While students are being educated in this
way, they are being made less able to do acceptable work for
the Master. The taxation that they undergo to obtain an extended
knowledge in medical lines unfits them to work as they should
in ministerial lines. Physical and mental weariness come because
of the overstrain of study, and because the students are encouraged
to labor unduly for the outcasts and the degraded. Thus some
are disqualified for the work that they might have done had they
begun missionary work where it was needed and let the medical
line come in as an essential part connected with the work of
the gospel ministry as a whole, as the hand is connected with
the body. Life is not to be imperiled in an effort to obtain
a medical education. There is danger, in some cases, that students
will ruin their health and unfit themselves to do the service
they might have done had they not been unwisely encouraged to
take a medical course.
Often erroneous opinions are transcribed
on the mind, and these lead to an unwise course of action. Students
should have time to talk with God, time to live in hourly, conscious
communion with the principles of truth and righteousness and
mercy. At this time straightforward investigation of the heart
is essential. The student must place himself where he can draw
from the Source of spiritual and intellectual power. He must
require that every cause which asks his sympathy and co-operation
has the approval of the reason which God has given him, and the
conscience, which the Holy Spirit is controlling. He is not to
perform an action that does not harmonize with the deep, holy
principles which minister light to his soul and vigor to his
will. Only thus can he do God the highest service. He is not
to be taught that medical missionary work will bind him to any
man, who shall dictate what his work shall be.
Medical missionary work is not to be drawn
apart and made separate from church organization. The medical
students are not to receive the idea that they may regard themselves
as amenable only to the leaders in the medical work. They are
to be left free to receive counsel from God. They are not to
pledge themselves and their future to anything that erring human
beings may outline for them. No thread of selfishness is to be
drawn into the web; no scheme is to be devised that has in it
one particle of injustice. Selfishness is not to control any
line of the work. Let us remember that individually we are working
in full view of the heavenly universe.