The Conservative Reformation and Its Theology - Saint Mary ...

9. Morbus is negatively the antithesis to health, the absence of health; and
secondly, in consequence of that lack, that which was originally useful and
pleasant becomes morbid and works misery. Take, for example, a healthy
tooth; everything in it is meant for use, and is promotive of comfort. Take
away its healthy state, and although no new thing is created, there is
misery and uselessness in place of its former healthy condition; there is
positive pain there.
10. Morbus is real morbus, vere morbus, before it comes to symptom.
A man is sick before he shows himself sick, and he shows himself sick
because he is sick. He may be sick for a time, and neither he nor others be
aware of it. The symptom is not the morbus, nor the cause of it, but the
result, the effect, the revelation of the morbus. The fever is before the
feverheat; the small-pox before the pustule; the obstruction of the pores
before the cough; there is morbus originis in the body before there is
morbus manifestus in it.
11. Morbus may be wholly independent of any act of ours. We may
have morbus because our neighbor has it. A child may have it because
the father has it, or the father may contract it from the child. One has
typhoid-fever or small-pox, and another takes it from him. There is
endemic morbus, epidemic morbus, contagious morbus, infectious morbus.
With the mystery of disease staring us in the face in the physical world, it
becomes us to be humble and reverent in regard to God's teachings in
reference to the mystery of His permission of hereditary sin in the moral
world. 12. Morbus, not only as a generic tendency, but in specific shape,
may be hereditary. There is an Erb-seuche as well as an Erbsünde. When
the skeptic shall thoroughly sound the mystery of that arrangement of
Providence by which the child of consumptive parents may be born not
only with a tendency to consumption, but with actual consumption, then
may he with more show of reason ask us to sound for him the fathomless
depths of the Divine permission of hereditary sin in our world.
13. Morbus in some forms defies all the curative powers of nature
and of art. Men will be so sick as to die, despite all