back to me a month from to-day.” And he bowed her out without a possibility of further protest.

At first his patient was inclined to be angry. Then she reflected that, at least, the prescription was not an expensive one. Besides, it certainly had been a long time since she had read the Bible regularly, she reflected, with a pang of conscience. Worldly cares had crowded out prayer and Bible study for years, and, tho she would have resented being called an irreligious woman, she had undoubtedly become a most careless Christian. She went home and set herself conscientiously to try the physician’s remedy.

In one month she went back to his office. “Well,” he said, smiling as he looked at her face. “I see you are an obedient patient, and have taken my prescription faithfully. Do you feel as if you needed any other medicine now?”

“No, doctor, I don’t,” she said honestly. “I feel like a different person—I hope I am a different person. But how did you know that was just what I needed?”

For answer the famous physician turned to his desk. There, worn and marked, lay an open Bible.

“Madam,” he said, with deep earnestness, “if I were to omit my daily reading of this book, I should lose my greatest source of strength and skill. I never go to an operation without reading my Bible, I never attend a distressing case without finding help in its pages. Your case called not for medicine, but for sources of peace and strength outside your own mind, and I showed you my own prescription, and knew it would cure.”

“Yet I confess, doctor,” said his patient, “that I came very near not taking it.”

“Very few are willing to try it, I find,” said the physician, smiling again. “But, he pardons many cases in my practice. He strengthens wonders if they would mercy that He gives us a

This is a true story. The doctor died only a little while ago, but his prescription remains. It will do no one any harm to try it.—Philadelphia Ledger.