by Isolde James-Griffiths | Mar 28, 2024 | The Nineteenth Century Awakening, Uncategorized
The next patient came in for an operation, fearful and agitated. He was tied down and given alcohol to drink to help deaden the pain. Despite this, as the surgeon cut through his body there was searing pain, agonising cries, and a traumatic experience. James Young Simpson, the observing medical student, was horrified. He left, his heart racing, determined to find a more effective form of pain relief.
It was a strange and epoch-making day on 4th November 1847, at 52 Queen St, Edinburgh. For days Simpson and his assistants, James Matthews Duncan and George Keith, had sought to discover the best form of anaesthetic. Professor James Miller, a devout Christian surgeon and Simpson’s next-door neighbour, had come in to check up on the three, “just to inquire if everyone was still alive”, for this was a hazardous series of experiments. Finally, following the earlier suggestion of David Waldie of Liverpool, Simpson took a bottle of chloroform out of a waste-paper basket, which had been made up by Professor William Gregory, and the three brave adventurers sniffed the solution. Soon they were unconscious, without any bad side effects. History was being made.
The first patient on whom Professor James Miller operated, with Simpson assisting with the use of chloroform, was a Gaelic-speaking lad from the Highlands. Encouraged by their success, Simpson, as a professor of midwifery, was keen to try it on a woman giving birth. Again, they were delighted at the outcome: a girl named Anaesthesia was born to the daughter of Dr Carstairs. Simpson light-heartedly nicknamed her his “patron St Anaesthesia”. Growing support from the medical establishment enabled Simpson to promote this form of pain relief, but the general public was suspicious. It was only when Queen Victoria gave birth to Leopold with the use of chloroform that the suspicion of most dissolved. In 1866 Simpson was made baronet in Scotland for his pioneering medical work.
One day an interviewer asked him, “What do you consider was the greatest discovery you ever made?”He expected the professor to speak about the medical use of anaesthetics, but instead Simpson looked intently at him, replying “That I have a Saviour.” Simpson went on to write his own personal account of how he became a Christian. “I saw another sight – it matters not when – myself a sinner standing on the brink of ruin, deserving nought but hell”, he wrote.“For one sin? No; for many sins committed against the unchanging laws of God. But again, I looked and saw JESUS, my substitute, scourged in my stead and dying on the cross for me. I looked and cried and was forgiven. And it seems to be my duty to tell you of that Saviour, to see if you will not also look and live… How simple it all becomes when the Holy Spirit opens the eyes!”
During his last days he suffered with great pain in his home in Queens St. His nephew, Robert Simpson, visited him often and recorded a diary, which his own descendant, another Robert, transcribed and gave to me. He left a moving account of his uncle’s last battle. “I shall never forget our conversation,” he wrote. “How he was cheered and comforted amid pain and weariness by his Saviour’s grace I cannot rightly describe. It was heaven begun on earth. He who had seen suffering in so many forms and had done so much to alleviate the pain of others was now in the furnace of affliction. But there he was sustained by the presence of the Son of Man. He who had so often stood by the bed of death and softened so many dying pillows was now face to face with the last enemy. Yet there was no murmuring under suffering, no terror in prospect of death. He had learnt to count these afflictions as but for a moment; he had been taught the secret of victory over death.”
“Now I saw a new heaven and a new earth… And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away” (Revelation 21:1-4, NKJV).
Image: James Young Simpson (1811-1870), unidentified photographer, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
by Paul James-Griffiths | Mar 25, 2024 | The Reformation, Uncategorized
Part 1: Restoring Biblical Authority
The watchword cry of the reformers throughout Europe was Sola Scriptura – Scripture alone as the authority for belief and practice, rather than the authority of the Vatican. This was the very heart of the Reformation in Scotland too. The reformers were convinced that every belief and practice in the church should line up with the Bible, which was the true measuring line. For example, it was understandable that Christians should respect and honour the memory of believers who had gone before them. Their examples should stir up Christians for every generation, and Scripture encourages this in Hebrews chapter 11. However, praying to Mary and the saints was seen as pagan idolatry because ‘there is one God and one Mediator between God and men, the Man Christ Jesus’ (1 Timothy 2:5, NKJV). Likewise, we cannot possibly earn eternal life through our good works, but through trusting in Christ alone, ‘For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast’ (Ephesians 2:8-9). The Roman Catholic transubstantiation belief, that the priest could just say some words in Latin and the communion would literally turn into the body and blood of Christ, was seen as blasphemy. The reformers reminded their persecutors that Jesus had clearly explained that eating Christ’s flesh and drinking his blood had a spiritual, not literal meaning (John 6:48-64).
The hierarchy which had been built up in the church reflected more that of the Roman Empire than the New Testament church. It was clear to the reformers that either this whole structure would have to be pulled down and rebuilt, or that true believers would have to leave the system and start again. In Scotland we were more rigorous than England in our zeal for reformation. Celibacy and special priests were rejected as being unbiblical because every Christian is a royal priest (1 Peter 2:9), and leaders of the church should be married (1 Timothy 3:1-6). The idea of popes, bishops, and abbots living like princes in palaces was horrific, for they should be servant-leaders of God’s people, following Christ’s example who washed the disciples’ feet and laid down his life for us. Thus, in Scotland, when the reformers rejected Romanism in favour of the Bible, they replaced this pyramid power structure with Presbyterianism – the rule of a team of godly elders, chosen by the vote of the people.
It is not surprising that the Romanist hierarchy fought tooth and nail to oppose this movement because it threatened their existence and their control over the people. They knew that if the Bible was made public for everyone to read, the church could split into different factions, but more than that, their system would be exposed as being fraudulent and contrary to the God they claimed to worship. Much is made of the Scottish reforming zeal when the crowds smashed down statues of the saints, destroyed stained-glass windows, and in some cases pulled down whole church buildings, but only one known Romanist priest was possibly executed. This has to be compared with the wholescale massacres of Protestants in Europe by Romanists. As such the Scottish Reformation, by comparison, was surprisingly subdued.
‘Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path’ (Psalm 119:105, NKJV).
Image: Magdalen Chapel, the Cowgate, Edinburgh. In this chapel the reformers met to establish the Protestant church in Scotland, Paul James-Griffiths
by Paul James-Griffiths | Aug 11, 2016 | Quotes from famous Christians in science and medicine, Uncategorized
Sir William Thomson, Lord Kelvin (1824-1907), physics
Formulator of the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics.
Do not be afraid of being free thinkers. If you think strongly enough you will be forced by science to the belief in God, which is the foundation of all Religion. You will find science not antagonistic, but helpful to Religion.
The Times, May 2, 1903, Lord Kelvin on Religion and Science, corrected by Lord Kelvin himself in The Life of William Thompson, Baron Kelvin of Largs, by S.P. Thompson
Sir James Young Simpson (1811-1907), pioneer of anaesthetics
But again I looked and saw Jesus, my substitute, scourged in my stead and dying on the cross for me. I looked and cried and was forgiven. And it seems to be my duty to tell you of that Saviour, to see if you will not also look and live: How simple it all becomes when the Holy Spirit opens the eyes!
From his own personal testimony, St Columba’s Free Church, Edinburgh, where he was an elder, reproduced by Sovereign Grace Union
Lord Joseph Lister (1827-1912), pioneer of antiseptics
I am a believer in the fundamental doctrines of Christianity.
Ann Lamont, 21 Great Scientists who believed the Bible, p.196, Creation Science Foundation, © 1995
Sir Ambrose Fleming (1849-1945), pioneer of electronics
There is abundant evidence that the Bible, though written by men, is not the product of the human mind. By countless multitudes it has always been revered as a communication to us from the Creator of the Universe.
Ann Lamont, 21 Great Scientists who believed the Bible, p.217, Creation Science Foundation, © 1995
George Washington Carver (1864-1943), pioneer of agricultural chemistry
Without my Saviour I am nothing.
The Lord has guided me. He has shown me the way, just as he will show everyone who turns to Him.
Ann Lamont, 21 Great Scientists who believed the Bible, p.228, Creation Science Foundation, © 1995
Max Planck (1858-1947), pioneer of quantum physics
Both religion and science need for their activities the belief in God, and moreover God stands for the former in the beginning, and for the latter at the end of the whole thinking. For the former, God represents the basis, for the latter – the crown of any reasoning concerning the world-view.
Max Planck, Religion und Naturwissenschaft, Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth Verlag, 1958, 27
Wernher Von Braun (1912-1977), pioneer of space rockets
An outlook… at the vast mysteries of the universe should only confirm our belief in the certainty of its Creator.
[Scientific concepts] exist only in the minds of men. Behind these concepts lies the reality which is being revealed to us, but only by the grace of God.
Ann Lamont, 21 Great Scientists who believed the Bible, p.250-1, Creation Science Foundation, © 1995
In conclusion
Many more pages of quotations of famous scientists and medical pioneers could be put together, but it would become a book, which is beyond the purpose of this article. The reader will also notice that I have not included anybody since Wernher von Braun died in 1977. This is not because there have not been any important scientists and medical pioneers who are Christians since then; on the contrary there have been many. However, many of those I have cited here were key founders of most of the major branches of science, and my purpose has been to show that Christians have clearly been heavily involved in the foundation and development of modern science, despite what today’s myth-makers would claim.
