Charles Cullis: From Sickly Child to HERO of Faith
[Dr. Cullis, from Page, H. A. "Dr. Cullis' Labours." The Sunday Magazine. New Series 3. United Kingdom: Strahan & Company, 1874. Public domain]
CHARLES CULLIS WAS SICKLY as a child and into early manhood. While recovering from a collapse that prevented him from working, he reluctantly accepted an invitation by a friendly physician to study medicine. In nineteenth-century New England, medical training was largely a matter of reading and accompanying a doctor on his rounds. He went to live with the friendly doctor and in time married Chastina, his benefactor’s sister-in-law.
Meanwhile he felt that he ought to be a Christian, which he supposed to mean
I ought to read the Bible, pray, be confirmed, receive the Communion, and conform to the requirements of the Episcopal Church, in which I was bred. After considering the matter, I made up my mind, went forward, and thought myself all right.
Not long after their marriage, Chastina showed symptoms of tuberculosis and soon died. All Cullis’s plans and expectations of happiness vanished with her. Pondering the death of his hopes, he prayed “Lord, my wife is dead and I have no one now to make money for. I will give all I receive over expenses for thy cause.”
My vow was that of a slave, and it was a slave’s life that it led to. Selfishness was not dead; pride was not dead; vanity was not dead; envy and malice, and the whole brood of vipers which are born of self, still lived. And as for the love of Christ which passeth knowledge, I did not comprehend it, nor had responsive love been yet awakened in my heart for Christ in any considerable degree.
Dissatisfied with his own impurity and with the way ministries used his donations, he began to pray in earnest.
One day, whilst the daily cry of my soul to God was for the twofold boon, a pure heart and a special work, a stranger called upon me in behalf of a poor man in consumption who had no home, and had been refused admission into the public hospitals because he was incurable. It gave me a pang deep and keen to be compelled, as I was, to send the stranger away.... Instantly, however, a voice within said, as plainly as words could speak, “There, that is your work.”
That was in 1862. On this day, 27 September 1864, Dr. Cullis dedicated his first home for consumptives. He told no one of his financial needs, giving all he could from his own resources and trusting God for the rest, including provision of the right workers. There were no racial barriers. In course of time, he opened several more homes, all on faith.
The Consumptive Home in its first eight years took in eight hundred and seventy-two sick people, and forty-five orphan children, and gifts were received to the value of a hundred thousand pounds of our money [$12,370,000 in 2025 dollars according to Eric Nye’s calculator]. All have been accepted as coming from God, since no means save prayer and the sight of His servant working in this good cause have been adopted.
Not content to care for bodies, Cullis also endeavored to save souls. All but one of his 872 patients died expressing hope in Christ. Many had come from sordid backgrounds.
Financially the work often limped along. Once he had to sell his gold watch to keep the place going. Yet everyone was fed and every bill paid. After a while he was able to acquire a large property outside Boston. Patients were greeted by a sign reading “Have Faith in God.” The work branched out to a children’s home, a deaconess home, a chapel, a training school, a tract repository, several publications, and a convention center. Although he used homeopathic remedies, he also taught faith healing and frequently saw people healed through prayer.
—Dan Graves
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For more stories of healing, see CH 142 Divine Healing
