Chapter 3 - Moral Perfection

Summary

Chapter 3 takes a more biographical approach, seeing an example of moral human perfection in the, little known, but dedicated, life and work of Dr Henry Holland, a medical missionary in North India, compared favourably with the well-known, but flawed, medical missionary work of his more famous exact contemporary Albert Schweitzer. Together with the two earlier chapters, it is suggested that human perfection – understood in the contextual sense of it being difficult to see how something similar could at the time have been done better – is dynamic rather than absolute, just as John Wesley, Calvin, Aquinas and Gregory claimed, is highly focused and requires very considerable effort and hard work -- striving to get something as near to perfect as humanly possible. It concludes with a discussion of the recent work of the late Catholic medical anthropologist Paul Farmer.