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Miracles of Our Lord

by George MacDonald · English · Gutenberg #9103 · 309,809 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Miracles of Our Lord

Author: George MacDonald


        
Release date: October 1, 2005 [eBook #9103]
                Most recently updated: September 15, 2017

Language: English

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        Proofreaders. HTML version by Al Haines.


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MIRACLES OF OUR LORD ***




Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Graham Smith and Distributed
Proofreaders. HTML version by Al Haines.










THE MIRACLES OF OUR LORD

BY

George MacDonald


THE MIRACLES OF OUR LORD

1870



CONTENTS

    I. INTRODUCTION
   II. THE BEGINNING OF MIRACLES
  III. THE CURE OF SIMON'S WIFE'S MOTHER
   IV. MIRACLES OF HEALING UNSOLICITED
    V. MIRACLES OF HEALING SOLICITED BY THE SUFFERS
   VI. MIRACLES GRANTED TO THE PRAYER OF FRIENDS
  VII. THE CASTING OUT OF DEVILS
 VIII. THE RAISING OF THE DEAD
   IX. THE GOVERNMENT OF NATURE
    X. MIRACLES OF DESTRUCTION
   XI. THE RESURRECTION
  XII. THE TRANSFIGURATION




I. INTRODUCTION.


I have been requested to write some papers on our Lord's miracles. I
venture the attempt in the belief that, seeing they are one of the modes
in which his unseen life found expression, we are bound through them to
arrive at some knowledge of that life. For he has come, The Word of God,
that we may know God: every word of his then, as needful to the knowing
of himself, is needful to the knowing of God, and we must understand,
as far as we may, every one of his words and every one of his actions,
which, with him, were only another form of word. I believe this the
immediate end of our creation. And I believe that this will at length
result in the unravelling for us of what must now, more or less, appear
to every man the knotted and twisted coil of the universe.

It seems to me that it needs no great power of faith to believe in the
miracles--for true faith is a power, not a mere yielding. There are far
harder things to believe than the miracles. For a man is not required to
believe in them save as believing in Jesus. If a man can believe that
there is a God, he may well believe that, having made creatures capable
of hungering and thirsting for him, he must be capable of speaking a
word to guide them in their feeling after him. And if he is a grand
God, a God worthy of being God, yea (his metaphysics even may show the
seeker), if he is a God capable of being God, he will speak the clearest
grandest word of guidance which he can utter intelligible to his
creatures. For us, that word must simply be the gathering of all the
expressions of his visible works into an infinite human face, lighted up
by an infinite human soul behind it, namely, that potential essence of
man, if I may use a word of my own, which was in the beginning with God.
If God should _thus_ hear the cry of the noblest of his creatures, for
such are all they who do cry after him, and in very deed show them his
face, it is but natural to expect that the deeds of the great messenger
should be just the works of the Father done in little. If he came to
reveal his Father in miniature, as it were (for in these unspeakable
things we can but use figures, and the homeliest may be the holiest), to
tone down his great voice, which, too loud for men to hear it aright,
could but sound to them as an inarticulate thundering, into such a still
small voice as might enter their human ears in welcome human speech,
then the works that his Father does so widely, so grandly that they
transcend the vision of men, the Son must do briefly and sharply before
their very eyes.

This, I think, is the true nature of the miracles, an epitome of God's
processes in nature beheld in immediate connection with their source--a
source as yet lost to the eyes and too often to the hearts of men in the
far-receding gradations of continuous law. That men might see the will
of God at work, Jesus did the works of his Father thus.

Here I will suppose some honest, and therefore honourable, reader
objecting: But do you not thus place the miracles in dignity below the
ordinary processes of nature? I answer: The miracles are mightier far
than any goings on of nature as beheld by common eyes, dissociating them
from a living Will; but the miracles are surely less than those mighty
goings on of nature with God beheld at their heart. In the name of him
who delighted to say "My Father is greater than I," I will say that his
miracles in bread and in wine were far less grand and less beautiful
than the works of the Father they represented, in making the corn
to grow in the valleys, and the grapes to drink the sunlight on the
hill-sides of the world, with all their infinitudes of tender gradation
and delicate mystery of birth. But the Son of the Father be praised,
who, as it were, condensed these mysteries before us, and let us see
the precious gifts coming at once from gracious hands--hands that love
could kiss and nails could wound.

There are some, I think, who would perhaps find it more possible to
accept the New Testament story if the miracles did not stand in the way.
But perhaps, again, it would be easier for them, to accept both if they
could once look into the true heart of these miracles. So long as they
regard only the surface of them, they will, most likely, see in them
only a violation of the laws of nature: when they behold the heart of
them, they will recognize there at least a possible fulfilment of her
deepest laws.

With such, however, is not my main business now, any more than with
those who cannot believe in a God at all, and therefore to whom a
miracle is an absurdity. I may, however, just make this one remark with
respect to the latter--that perhaps it is better they should believe in
no God than believe in such a God as they have yet been able to imagine.
Perhaps thus they are nearer to a true faith--except indeed they prefer
the notion of the Unconscious generating the Conscious, to that of a
self-existent Love, creative in virtue of its being love. Such have
never loved woman or child save after a fashion which has left them
content that death should seize on the beloved and bear them back to the
maternal dust. But I doubt if there can be any who thus would choose a
sleep--walking Pan before a wakeful Father. At least, they cannot know
the Father and choose the Pan.

Let us then recognize the works of the Father as epitomized in the
miracles of the Son. What in the hands of the Father are the mighty
motions and progresses and conquests of life, in the hands of the Son
are miracles. I do not myself believe that he valued the working of
these miracles as he valued the utterance of the truth in words; but all
that he did had the one root, _obedience_, in which alone can any son
be free. And what is the highest obedience? Simply a following of the
Father--a doing of what the Father does. Every true father wills that
his child should be as he is in his deepest love, in his highest hope.
All that Jesus does is of his Father. What we see in the Son is of the
Father. What his works mean concerning him, they mean concerning the
Father.

Much as I shrink from the notion of a formal shaping out of design in
any great life, so unlike the endless freedom and spontaneity of nature
(and He is the Nature of nature), I cannot help observing that his first
miracle was one of creation--at least, is to our eyes more like creation
than almost any other--for who can say that it was creation, not knowing
in the least what creation is, or what was the process in this miracle?




II. THE BEGINNING OF MIRACLES.


Already Jesus had his disciples, although as yet he had done no mighty
works. They followed him for himself and for his mighty words. With his
mother they accompanied him to a merry-making at a wedding. With no
retiring regard, with no introverted look of self-consciousness or
self-withdrawal, but more human than any of the company, he regarded
their rejoicings with perfect sympathy, for, whatever suffering might
follow, none knew so well as he that--

  "there is one
  Who makes the joy the last in every song."

The assertion in the old legendary description of his person and habits,
that he was never known to smile, I regard as an utter falsehood, for to
me it is incredible--almost as a geometrical absurdity. In that glad
company the eyes of a divine artist, following the spiritual lines of
the group, would have soon settled on his face as the centre whence
radiated all the gladness, where, as I seem to see him, he sat in the
background beside his mother. Even the sunny face of the bridegroom
would appear less full of light than his. But something is at hand which
will change his mood. For no true man had he been if his mood had never
changed. His high, holy, obedient will, his tender, pure, strong heart
never changed, but his mood, his feeling did change. For the mood must
often, and in many cases ought to be the human reflex of changing
circumstance. The change comes from his mother. She whispers to him that
they have no more wine. The bridegroom's liberality had reached the
limit of his means, for, like his guests, he was, most probably, of a
humble calling, a craftsman, say, or a fisherman. It must have been a
painful little trial to him if he knew the fact; but I doubt if he heard
of the want before it was supplied.

There was nothing in this however to cause the change in our Lord's mood
of which I have spoken. It was no serious catastrophe, at least to him,
that the wine should fail. His mother had but told him the fact; only
there is more than words in every commonest speech that passes. It was
not his mother's words, but the tone and the look with which they were
interwoven that wrought the change. She knew that her son was no common
man, and she believed in him, with an unripe, unfeatured faith. This
faith, working with her ignorance and her fancy, led her to expect the
great things of the world from him. This was a faith which must fail
that it might grow. Imperfection must fail that strength may come in its
place. It is well for the weak that their faith should fail them, for
it may at the moment be resting its wings upon the twig of some brittle
fancy, instead of on a branch of the tree of life.

But, again, what was it in his mother's look and tone that should work
the change in our Lord's mood? The request implied in her words could
give him no offence, for he granted that request; and he never would
have done a thing he did not approve, should his very mother ask him.
The _thoughts of_ the mother lay not in her words, but in the expression
that accompanied them, and it was to those thoughts that our Lord
replied. Hence his answer, which has little to do with her spoken
request, is the key both to her thoughts and to his. If we do not
understand his reply, we _may_ misunderstand the miracle--certainly we
are in danger of grievously misunderstanding him--a far worse evil. How
many children are troubled in heart that Jesus should have spoken to his
mother as our translation compels them to suppose he did speak! "Woman,
what have I to do with thee? Mine hour is not yet come." His hour for
working the miracle _had_ come, for he wrought it; and if he had to do
with one human soul at all, that soul must be his mother. The "woman,"
too, sounds strange in our ears. This last, however, is our fault: we
allow words to sink from their high rank, and then put them to degraded
uses. What word so full of grace and tender imagings to any true man as
that one word! The Saviour did use it to his mother; and when he called
her _woman_, the good custom of the country and the time was glorified
in the word as it came from his lips _fulfilled_, of humanity; for those
lips were the open gates of a heart full of infinite meanings. Hence
whatever word he used had more of the human in it than that word had
ever held before.

What he did say was this--"Woman, what is there common to thee and me?
My hour is not yet come." What! was not their humanity common to them?
Had she not been fit, therefore chosen, to bear him? Was she not his
mother? But his words had no reference to the relation between them;
they only referred to the present condition of her mind, or rather the
nature of the thought and expectation which now occupied it. Her hope
and his intent were at variance; there was no harmony between his
thought and hers; and it was to that thought and that hope of hers that
his words were now addressed. To paraphrase the words--and if I do so
with reverence and for the sake of the spirit which is higher than the
word, I think I am allowed to do so--

"Woman, what is there in your thoughts now that is in sympathy with
mine? Also the hour that you are expecting is not come yet."

What, then, was in our Lord's thoughts? and what was in his mother's
thoughts to call forth his words? She was thinking the time had come for
making a show of his power--for revealing what a great man he was--for
beginning to let that glory shine, which was, in her notion, to
culminate in the grandeur of a righteous monarch--a second Solomon,
forsooth, who should set down the mighty in the dust, and exalt them of
low degree. Here was the opportunity for working like a prophet of old,
and revealing of what a mighty son she was the favoured mother.

And of what did the glow of her face, the light in her eyes, and the
tone with which she uttered the words, "They have no wine," make Jesus
think? Perhaps of the decease which he must accomplish at Jerusalem;
perhaps of a throne of glory betwixt the two thieves; certainly of a
kingdom of heaven not such as filled her imagination, even although
her heaven-descended Son was the king thereof. A kingdom of exulting
obedience, not of acquiescence, still less of compulsion, lay germed in
his bosom, and he must be laid in the grave ere that germ could send
up its first green lobes into the air of the human world. No throne,
therefore, of earthly grandeur for him! no triumph for his blessed
mother such as she dreamed! There was nothing common in their visioned
ends. Hence came the change of mood to Jesus, and hence the words that
sound at first so strange, seeming to have so little to do with the
words of his mother.

But no change of mood could change a feeling towards mother or friends.
The former, although she could ill understand what he meant, never
fancied in his words any unkindness to her. She, too, had the face of
the speaker to read; and from that face came such answer to her prayer
for her friends, that she awaited no confirming words, but in the
confidence of a mother who knew her child, said at once to the servants,
"Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it."

If any one object that I have here imagined too much, I would remark,
first, that the records in the Gospel are very brief and condensed;
second, that the germs of a true intelligence must lie in this small
seed, and our hearts are the soil in which it must unfold itself; third,
that we are bound to understand the story, and that the foregoing are
the suppositions on which I am able to understand it in a manner worthy
of what I have learned concerning Him. I am bound to refuse every
interpretation that seems to me unworthy of Him, for to accept such
would be to sin against the Holy Ghost. If I am wrong in my idea either
of that which I receive or of that which I reject, as soon as the fact
is revealed to me I must cast the one away and do justice to the other.
Meantime this interpretation seems to me to account for our Lord's words
in a manner he will not be displeased with even if it fail to reach
the mark of the fact. That St John saw, and might expect such an
interpretation to be found in the story, barely as he has told it, will
be rendered the more probable if we remember his own similar condition
and experience when he and his brother James prayed the Lord for the
highest rank in his kingdom, and received an answer which evidently
flowed from the same feeling to which I have attributed that given on
this occasion to his mother.

"'Fill the water-pots with water.' And they filled them up to the brim.
'Draw out now, and bear unto the governor of the feast.' And they bare
it. 'Thou hast kept the good wine until now.'" It is such a thing of
course that, when our Lord gave them wine, it would be of the best, that
it seems almost absurd to remark upon it. What the Father would make and
will make, and that towards which he is ever working, is _the Best;_ and
when our Lord turns the water into wine it must be very good.

It is like his Father, too, not to withhold good wine because men abuse
it. Enforced virtue is unworthy of the name. That men may rise above
temptation, it is needful that they should have temptation. It is the
will of him who makes the grapes and the wine. Men will even call Jesus
himself a wine-bibber. What matters it, so long as he works as the
Father works, and lives as the Father wills?

I dare not here be misunderstood. God chooses that men should be tried,
but let a man beware of tempting his neighbour. God knows how and how
much, and where and when: man is his brother's keeper, and must keep him
according to his knowledge. A man may work the will of God for others,
and be condemned therein because he sought his own will and not God's.
That our Lord gave this company wine, does not prove that he would have
given any company wine. To some he refused even the bread they requested
at his hands. Because he gave wine to the wedding-guests, shall man dig
a pit at the corner of every street, that the poor may fall therein,
spending their money for that which is not bread, and their labour for
that which satisfieth not? Let the poor man be tempted as God wills, for
the end of God is victory; let not man tempt him, for his end is his
neighbour's fall, or at best he heeds it not for the sake of gain, and
he shall receive according to his works.

To him who can thank God with free heart for his good wine, there is a
glad significance in the fact that our Lord's first miracle was this
turning of water into wine. It is a true symbol of what he has done for
the world in glorifying all things. With his divine alchemy he turns not
only water into wine, but common things into radiant mysteries, yea,
every meal into a eucharist, and the jaws of the sepulchre into an
outgoing gate. I do not mean that he makes any change in the things or
ways of God, but a mighty change in the hearts and eyes of men, so that
God's facts and God's meanings become their faiths and their hopes. The
destroying spirit, who works in the commonplace, is ever covering the
deep and clouding the high. For those who listen to that spirit great
things cannot be. Such are there, but they cannot see them, for in
themselves they do not aspire. They believe, perhaps, in the truth and
grace of their first child: when they have spoiled him, they laugh
at the praises of childhood. From all that is thus low and wretched,
incapable and fearful, he who made the water into wine delivers men,
revealing heaven around them, God in all things, truth in every
instinct, evil withering and hope springing even in the path of the
destroyer.

That the wine should be his first miracle, and that the feeding of the
multitudes should be the only other creative miracle, will also suggest
many thoughts in connection with the symbol he has left us of his
relation to his brethren. In the wine and the bread of the eucharist, he
reminds us how utterly he has given, is giving, himself for the gladness
and the strength of his Father's children. Yea more; for in that he is
the radiation of the Father's glory, this bread and wine is the symbol
of how utterly the Father gives himself to his children, how earnestly
he would have them partakers of his own being. If Jesus was the son of
the Father, is it hard to believe that he should give men bread and
wine?

It was not his power, however, but his glory, that Jesus showed forth
in the miracle. His power could not be hidden, but it was a poor thing
beside his glory.

Yea, power in itself is a poor thing. If it could stand alone, which it
cannot, it would be a horror. No amount of lonely power could create.
It is the love that is at the root of power, the power of power, which
alone can create. What then was this his glory? What was it that made
him glorious? It was that, like his Father, he ministered to the wants
of men. Had they not needed the wine, not for the sake of whatever show
of his power would he have made it. The concurrence of man's need and
his love made it possible for that glory to shine forth. It is for this
glory most that we worship him. But power is no object of adoration, and
they who try to worship it are slaves. Their worship is no real worship.
Those who trembled at the thunder from the mountain went and worshipped
a golden calf; but Moses went into the thick darkness to find his God.

How far the expectation of the mother Mary that her son would, by
majesty of might, appeal to the wedding guests, and arouse their
enthusiasm for himself, was from our Lord's thoughts, may be well seen
in the fact that the miracle was not beheld even by the ruler of the
feast; while the report of it would probably receive little credit from
at least many of those who partook of the good wine. So quietly was it
done, so entirely without pre-intimation of his intent, so stolenly, as
it were, in the two simple ordered acts, the filling of the water-pots
with water, and the drawing of it out again, as to make it manifest that
it was done for the ministration. He did not do it even for the show
of his goodness, but _to be good_. This alone could show his Father's
goodness. It was done because here was an opportunity in which all
circumstances combined with the bodily presence of the powerful and the
prayer of his mother, to render it fit that the love of his heart should
go forth in giving his merry-making brothers and sisters more and better
wine to drink.

And herein we find another point in which this miracle of Jesus
resembles the working of his Father. For God ministers to us so gently,
so stolenly, as it were, with such a quiet, tender, loving absence of
display, that men often drink of his wine, as these wedding guests
drank, without knowing whence it comes--without thinking that the giver
is beside them, yea, in their very hearts. For God will not compel the
adoration of men: it would be but a pagan worship that would bring to
his altars. He will rouse in men a sense of need, which shall grow at
length into a longing; he will make them feel after him, until by their
search becoming able to behold him, he may at length reveal to them the
glory of their Father. He works silently--keeps quiet behind his works,
as it were, that he may truly reveal himself in the right time. With
this intent also, when men find his wine good and yet do not rise and
search for the giver, he will plague them with sore plagues, that the
good wine of life may not be to them, and therefore to him and the
universe, an evil thing. It would seem that the correlative of creation
is search; that as God has _made us_, we must _find_ him; that thus our
action must reflect his; that thus he glorifies us with a share in the
end of all things, which is that the Father and his children may be one
in thought, judgment, feeling, and intent, in a word, that they may
mean the same thing. St John says that Jesus thus "manifested forth
his glory, and his disciples believed on him." I doubt if any but his
disciples knew of the miracle; or of those others who might see or hear
of it, if any believed on him because of it. It is possible to see a
miracle, and not believe in it; while many of those who saw a miracle of
our Lord believed in the miracle, and yet did not believe in him.

I wonder how many Christians there are who so thoroughly believe God
made them that they can laugh in God's name; who understand that God
invented laughter and gave it to his children. Such belief would add a
keenness to the zest in their enjoyment, and slay that sneering laughter
of which a man grimaces to the fiends, as well as that feeble laughter
in which neither heart nor intellect has a share. It would help them
also to understand the depth of this miracle. The Lord of gladness
delights in the laughter of a merry heart. These wedding guests could
have done without wine, surely without more wine and better wine. But
the Father looks with no esteem upon a bare existence, and is ever
working, even by suffering, to render life more rich and plentiful.
His gifts are to the overflowing of the cup; but when the cup would
overflow, he deepens its hollow, and widens its brim. Our Lord is
profuse like his Father, yea, will, at his own sternest cost, be lavish
to his brethren. He will give them wine indeed. But even they who know
whence the good wine comes, and joyously thank the giver, shall one day
cry out, like the praiseful ruler of the feast to him who gave it not,
"Thou hast kept the good wine until now."




III. THE CURE OF SIMON'S WIFE'S MOTHER.


In respect of the purpose I have in view, it is of little consequence in
what order I take the miracles. I choose for my second chapter the story
of the cure of St Peter's mother-in-law. Bare as the narrative is,
the event it records has elements which might have been moulded with
artistic effect--on the one side the woman tossing in the folds of the
fever, on the other the entering Life. But it is not from this side that
I care to view it.

Neither do I wish to look at it from the point of view of the
bystanders, although it would appear that we had the testimony of three
of them in the three Gospels which contain the story. We might almost
determine the position in the group about the bed occupied by each of
the three, from the differences between their testimonies. One says
Jesus stood over her; another, he touched her hand; the third, he lifted
her up: they agree that the fever left her, and she ministered to
them.--In the present case, as in others behind, I mean to regard the
miracle from the point of view of the person healed.

Pain, sickness, delirium, madness, as great infringements of the laws of
nature as the miracles themselves, are such veritable presences to the
human experience, that what bears no relation to their existence, cannot
be the God of the human race. And the man who cannot find his God in the
fog of suffering, no less than he who forgets his God in the sunshine of
health, has learned little either of St Paul or St John. The religion
whose light renders no dimmest glow across this evil air, cannot be more
than a dim reflex of the true. And who will mourn to find this out?
There are, perhaps, some so anxious about themselves that, rather than
say, "I have it not: it is a better thing than I have ever possessed,"
they would say, "I have the precious thing, but in the hour of trial it
is of little avail." Let us rejoice that the glory is great, even if we
dare not say, It is mine. Then shall we try the more earnestly to lay
hold upon it.

So long as men must toss in weary fancies all the dark night, crying,
"Would God it were morning," to find, it may be, when it arrives, but
little comfort in the grey dawn, so long must we regard God as one to be
seen or believed in--cried unto at least--across all the dreary flats of
distress or dark mountains of pain, and therefore those who would help
their fellows must sometimes look for him, as it were, through the eyes
of those who suffer, and try to help them to think, not from ours, but
from their own point of vision. I shall therefore now write almost
entirely for those to whom suffering is familiar, or at least well
known. And first I would remind them that all suffering is against the
ideal order of things. No man can love pain. It is an unlovely, an
ugly, abhorrent thing. The more true and delicate the bodily and mental
constitution, the more must it recoil from pain. No one, I think, could
dislike pain so much as the Saviour must have disliked it. God dislikes
it. He is then on our side in the matter. He knows it is grievous to
be borne, a thing he would cast out of his blessed universe, save for
reasons.

But one will say--How can this help me when the agony racks me, and the
weariness rests on me like a gravestone?--Is it nothing, I answer, to be
reminded that suffering is in its nature transitory--that it is against
the first and final will of God--that it is a means only, not an end?
Is it nothing to be told that it will pass away? Is not that what you
would? God made man for lordly skies, great sunshine, gay colours, free
winds, and delicate odours; and however the fogs may be needful for the
soul, right gladly does he send them away, and cause the dayspring from
on high to revisit his children. While they suffer he is brooding over
them an eternal day, suffering with them but rejoicing in their future.
He is the God of the individual man, or he could be no God of the race.

I believe it is possible--and that some have achieved it--so to believe
in and rest upon the immutable Health--so to regard one's own sickness
as a kind of passing aberration, that the soul is thereby sustained,
even as sometimes in a weary dream the man is comforted by telling
himself it is but a dream, and that waking is sure. God would have us
reasonable and strong. Every effort of his children to rise above
the invasion of evil in body or in mind is a pleasure to him. Few, I
suppose, attain to this; but there is a better thing which to many, I
trust, is easier--to say, Thy will be done.

But now let us look at the miracle as received by the woman.

She had "a great fever." She was tossing from side to side in vain
attempts to ease a nameless misery. Her head ached, and forms dreary,
even in their terror, kept rising before her in miserable and aimless
dreams; senseless words went on repeating themselves ill her very brain
was sick of them; she was destitute, afflicted, tormented; now the
centre for the convergence of innumerable atoms, now driven along in an
uproar of hideous globes; faces grinned and mocked at her; her mind
ever strove to recover itself, and was ever borne away in the rush of
invading fancies; but through it all was the nameless unrest, not an
aching, nor a burning, nor a stinging, but a bodily grief, dark, drear,
and nameless. How could they have borne such before He had come?

A sudden ceasing of motions uncontrolled; a coolness gliding through
the burning skin; a sense of waking into repose; a consciousness of
all-pervading well-being, of strength conquering weakness, of light
displacing darkness, of urging life at the heart; and behold! she is
sitting up in her bed, a hand clasping hers, a face looking in hers. He
has judged the evil thing, and it is gone. He has saved her out of her
distresses. They fold away from off her like the cerements of death. She
is new-born--new-made--all things are new-born with her--and he who
makes all things new is there. From him, she knows, has the healing
flowed. He has given of his life to her. Away, afar behind her floats
the cloud of her suffering. She almost forgets it in her grateful joy.
She is herself now. She rises. The sun is shining. It had been shining
all the time--waiting for her. The lake of Galilee is glittering
joyously. That too sets forth the law of life. But the fulfilling of the
law is love: she rises and ministers.

I am tempted to remark in passing, although I shall have better
opportunity of dealing with the matter involved, that there is no sign
of those whom our Lord cures desiring to retain the privileges of
the invalid. The joy of health is labour. He who is restored must be
fellow-worker with God. This woman, lifted out of the whelming sand of
the fever and set upon her feet, hastens to her ministrations. She has
been used to hard work. It is all right now; she must to it again.

But who was he who had thus lifted her up? She saw a young man by her
side. Is it the young man, Jesus, of whom she has heard? for Capernaum
is not far from Nazareth, and the report of his wisdom and goodness must
have spread, for he had grown in favour with man as well as with God. Is
it he, to whom God has given such power, or is it John, of whom she has
also heard? Whether he was a prophet or a son of the prophets, whether
he was Jesus or John, she waits not to question; for here are guests;
here is something to be done. Questions will keep; work must be
despatched. It is the day, and the night is at hand. She rose and
ministered unto them.

But if we ask who he is, this is the answer: He is the Son of God come
to do the works of his Father. Where, then, is the healing of the
Father? All the world over, in every man's life and knowledge, almost
in every man's personal experience, although it may be unrecognized
as such. For just as in certain moods of selfishness our hearts are
insensible to the tenderest love of our surrounding families, so the
degrading spirit of the commonplace _enables_ us to live in the midst of
ministrations, so far from knowing them as such, that it is hard for us
to believe that the very heart of God would care to do that which his
hand alone can do and is doing every moment. I remind my reader that I
have taken it for granted that he confesses there is a God, or at least
hopes there may be a God. If any one interposes, saying that science
nowadays will not permit him to believe in such a being, I answer it
is not for him I am now writing, but for such as have gone through a
different course of thought and experience from his. To him I may be
honoured to say a word some day. I do not think of him now. But to
the reader of my choice I do say that I see no middle course between
believing that every alleviation of pain, every dawning of hope across
the troubled atmosphere of the spirit, every case of growing well again,
is the doing of God, or that there is no God at all--none at least in
whom _I_ could believe. Had Christians been believing in God better,
more grandly, the present phase of unbelief, which no doubt is needful,
and must appear some time in the world's history, would not have
appeared in our day. No doubt it has come when it must, and will vanish
when it must; but those who do believe are more to blame for it, I
think, than those who do not believe. The common kind of belief in God
is rationally untenable. Half to an insensate nature, half to a living
God, is a worship that cannot stand. God is all in all, or no God at
all. The man who goes to church every Sunday, and yet trembles before
chance, is a Christian only because Christ has claimed him; is not a
Christian as having believed in Him. I would not be hard. There are so
many degrees in faith! A man may be on the right track, may be learning
of Christ, and be very poor and weak. But I say there is no _standing_
room, no reality of reason, between absolute faith and absolute
unbelief. Either not a sparrow falls to the ground without Him, or there
is no God, and we are fatherless children. Those who attempt to live in
such a limbo as lies between the two, are only driven of the wind and
tossed.

Has my reader ever known the weariness of suffering, the clouding of the
inner sky, the haunting of spectral shapes, the misery of disordered
laws, when nature is wrong within him, and her music is out of tune and
harsh, when he is shot through with varied griefs and pains, and it
seems as there were no life more in the world, save of misery--"pain,
pain ever, for ever"? Then, surely, he has also known the turn of the
tide, when the pain begins to abate, when the sweet sleep falls upon
soul and body, when a faint hope doubtfully glimmers across the gloom!
Or has he known the sudden waking from sleep and from fever at once, the
consciousness that life is life, that life is the law of things, the
coolness and the gladness, when the garments of pain which, like that
fabled garment of Dejanira, enwrapped and ate into his being, have
folded back from head and heart, and he looks out again once more
new-born? It is God. This is his will, his law of life conquering the
law of death Tell me not of natural laws, as if I were ignorant of them,
or meant to deny them. The question is whether these laws go wheeling
on of themselves in a symmetry of mathematical shapes, or whether
their perfect order, their unbroken certainty of movement, is not the
expression of a perfect intellect informed by a perfect heart. Law is
truth: has it a soul of thought, or has it not? If not, then farewell
hope and love and possible perfection. But for me, I will hope on,
strive on, fight with the invading unbelief; for the horror of being the
sport of insensate law, the more perfect the more terrible, is hell and
utter perdition. If a man tells me that science says God is not a likely
being, I answer, Probably not--such as you, who have given your keen,
admirable, enviable powers to the observation of outer things only, are
capable of supposing him; but that the God I mean may not be the very
heart of the lovely order you see so much better than I, you have given
me no reason to fear. My God may be above and beyond and in all that.

In this matter of healing, then, as in all the miracles, we find Jesus
doing the works of the Father. God is our Saviour: the Son of God comes
healing the sick--doing that, I repeat, before our eyes, which the
Father, for his own reasons, some of which I think I can see well
enough, does from behind the veil of his creation and its laws. The cure
comes by law, comes by the physician who brings the law to bear upon us;
we awake, and lo! I it is God the Saviour. Every recovery is as much his
work as the birth of a child; as much the work of the Father as if
it had been wrought by the word of the Son before the eyes of the
multitude.

Need I, to combat again the vulgar notion that the essence of the
miracles lies in their power, dwell upon this miracle further? Surely,
no one who honours the Saviour will for a moment imagine him, as he
entered the chamber where the woman lay tormented, saying to himself,
"Here is an opportunity of showing how mighty my Father is!" No. There
was suffering; here was healing. What I could imagine him saying to
himself would be, "Here I can help! Here my Father will let me put forth
my healing, and give her back to her people." What should we think of a
rich man, who, suddenly brought into contact with the starving upon his
own estate, should think within himself, "Here is a chance for me! Now I
can let them see how rich I am!" and so plunge his hands in his pockets
and lay gold upon the bare table? The receivers might well be grateful;
but the arm of the poor neighbour put under the head of the dying man,
would gather a deeper gratitude, a return of tenderer love. It is heart
alone that can satisfy heart. It is the love of God alone that can
gather to itself the love of his children. To believe in an almighty
being is hardly to believe in a God at all. To believe in a being
who, in his weakness and poverty, if such could be, would die for his
creatures, would be to believe in a God indeed.




IV. MIRACLES OF HEALING UNSOLICITED.


In my last chapter I took the healing of Simon's wife's mother as a
type of all such miracles, viewed from the consciousness of the person
healed. In the multitude of cases--for it must not be forgotten that
there was a multitude of which we have no individual record--the
experience must have been very similar. The evil thing, the antagonist
of their life, departed; they knew in themselves that they were healed;
they beheld before them the face and form whence the healing power had
gone forth, and they believed in the man. What they believed _about_
him, farther than that he had healed them and was good, I cannot pretend
to say. Some said he was one thing, some another, but they believed in
the man himself. They felt henceforth the strongest of ties binding his
life to their life. He was now the central thought of their being. Their
minds lay open to all his influences, operating in time and by holy
gradations. The well of life was henceforth to them an unsealed
fountain, and endless currents of essential life began to flow from it
through their existence. High love urging gratitude awoke the conscience
to intenser life; and the healed began to recoil from evil deeds and
vile thoughts as jarring with the new friendship. Mere acquaintance with
a good man is a powerful antidote to evil; but the knowledge of _such_
a man, as those healed by him knew him, was the mightiest of divine
influences.

In these miracles of healing our Lord must have laid one of the largest
of the foundation-stones of his church. The healed knew him henceforth,
not by comprehension, but with their whole being. Their very life
acknowledged him. They returned to their homes to recall and love
afresh. I wonder what their talk about him was like. What an insight
it would give into our common nature, to know how these men and women
thought and spoke concerning him! But the time soon arrived when they
had to be public martyrs--that is, witnesses to what they knew, come of
it what might. After our Lord's departure came the necessity for those
who loved him to gather together, thus bearing their testimony at once.
Next to his immediate disciples, those whom he had cured must have been
the very heart of the young church. Imagine the living strength of such
a heart--personal love to the personal helper the very core of it. The
church had begun with the first gush of affection in the heart of the
mother Mary, and now "great was the company of those that published" the
good news to the world. The works of the Father had drawn the hearts of
the children, and they spake of the Elder Brother who had brought those
works to their doors. The thoughtful remembrances of those who had heard
him speak; the grateful convictions of those whom he had healed;
the tender memories of those whom he had taken in his arms and
blessed--these were the fine fibrous multitudinous roots which were to
the church existence, growth, and continuance, for these were they which
sucked in the dews and rains of that descending Spirit which was the
life of the tree. Individual life is the life of the church.

But one may say: Why then did he not cure all the sick in Judæa? Simply
because all were not ready to be cured. Many would not have believed in
him if he had cured them. Their illness had not yet wrought its work,
had not yet ripened them to the possibility of faith; his cure would
have left them deeper in evil than before. "He did not many mighty works
there because of their unbelief." God will cure a man, will give him a
fresh start of health and hope, and the man will be the better for it,
even without having _yet_ learned to thank him; but to behold the healer
and acknowledge the outstretched hand of help, yet not to believe in the
healer, is a terrible thing for the man; and I think the Lord kept his
personal healing for such as it would bring at once into some relation
of heart and will with himself; whence arose his frequent demand of
faith--a demand apparently always responded to: at the word, the
flickering belief, the smoking flax, burst into a flame. Evil, that is,
physical evil, is a moral good--a mighty means to a lofty end. Pain is
an evil; but a good as well, which it would be a great injury to take
from the man before it had wrought its end. Then it becomes all evil,
and must pass.

I now proceed to a group of individual cases in which, as far as we
can judge from the narratives, our Lord gave the gift of restoration
unsolicited. There are other instances of the same, but they fall into
other groups, gathered because of other features.

The first is that, recorded by St Luke alone, of the "woman which had a
spirit of infirmity eighteen years, and was bowed together, and could in
no wise lift up herself." It may be that this belongs to the class of
demoniacal possession as well, but I prefer to take it here; for I am
very doubtful whether the expression in the narrative--"a spirit of
infirmity," even coupled with that of our Lord in defending her and
himself from the hypocritical attack of the ruler of the synagogue,
"this woman--whom Satan hath bound," renders it necessary to regard
it as one of the latter kind. This is, however, a matter of small
importance--at least from our present point of view.

Bowed earthwards, the necessary blank of her eye the ground and not
the horizon, the form divine deformed towards that of the four-footed
animals, this woman had been in bondage eighteen years. Necessary as it
is to one's faith to believe every trouble fitted for the being who has
to bear it, every physical evil not merely the result of moral evil, but
antidotal thereto, no one ought to dare judge of the relation between
moral condition and physical suffering in individual cases. Our Lord has
warned us from that. But in proportion as love and truth prevail in
the hearts of men, physical evil will vanish from the earth. The
righteousness of his descendants will destroy the disease which the
unrighteousness of their ancestor has transmitted to them. But, I
repeat, to destroy this physical evil save by the destruction of its
cause, by the redemption of the human nature from moral evil, would be
to ruin the world. What in this woman it was that made it right she
should bear these bonds for eighteen years, who can tell? Certainly it
was not that God had forgotten her. What it may have preserved her
from, one may perhaps conjecture, but can hardly have a right to utter.
Neither can we tell how she had borne the sad affliction; whether in the
lovely patience common amongst the daughters of affliction, or with
the natural repining of one made to behold the sun, and doomed ever to
regard the ground upon which she trod. While patience would have its
glorious reward in the cure, it is possible that even the repinings
of prideful pain might be destroyed by the grand deliverance, that
gratitude might beget sorrow for vanished impatience. Anyhow the right
hour had come when the darkness must fly away.

Supported, I presume, by the staff which yet more assimilated her to the
lower animals, she had crept to the synagogue--a good sign surely, for
the synagogue was not its ruler. There is no appearance from the story,
that she had come there to seek Jesus, or even that when in his presence
she saw him before the word of her deliverance had gone forth. Most
likely, being bowed together, she heard him before she saw him.

But he saw her. Our translation says he called her to him. I do not
think this is correct. I think the word, although it might mean that,
does mean simply that he _addressed her_. Going to her, I think, and
saying, "Woman, thou art loosed from thy infirmity," "he laid his hands
on her, and immediately she was made straight, and glorified God." What
an uplifting!--a type of all that God works in his human beings.
The head, down-bent with sin, care, sorrow, pain, is uplifted; the
grovelling will sends its gaze heavenward; the earth is no more the
one object of the aspiring spirit; we lift our eyes to God; we bend no
longer even to his will, but raise ourselves up towards his will, for
his will has become our will, and that will is our sanctification.

Although the woman did not beg the Son to cure her, she may have prayed
the Father much. Anyhow proof that she was ready for the miracle is not
wanting. She glorified God. It is enough. She not merely thanked the man
who had wrought the cure, for of this we cannot doubt; but she glorified
the known Saviour, God, from whom cometh down every good gift and every
perfect gift.

She had her share in the miracle I think too, as, in his perfect bounty,
God gives a share to every one in what work He does for him. I mean,
that, with the given power, _she_ had to _lift herself_ up. Such active
faith is the needful response in order that a man may be a child of God,
and not the mere instrument upon which his power plays a soulless tune.

In this preventing of prayer, in this answering before the call, in this
bringing of the blessing to the door, according to which I have grouped
this with the following miracles, Jesus did as his Father is doing
every day. He was doing the works of his Father. If men had no help, no
deliverance from the ills which come upon them, even those which they
bring upon themselves, except such as came at their cry; if no salvation
descended from God, except such as they prayed for, where would the
world be? in what case would the generations of men find themselves? But
the help of God is ever coming, ever setting them free whom Satan hath
bound; ever giving them a fresh occasion and a fresh impulse to glorify
the God of their salvation. For with every such recovery the child in
the man is new-born--for some precious moments at least; a gentleness of
spirit, a wonder at the world, a sense of the blessedness of being, an
openness to calm yet rousing influences, appear in the man. These are
the descending angels of God. The passion that had blotted out the child
will revive; the strife of the world will renew wrath and hate; ambition
and greed will blot out the beauty of the earth; envy of others will
blind the man to his own blessedness; and self-conceit will revive in
him all those prejudices whose very strength lies in his weakness; but
the man has had a glimpse of the peace to gain which he must fight with
himself; he has for one moment felt what he might be if he trusted in
God; and the memory of it may return in the hour of temptation. As
the commonest things in nature are the most lovely, so the commonest
agencies in humanity are the most powerful. Sickness and recovery
therefrom have a larger share in the divine order of things for the
deliverance of men than can show itself to the keenest eyes. Isolated
in individuals, the facts are unknown; or, slow and obscure in their
operation, are forgotten by the time their effects appear. Many things
combine to render an enlarged view of the moral influences of sickness
and recovery impossible. The kingdom cometh not with observation, and
the working of the leaven of its approach must be chiefly unseen. Like
the creative energy itself, it works "in secret shadow, far from all
men's sight."

The teaching of our Lord which immediately follows concerning the small
beginnings of his kingdom, symbolized in the grain of mustard seed and
the leaven, may, I think, have immediate reference to the cure of this
woman, and show that he regarded her glorifying of God for her recovery
as one of those beginnings of a mighty growth. We do find the same
similes in a different connection in St Matthew and St Mark; but even if
we had no instances of fact, it would be rational to suppose that the
Lord, in the varieties of place, audience, and occasion, in the dullness
likewise of his disciples, and the perfection of the similes he chose,
would again and again make use of the same.

I now come to the second miracle of the group, namely that, recorded
by all the Evangelists except St John, of the cure of the man with the
withered hand. This, like the preceding, was done in the synagogue. And
I may remark, in passing, that all of this group, with the exception of
the last--one of very peculiar circumstance--were performed upon the
Sabbath, and each gave rise to discussion concerning the lawfulness of
the deed. St Mark says they watched Jesus to see whether he would heal
the man on the Sabbath-day; St Luke adds that he knew their thoughts,
and therefore met them with the question of its lawfulness; St Matthew
says they challenged him to the deed Joy asking him whether it was
lawful. The mere watching could hardly have taken place without the
man's perceiving something in motion which had to do with him. But there
is no indication of a request.

There cannot surely be many who have reached half the average life of
man without at some time having felt the body a burden in some way, and
regarded a possible deliverance from it as an enfranchisement. If the
spirit of man were fulfilled of the Spirit of God, the body would simply
be a living house, an obedient servant--yes, a humble mediator, by the
senses, between his thoughts and God's thoughts; but when every breath
has, as it were, to be sent for and brought hither with much labour
and small consolation--when pain turns faith into a mere shadow of
hope--when the withered limb hangs irresponsive, lost and cumbersome, an
inert simulacrum of power, swinging lifeless to and fro;--then even the
physical man understands his share in the groaning of the creation after
the sonship. When, at a word issuing from such a mouth as that of Jesus
of Nazareth, the poor, withered, distorted, contemptible hand obeyed
and, responsive to the spirit within, spread forth its fingers, filled
with its old human might, became capable once more of the grasp of
friendship, of the caress of love, of the labour for the bread that
sustains the life, little would the man care that other men--even rulers
of synagogues, even Scribes and Pharisees, should question the rectitude
of him who had healed him. The power which restored the gift of God and
completed humanity, must be of God. Argument upon argument might follow
from old books and old customs and learned interpretations, wherein man
set forth the will of God as different from the laws of his world, but
the man whose hand was restored whole as the other, knew it fitting that
his hands should match. They might talk; he would thank God for the
crooked made straight. Bewilder his judgment they might with their
glosses upon commandment and observance; but they could not keep his
heart from gladness; and, being glad, whom should he praise but God? If
there was another giver of good things he knew nothing of him. The hand
was now as God had meant it to be. Nor could he behold the face of
Jesus, and doubt that such a man would do only that which was right. It
was not Satan, but God that had set him free.

Here, plainly by the record, our Lord gave the man his share, not of
mere acquiescence, but of active will, in the miracle. If man is the
child of God, he must have a share in the works of the Father. Without
such share in the work as faith gives, cure will be of little avail.
"Stretch forth thine hand," said the Healer; and the man made the
effort; and the withered hand obeyed, and was no more withered. _In_ the
act came the cure, without which the act had been confined to the will,
and had never taken form in the outstretching. It is the same in all
spiritual redemption.

Think for a moment with what delight the man would employ his new hand.
This right hand would henceforth be God's hand. But was not the other
hand God's too?--God's as much as this? Had not the power of God been
always present in that left hand, whose unwithered life had ministered
to him all these years? Was it not the life of God that inspired
his whole frame? By the loss and restoration in one part, he would
understand possession in the whole.

But as the withered and restored limb to the man, so is the maimed and
healed man to his brethren. In every man the power by which he does the
commonest things is the power of God. The power is not _of us_. Our
power does it; but we do not make the power. This, plain as it is,
remains, however, the hardest lesson for a man to learn with conviction
and thanksgiving. For God has, as it were, put us just so far away
from Him that we can exercise the divine thing in us, our own will, in
returning towards our source. Then we shall learn the fact that we are
infinitely more great and blessed in being the outcome of a perfect
self-constituting will, than we could be by the conversion of any
imagined independence of origin into fact for us--a truth no man _can_
understand, feel, or truly acknowledge, save in proportion as he has
become one with his perfect origin, the will of God. While opposition
exists between the thing made and the maker, there can be but discord
and confusion in the judgment of the creature. No true felicitous vision
of the facts of the relation between his God and him; no perception of
the mighty liberty constituted by the holy dependence wherein the will
of God is the absolutely free choice of the man; no perception of a
unity such as cannot exist between independent wills, but only in
unspeakable love and tenderness between the causing Will and the caused
will, can yet have place. Those who cannot see how the human will should
be free in dependence upon the will of God, have not realized that the
will of God made the will of man; that, when most it pants for freedom,
the will of man is the child of the will of God, and therefore that
there can be no natural opposition or strife between them. Nay, more,
the whole labour of God is that the will of man should be free as his
will is free--in the same way that his will is free--by the perfect love
of the man for that which is true, harmonious, lawful, creative. If a
man say, "But might not the will of God make my will with the intent of
over-riding and enslaving it?" I answer, such a Will could not create,
could not be God, for it involves the false and contrarious. That would
be to make a will in order that it might be no will. To create in order
to uncreate is something else than divine. But a free will is not the
liberty to do whatever one likes, but the power of doing whatever one
sees ought to be done, even in the very face of otherwise overwhelming
impulse. There lies freedom indeed.

I come now to the case of the man who had been paralysed for
eight-and-thirty years. There is great pathos in the story. For many,
at least, of these years, the man had haunted the borders of legendary
magic, for I regard the statement about the angel troubling the pool as
only the expression of a current superstition. Oh, how different from
the healing of our Lord! What he had to bestow was free to all. The cure
of no man by his hand weakened that hand for the cure of the rest. None
were poorer that one was made rich. But this legend of the troubling
of the pool fostered the evil passion of emulation, and that in a most
selfish kind. Nowhere in the divine arrangements is my gain another's
loss. If it be said that this was the mode in which God determined which
was to be healed, I answer that the effort necessary was contrary to all
we admire most in humanity. According to this rule, Sir Philip Sidney
ought to have drunk the water which he handed to the soldier instead.
Does the doctrine of Christ, and by that I insist we must interpret the
ways of God, countenance a man's hurrying to be before the rest, and
gain the boon in virtue t of having the least need of it, inasmuch as
he was the ablest to run and plunge first into the eddies left by the
fantastic angel? Or if the triumph were to be gained by the help of
friends, surely he was in most need of the cure who like this man--a man
such as we hope there are few--had no friends either to plunge him
in the waters of fabled hope, or to comfort him in the seasons of
disappointment which alone divided the weary months of a life passed in
empty expectation.

But the Master comes near. In him the power of life rests as in "its own
calm home, its crystal shrine," and he that believeth in him shall not
need to make haste. He knew it was time this man should be healed, and
did not wait to be asked. Indeed the man did not know him; did not even
know his name. "Wilt thou be made whole?" "Sir, I have no man, when
the water is troubled, to put me into the pool: but while I am coming,
another steppeth down before me." "Rise, take up thy bed, and walk."

Our Lord delays the cure in this case with no further speech. The man
knows nothing about him, and he makes no demand upon his faith, except
that of obedience. He gives him something to do at once. He will find
him again by and by. The man obeys, takes up his bed, and walks.

He sets an open path before us; _we_ must walk in it. More, we must be
willing to believe that the path is open, that we have strength to walk
in it. God's gift glides into man's choice. It is needful that we should
follow with our effort in the track of his foregoing power. To refuse is
to destroy the gift. His cure is not for such as choose to be invalids.
They must be willing to be made whole, even if it should involve the
carrying of their beds and walking. Some keep in bed who have strength
enough to get up and walk. There is a self-care and a self-pity, a
laziness and conceit of incapacity, which are as unhealing for the body
as they are unhealthy in the mind, corrupting all dignity and destroying
all sympathy. Who but invalids need like miracles wrought in them? Yet
some invalids are not cured because they will not be healed. They will
not stretch out the hand; they will not rise; they will not walk; above
all things, they will not work. Yet for their illness it may be that
the work so detested is the only cure, or if no cure yet the best
amelioration. Labour is not in itself an evil like the sickness, but
often a divine, a blissful remedy. Nor is the duty or the advantage
confined to those who ought to labour for their own support. No amount
of wealth sets one free from the obligation to work--in a world the God
of which is ever working. He who works not has not yet discovered what
God made him for, and is a false note in the orchestra of the universe.
The possession of wealth is as it were pre-payment, and involves an
obligation of honour to the doing of correspondent work. He who does not
know what to do has never seriously asked himself what he ought to do.

But there is a class of persons, the very opposite of these, who, as
extremes meet, fall into a similar fault. They will not be healed
either. They will not take the repose in which God giveth to his
beloved. Some sicknesses are to be cured with rest, others with labour.

The right way is all--to meet the sickness as God would have it met, to
submit or to resist according to the conditions of cure. Whatsoever is
not of faith is sin; and she who will not go to her couch and rest in
the Lord, is to blame even as she who will not rise and go to her work.

There is reason to suppose that this man had brought his infirmity upon
himself--I do not mean by the mere neglect of physical laws, but by the
doing of what he knew to be wrong. For the Lord, although he allowed
the gladness of the deliverance full sway at first, when he found him
afterwards did not leave him without the lesson that all health and
well-being depend upon purity of life: "Behold, thou art made whole:
sin no more lest a worse thing come unto thee." It is the only case of
recorded cure in which Jesus gives a warning of the kind. Therefore I
think the probability is as I have stated it. Hence, the fact that we
may be ourselves to blame for our sufferings is no reason why we should
not go to God to deliver us from them. David the king knew this, and set
it forth in that grand poem, the 107th Psalm.

In the very next case we find that Jesus will not admit the cause of the
man's condition, blindness from his birth, to be the sin either of the
man himself, or of his parents. The probability seems, to judge from
their behaviour in the persecution that followed, that both the man and
his parents were people of character, thought, and honourable prudence.
He was born blind, Jesus said, "that the works of God should be made
manifest in him." What works, then? The work of creation for one, rather
than the work of healing. The man had suffered nothing in being born
blind. God had made him only not so blessed as his fellows, with
the intent of giving him equal faculty and even greater enjoyment
afterwards, with the honour of being employed for the revelation of his
works to men. In him Jesus created sight before men's eyes. For, as at
the first God said, "Let there be light," so the work of God is still
to give light to the world, and Jesus must work his work, and _be_ the
light of the world--light in all its degrees and kinds, reaching into
every corner where work may be done, arousing sleepy hearts, and opening
blind eyes.

Jesus saw the man, the disciples asked their question, and he had no
sooner answered it, than "he spat on the ground, made clay of the
spittle, and anointed the eyes of the blind man with the clay."--Why
this mediating clay? Why the spittle and the touch?--Because the man
who could not see him must yet be brought into sensible contact with
him--must know that the healing came from the man who touched him. Our
Lord took pains about it because the man was blind. And for the man's
share in the miracle, having blinded him a second time as it were with
clay, he sends him to the pool to wash it away: clay and blindness
should depart together by the act of the man's faith. It was as if the
Lord said, "I blinded thee: now, go and see." Here, then, are the links
of the chain by which the Lord bound the man to himself. The voice, if
heard by the man, which defended him and his parents from the judgment
of his disciples; the assertion that he was the light of the world--a
something which others had and the blind man only knew as not possessed
by him; the sound of the spitting on the ground; the touch of the
speaker's fingers; the clay on his eyes; the command to wash; the
journey to the pool; the laving water; the astonished sight. "He went
his way, therefore, and washed, and came seeing."

But who can imagine, save in a conception only less dim than the man's
blindness, the glory which burst upon him when, as the restoring clay
left his eyes, the light of the world invaded his astonished soul? The
very idea may well make one tremble. Blackness of darkness--not an
invading stranger, but the home-companion always there--the negation
never understood because the assertion was unknown--creation not erased
and treasured in the memory, but to his eyes uncreated!--Blackness of
darkness!.... The glory of the celestial blue! The towers of the
great Jerusalem dwelling in the awful space! The room! The life! The
tenfold-glorified being! Any wonder might follow on such a wonder. And
the whole vision was as fresh as if he had that moment been created, the
first of men.

But the best remained behind. A man had said, "I am the light of the
world," and lo! here was the light of the world. The words had been
vague as a dark form in darkness, but now the thing itself had invaded
his innermost soul. But the face of the man who was this light of the
world he had not seen. The creator of his vision he had not yet beheld.
But he believed in him, for he defended him from the same charge of
wickedness from which Jesus had defended him. "Give God the praise,"
they said; "we know that this man is a sinner." "God heareth not
sinners," he replied; "and this man hath opened my eyes." It is no
wonder that when Jesus found him and asked him, "Dost thou believe on
the Son of God?" he should reply, "Who is he, Lord, that I might believe
on him?" He was ready. He had only to know which was he, that he might
worship him. Here at length was the Light of the world before him--the
man who had said, "I am the light of the world," and straightway the
world burst upon him in light! Would this man ever need further proof
that there was indeed a God of men? I suspect he had a grander idea
of the Son of God than any of his disciples as yet. The would-be
refutations of experience, for "since the world began was it not heard
that any man opened the eyes of one that was born blind;" the objections
of the religious authorities, "This man is not of God, because he
keepeth not the Sabbath day;" endless possible perplexities of the
understanding, and questions of the _how_ and the _why_, could never
touch that man to the shaking of his confidence: "One thing I know, that
whereas I was blind, now I see." The man could not convince the Jews
that Jesus must be a good man; neither could he doubt it himself, whose
very being, body and soul and spirit, had been enlightened and glorified
by him. With light in the eyes, in the brain, in the heart, light
permeating and unifying his physical and moral nature, asserting itself
in showing the man to himself one whole--how could he doubt!

The miracles were for the persons on whom they passed. To the spectators
they were something, it is true; but they were of unspeakable value to,
and of endless influence upon their subjects. The true mode in which
they reached others was through the healed themselves. And the testimony
of their lives would go far beyond the testimony of their tongues. Their
tongues could but witness to a fact; their lives could witness to a
truth.

In this miracle as in all the rest, Jesus did in little the great work
of the Father; for how many more are they to whom God has given the
marvel of vision than those blind whom the Lord enlightened! The remark
will sound feeble and far-fetched to the man whose familiar spirit is
that Mephistopheles of the commonplace. He who uses his vision only
for the care of his body or the indulgence of his mind--how should he
understand the gift of God in its marvel? But the man upon whose soul
the grandeur and glory of the heavens and the earth and the sea and
the fountains of waters have once arisen will understand what a divine
_invention_, what a mighty gift of God is this very common thing--these
eyes to see with--that light which enlightens the world, this sight
which is the result of both. He will understand what a believer the man
born blind must have become, yea, how the mighty inburst of splendour
might render him so capable of believing that nothing should be too
grand and good for him to believe thereafter--not even the doctrine
hardest to commonplace humanity, though the most natural and reasonable
to those who have beheld it--that the God of the light is a faithful,
loving, upright, honest, and self-denying being, yea utterly devoted to
the uttermost good of those whom he has made.

Such is the Father of lights who enlightens the world and every man that
cometh into it. Every pulsation of light on every brain is from him.
Every feeling of law and order is from him. Every hint of right, every
desire after the true, whatever we call aspiration, all longing for the
light, every perception that this is true, that that ought to be done,
is from the Father of lights. His infinite and varied light gathered
into one point--for how shall we speak at all of these things if we do
not speak in figures?--concentrated and embodied in Jesus, became _the_
light of the world. For the light is no longer only diffused, but in him
man "beholds the light _and whence it flows_." Not merely is our chamber
enlightened, but we see the lamp. And so we turn again to God, the
Father of lights, yea even of The Light of the World. Henceforth we know
that all the light wherever diffused has its centre in God, as the light
that enlightened the blind man flowed from its centre in Jesus. In other
words, we have a glimmering, faint, human perception of the absolute
glory. We know what God is in recognizing him as our God.

Jesus did the works of the Father.

The next miracle--recorded by St Luke alone--is the cure of the man with
the dropsy, wrought also upon the Sabbath, but in the house of one
of the chief of the Pharisees. Thither our Lord had gone to an
entertainment, apparently large, for the following parable is spoken "to
those which were bidden, when he marked how they chose out the chief
rooms."

[Footnote: 1. Not _rooms_, but _reclining places_ at the table.] Hence
the possibility at least is suggested, that the man was one of the
guests. No doubt their houses were more accessible than ours, and it
was not difficult for one uninvited to make his way in, especially upon
occasion of such a gathering. But I think the word translated _before
him_ means _opposite to him_ at the table; and that the man was not too
ill to appear as a guest. The "took him and healed him and let him go,"
of our translation, is against the notion rather, but merely from its
indefiniteness being capable of meaning that he sent him away; but such
is not the meaning of the original. That merely implies that he _took
him_, went to him and laid his hands upon him, thus connecting the cure
with himself, and then released him, set him free, took his hands off
him, turning at once to the other guests and justifying himself by
appealing to their own righteous conduct towards the ass and the ox. I
think the man remained reclining at the table, to enjoy the appetite of
health at a good meal; if, indeed, the gladness of the relieved breath,
the sense of lightness and strength, the consciousness of a restored
obedience of body, not to speak of the presence of him who had cured
him, did not make him too happy to care about his dinner. I come now to
the last of the group, exceptional in its nature, inasmuch as it was
not the curing of a disease or natural defect, but the reparation of an
injury, or hurt at least, inflicted by one of his own followers. This
miracle also is recorded by St Luke alone. The other evangelists relate
the occasion of the miracle, but not the miracle itself; they record the
blow, but not the touch. I shall not, therefore, compare their accounts,
which have considerable variety, but no inconsistency. I shall confine
myself to the story as told by St Luke. Peter, intending, doubtless, to
cleave the head of a servant of the high priest who had come out to take
Jesus, with unaccustomed hand, probably trembling with rage and perhaps
with fear, missed his well-meant aim, and only cut off the man's ear.
Jesus said, "Suffer ye thus far." I think the words should have a point
of interrogation after them, to mean, "Is it thus far ye suffer?" "Is
this the limit of your patience?" but I do not know. With the words, "he
touched his ear and healed him." Hardly had the wound reached the true
sting of its pain, before the gentle hand of him whom the servant had
come to drag to the torture, dismissed the agony as if it had never
been. Whether he restored the ear, or left the loss of it for a reminder
to the man of the part he had taken against his Lord, and the return the
Lord had made him, we do not know. Neither do we know whether he turned
back ashamed and contrite, now that in his own person he had felt the
life that dwelt in Jesus, or followed out the capture to the end.
Possibly the blow of Peter was the form which the favour of God took,
preparing the way, like the blindness from the birth, for the glory that
was to be manifested in him. But the Lord would countenance no violence
done in his defence. They might do to him as they would. If his Father
would not defend him, neither would he defend himself.

Within sight of the fearful death that awaited him, his heart was no
whit hardened to the pain of another. Neither did it make any difference
that it was the pain of an enemy--even an enemy who was taking him to
the cross. There was suffering; here was healing. He came to do the
works of him that sent him. He did good to them that hated him, for his
Father is the Saviour of men, saving "them out of their distresses."




V. MIRACLES OF HEALING SOLICITED BY THE SUFFERERS.


I come now to the second group of miracles, those granted to the
prayers of the sufferers. But before I make any general remarks on the
speciality of these, I must speak of one case which appears to lie
between the preceding group and this. It is that of the woman who came
behind Jesus in the crowd; and involves peculiar difficulties, in
connection with the facts which render its classification uncertain.

At Capernaum, apparently, our Lord was upon his way with Jairus to visit
his daughter, accompanied by a crowd of people who had heard the request
of the ruler of the synagogue. A woman who had been ill for twelve
years, came behind him and touched the hem of his garment. This we may
regard as a prayer in so far as she came to him, saying "within herself,
If I may but touch his garment, I shall be whole." But, on the other
hand, it was no true prayer in as far as she expected to be healed
without the knowledge and will of the healer. Although she came to him,
she did not ask him to heal her. She thought with innocent theft to
steal from him a cure.

What follows according to St Matthew's account, occasions me no
difficulty. He does not say that the woman was cured by the touch; he
says nothing of her cure until Jesus had turned and seen her, and spoken
the word to her, whereupon he adds: "And the woman was made whole from
that hour." But St Mark and St Luke represent that the woman was cured
upon the touch, and that the cure was only confirmed afterwards by the
words of our Lord. They likewise represent Jesus as ignorant of what had
taken place, except in so far as he knew that, without his volition,
some cure had been wrought by contact with his person, of which he was
aware by the passing from him of a saving influence. By this, in the
heart of a crowd which pressed upon him so that many must have come into
bodily contact with him, he knew that some one had touched him with
special intent. No perplexity arises from the difference between the
accounts, for there is only difference, not incongruity: the two tell
more than the one; it is from the nature of the added circumstances that
it springs, for those circumstances necessarily involve inquiries of the
most difficult nature. Nor can I in the least pretend to have satisfied
myself concerning them. In the first place comes the mode of the cure,
which _seems_ at first sight (dissociated, observe, from the will of
the healer) to partake of the nature of magic--an influence without
a sufficient origin. Not for a moment would I therefore yield to an
inclination to reject the testimony. I have no right to do so, for
it deals with circumstances concerning which my ignorance is all but
complete. I cannot rest, however, without seeking to come into some
spiritual relation with the narrative, that is, to find some credible
supposition upon which, without derogating from the lustre of the object
of the whole history, the thing might take place. The difficulty, I
repeat, is, that the woman could be cured by the garment of Jesus,
without (not against) the will of Jesus. I think that the whole
difficulty arises from our ignorance--a helpless ignorance--of the
relations of thought and matter. I use the word _thought_ rather than
spirit, because in reflecting upon spirit (which is thought), people
generally represent to themselves a vague form of matter. All religion
is founded on the belief or instinct--call it what we will--that matter
is the result of mind, spirit, thought. The relation between them is
therefore simply too close, too near for us to understand. Here is what
I am able to suggest concerning the account of the miracle as given by
St Mark and St Luke.

If even in what we call inanimate things there lies a healing power in
various kinds; if, as is not absurd, there may lie in the world absolute
cure existing in analysis, that is parted into a thousand kinds and
forms, who can tell what cure may lie in a perfect body, informed, yea,
caused, by a perfect spirit? If stones and plants can heal by the will
of God in them, might there not dwell in the perfect health of a body,
in which dwelt the Son of God, a necessarily healing power? It may seem
that in the fact of the many crowding about him, concerning whom we
have no testimony of influence received, there lies a refutation of
his supposition. But who can tell what he may have done even for them
without their recognizing it save in conscious well-being? Besides,
those who crowded nearest him would mostly be of the strongest who were
least in need of a physician, and in whose being consequently there lay
not that bare open channel hungering for the precious life-current. And
who can tell how the faith of the heart, calming or arousing the whole
nature, may have rendered the very person of the woman more fit than
the persons of others in the crowd to receive the sacred influence? For
although she did not pray, she had the faith as alive though as small as
the mustard seed. Why might not health from the fountain of health flow
then into the empty channel of the woman's weakness? It may have been
so. I shrink from the subject, I confess, because of the vulgar forms
such speculations have assumed in our days, especially in the hands of
those who savour unspeakably more of the charlatan than the prophet.
Still, one must be honest and truthful even in regard to what he has to
distinguish, as he can, into probable and impossible. Fact is not the
sole legitimate object of human inquiry. If it were, farewell to all
that elevates and glorifies human nature--farewell to God, to religion,
to hope! It is that which lies at the root of fact, yea, at the root of
law, after which the human soul hungers and longs.

In the preceding remarks I have anticipated a chapter to follow--a
chapter of speculation, which may God make humble and right. But some
remark was needful here. What must be to some a far greater difficulty
has yet to be considered. It is the representation of the Lord's
ignorance of the cure, save from the reaction upon his own person of the
influence which went out from him to fill that vacuum of suffering which
the divine nature abhors: he did not know that his body was about to
radiate health. But this gives me no concern. Our Lord himself tells us
in one case, at least, that he did not know, that only his Father knew.
He could discern a necessary result in the future, but not the day or
the hour thereof. Omniscience is a consequence, not an essential of the
divine nature. God knows because he creates. The Father knows because he
orders. The Son knows because he obeys. The knowledge of the Father must
be perfect; such knowledge the Son neither needs nor desires. His
sole care is to do the will of the Father. Herein lies his essential
divinity. Although he knew that one of his apostles should betray him, I
doubt much whether, when he chose Judas, he knew that he was that one.
We must take his own words as true. Not only does he not claim perfect
knowledge, but he disclaims it. He speaks once, at least, to his Father
with an _if it be possible_. Those who believe omniscience essential to
divinity, will therefore be driven to say that Christ was not divine.
This will be their punishment for placing knowledge on a level with
love. No one who does so can worship in spirit and in truth, can lift
up his heart in pure adoration. He will suppose he does, but his heaven
will be in the clouds, not in the sky.

But now we come to the holy of holies of the story--the divinest of its
divinity. Jesus could not leave the woman with the half of a gift. He
could not let her away so poor. She had stolen the half: she must fetch
the other half--come and take it from his hand. That is, she must know
who had healed her. Her will and his must come together; and for this
her eyes and his, her voice and his ears, her ears and his voice must
meet. It is the only case recorded in which he says _Daughter_. It could
not have been because she was younger than himself; there could not have
been much difference between their ages in that direction. Let us see
what lies in the word.

With the modesty belonging to her as a woman, intensified by the painful
shrinking which had its origin in the peculiar nature of her suffering,
she dared not present herself to the eyes of the Lord, but thought
merely to gather from under his table a crumb unseen. And I do not
believe that our Lord in calling her had any desire to make her tell her
tale of grief, and, in her eyes, of shame. It would have been enough to
him if she had come and stood before him, and said nothing. Nor had she
to appear before his face with only that poor remnant of strength which
had sufficed to bring her to the hem of his garment behind him; for
now she knew in herself that she was healed of her plague, and the
consciousness must have been strength. Yet she trembled when she came.
Filled with awe and gratitude, she could not stand before him; she fell
down at his feet. There, hiding her face in her hands, I presume, she
forgot the surrounding multitude, and was alone in the chamber of her
consciousness with the Son of Man. Her love, her gratitude, her holy
awe unite in an impulse to tell him all. When the lower approaches the
higher in love, even between men, the longing is to be known; the prayer
is "Know me." This was David's prayer to God, "Search me and know me."
There should be no more concealment. Besides, painful as it was to her
to speak, he had a right to know all, and know it he should. It was her
sacrifice offered unto the Lord. She told him all the truth. To conceal
anything from him now would be greater pain than to tell all, for the
thing concealed would be as a barrier between him and her; she would be
simple--one-fold; her whole being should lie open before him. I do not
for a moment mean that such thoughts, not to say words, took shape in
her mind; but sometimes we can represent a single consciousness only by
analysing it into twenty thoughts. And he accepted the offering. He let
her speak, and tell all.

But it was painful. He understood it well. His heart yearned towards the
woman to shield her from her own innocent shame, to make as it were a
heaven about her whose radiance should render it "by clarity invisible."
Her story appealed to all that was tenderest in humanity; for the secret
which her modesty had hidden, her conscience had spoken aloud. Therefore
the tenderest word that the language could afford must be hers.
"Daughter," he said. It was the fullest reward, the richest
acknowledgment he could find of the honour in which he held her, his
satisfaction with her conduct, and the perfect love he bore her. The
degrading spirit of which I have spoken, the spirit of the commonplace,
which lowers everything to the level of its own capacity of belief, will
say that the word was an eastern mode in more common use than with us. I
say that whatever Jesus did or said, he did and said like other men--he
did and said as no other man did or said. If he said _Daughter_, it
meant what any man would mean by it; it meant what no man could mean by
it--what no man was good enough, great enough, loving enough to mean
by it. In him the Father spoke to this one the eternal truth of his
relation to all his daughters, to all the women he has made, though
individually it can be heard only by those who lift up the filial eyes,
lay bare the filial heart. He did the works, he spoke the words of him
that sent him. Well might this woman, if she dared not lift the downcast
eye before the men present, yet depart in shameless peace: he who had
healed her had called her _Daughter_. Everything on earth is paltry
before such a word. It was the deepest gift of the divine nature--the
recognition of the eternal in her by him who had made it. Between the
true father and the true daughter nothing is painful. I think also that
very possibly some compunction arose in her mind, the moment she knew
herself healed, at the mode in which she had gained her cure. Hence
when the Lord called her she may have thought he was offended with her
because of it. Possibly her contrition for the little fault, if fault
indeed it was, may have increased the agony of feeling with which she
forced rather than poured out her confession. But he soothes her with
gentle, consoling, restoring words: "Be of good comfort." He heals the
shy suffering spirit, "wherein old dints of deep wounds did remain." He
confirms the cure she feared perhaps might be taken from her again. "Go
in peace, and be whole of thy plague." Nay, more, he attributes her
cure to her own faith. "Thy faith hath made thee whole." What wealth
of tenderness! She must not be left in her ignorance to the danger of
associating power with the mere garment of the divine. She must be
brought face to face with her healer. She must not be left kneeling on
the outer threshold of the temple. She must be taken to the heart of the
Saviour, and so redeemed, then only redeemed utterly. There is no word,
no backward look of reproach upon the thing she had condemned. If it was
evil it was gone from between them for ever. Confessed, it vanished. Her
faith was an ignorant faith, but, however obscured in her consciousness,
it was a true faith. She believed in the man, and our Lord loved the
modesty that kept her from pressing into his presence. It may indeed
have been the very strength of her faith working in her ignorance that
caused her to extend his power even to the skirts of his garments. And
there he met the ignorance, not with rebuke, but with the more grace. If
even her ignorance was so full of faith, of what mighty confidence was
she not capable! Even the skirt of his garment would minister to such a
faith. It should be as she would. Through the garment of his Son, the
Father would cure her who believed enough to put forth her hand and
touch it. The kernel-faith was none the worse that it was closed in the
uncomely shell of ignorance and mistake. The Lord was satisfied with it.
When did he ever quench the smoking flax? See how he praises her. He is
never slow to commend. The first quiver of the upturning eyelid is to
him faith. He welcomes the sign, and acknowledges it; commends the
feeblest faith in the ignorant soul, rebukes it as little only in
apostolic souls where it ought to be greater. "Thy faith hath saved
thee." However poor it was, it was enough for that. Between death and
the least movement of life there is a gulf wider than that fixed between
the gates of heaven and the depths of hell. He said "_Daughter_."

I come now to the first instance of plain request--that of the leper who
fell down before him, saying, "Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me
clean"--a prayer lovely in the simplicity of its human pleading--appeal
to the power which lay in the man to whom he spoke: his power was the
man's claim; the relation between them was of the strongest--that
between plenty and need, between strength and weakness, between health
and disease--poor bonds comparatively between man and man, for man's
plenty, strength, and health can only supplement, not satisfy the need;
support the weakness, not change it into strength; mitigate the disease
of his fellow, not slay it with invading life; but in regard to God, all
whose power is creative, any necessity of his creatures is a perfect
bond between them and him; his magnificence must flow into the channels
of the indigence he has created.

Observe how Jesus responds in the terms of the man's request. The woman
found the healing where she sought it--in the hem of his garment. One
man says, "Come with me;" the Lord goes. Another says, "Come not under
my roof, I am not worthy;" the Lord remains. Here the man says, "If thou
wilt;" the Lord answers, "I will." But he goes far beyond the man's
request.

I need say nothing of the grievous complaint under which he laboured.
It was sore to the mind as well as the body, for it made of the man an
outcast and ashamed. No one would come near him lest he should share his
condemnation. Physical evil had, as it were, come to the surface in him.
He was "full of leprosy." Men shrink more from skin-diseases than from
any other.[2] [Footnote 2: And they are amongst the hardest to cure;
just as the skin-diseases of the soul linger long after the heart is
greatly cured. Witness the petulance, fastidiousness, censoriousness,
social self-assertion, general disagreeableness of so many good
people--all in the moral skin--repulsive exceedingly. I say good people;
I do not say _very good_, nor do I say Christ-_like_, for that they are
not.]

Jesus could have cured him with a word. There was no need he should
touch him. _No need_ did I say? There was every need. For no one else
would touch him. The healthy human hand, always more or less healing,
was never laid on him; he was despised and rejected. It was a poor thing
for the Lord to cure his body; he must comfort and cure his sore heart.
Of all men a leper, I say, needed to be touched with the hand of love.
Spenser says, "Entire affection hateth nicer hands." It was not for our
master, our brother, our ideal man, to draw around him the skirts of his
garments and speak a lofty word of healing, that the man might at least
be clean before he touched him. The man was his brother, and an evil
disease cleaved fast unto him. Out went the loving hand to the ugly
skin, and there was his brother as he should be--with the flesh of a
child. I thank God that the touch went before the word. Nor do I think
it was the touch of a finger, or of the finger-tips. It was a kindly
healing touch in its nature as in its power. Oh blessed leper! thou
knowest henceforth what kind of a God there is in the earth--not the God
of the priests, but a God such as himself only can reveal to the hearts
of his own. That touch was more than the healing. It was to the leper
what the word _Daughter_ was to the woman in the crowd, what the
_Neither do I_ was to the woman in the temple--the sign of the perfect
presence. Outer and inner are one with him: the outermost sign is the
revelation of the innermost heart.

Let me linger one moment upon this coming together of creative health
and destroying disease. The health must flow forth; the disease could
not enter: Jesus was not defiled by the touch. Not that even if he would
have been, he would have shrunk and refrained; he respected the human
body in most evil case, and thus he acknowledged it his own. But my
reader must call up for himself the analogies--only I cannot admit that
they are mere analogies--between the cure of the body and the cure of
the soul: here they were combined in one act, for that touch went to the
man's heart. I can only hint at them here. Hand to hand is enough for
the cure of the bodily disease; but heart to heart will Jesus visit
the man who in deepest defilement of evil habits, yet lifts to him a
despairing cry. The healthful heart of the Lord will cure the heart
spotted with the plague: it will come again as the heart of a child.
_Only this kind goeth not out save by prayer and abstinence_.

The Lord gave him something to do at once, and something not to do. He
was to go to the priest, and to hold his tongue. It is easier to do than
to abstain; he went to the priest; he did not hold his tongue.

That the Lord should send him to the priest requires no explanation.
The sacred customs of his country our Lord in his own person constantly
recognized. That he saw in them more than the priests themselves was no
reason for passing them by. The testimony which he wished the man to
bear concerning him lay in the offering of the gift which Moses had
commanded. His healing was in harmony with all the forms of the ancient
law; for it came from the same source, and would in the lapse of ages
complete what the law had but begun. This the man was to manifest for
him. The only other thing he required of him--silence--the man would
not, at least did not, yield. The probability is that he needed the
injunction for his own sake more than for the master's sake; that he was
a talkative, demonstrative man, whose better life was ever in danger of
evaporating in words; and that the Lord required silence of him, that he
might think, and give the seed time to root itself well before it shot
its leaves out into the world. Are there not some in our own day, who,
having had a glimpse of truth across the darkness of a moral leprosy,
instantly begin to blaze abroad the matter, as if it were their part at
once to call to their fellows, and teach them out of an intellectual
twilight, in which they can as yet see men only as trees walking,
instead of retiring into the wilderness, for a time at least, to commune
with their own hearts, and be still? But he meant well, nor is it any
wonder that such a man should be incapable of such a sacrifice. The Lord
had touched him. His nature was all in commotion with gratitude. His
self-conceit swelled high. His tongue would not be still. Perhaps he
judged himself a leper favoured above his fellow-lepers. Nothing would
more tend to talkativeness than such a selfish mistake. He would be
grateful. He would befriend his healer against his will. He would work
for him--alas! only to impede the labours of the Wise; for the Lord
found his popularity a great obstacle to the only success he sought. "He
went out and began to blaze abroad the matter, insomuch that Jesus could
no more openly enter into the city." His nature could not yet understand
the kingdom that cometh not with observation, and from presumption
mingled with affection, he would serve the Lord after a better fashion
than that of doing his will. And he had his reward. He had his share in
bringing his healer to the cross.

Obedience is the only service.

       *       *       *       *       *

I take now the cure of the ten lepers, done apparently in a village of
Galilee towards Samaria. They stood afar off in a group, probably afraid
of offending him by any nearer approach, and cried aloud, "Jesus,
Master, have mercy on us." Instead of at once uttering their cure, he
desired them to go and show themselves to the priests. This may have
been partly for the sake of the priests, partly perhaps for the
justification of his own mission, but more certainly for the sake of the
men themselves, that he might, in accordance with his frequent practice,
give them something wherein to be obedient. It served also, as the
sequel shows, to individualize their relation to him. The relation as a
group was not sufficient for the men. Between him and them it must be
the relation of man to man. Individual faith must, as it were, break up
the group--to favour a far deeper reunion. Its bond was now a common
suffering; it must be changed to a common faith in the healer of it. His
intention wrought in them--at first with but small apparent result. They
obeyed, and went to go to the priests, probably wondering whether they
would be healed or not, for the beginnings of faith are so small that
they can hardly be recognized as such. Going, they found themselves
cured. Nine of them held on their way, obedient; while the tenth,
forgetting for the moment in his gratitude the word of the Master,
turned back and fell at his feet. A moral martinet, a scribe, or a
Pharisee, might have said "The nine were right, the tenth was wrong: he
ought to have kept to the letter of the command." Not so the Master: he
accepted the gratitude as the germ of an infinite obedience. Real love
is obedience and all things beside. The Lord's own devotion was that
which burns up the letter with the consuming fire of love, fulfilling
and setting it aside. High love needs no letter to guide it. Doubtless
the letter is all that weak faith is capable of, and it is well for
those who keep it! But it is ill for those who do not outgrow and forget
it! Forget it, I say, _by outgrowing it_. The Lord cared little for the
letter of his own commands; he cared all for the spirit, for that was
life.

This man was a stranger, as the Jews called him, a Samaritan. Therefore
the Lord praised him to his followers. It was as if he had said, "See,
Jews, who think yourselves the great praisers of God! here are ten
lepers cleansed: where are the nine? One comes back to glorify God--a
Samaritan!" To the man himself he says, "Arise, go thy way; thy faith
hath made thee whole." Again this commending of individual faith! "Was
it not the faith of the others too that had healed them?" Doubtless. If
they had had enough to bring them back, he would have told them that
their faith had saved them. But they were content to be healed, and
until their love, which is the deeper faith, brought them to the
Master's feet, their faith was not ripe for praise. But it was not for
their blame, it was for the Samaritan's praise that he spoke. Probably
this man's faith had caused the cry of all the ten; probably he was the
salt of the little group of outcasts--the tenth, the righteous man.
Hence they were contented, for the time, with their cure: he forgot the
cure itself in his gratitude. A moment more, and with obedient feet he
would overtake them on their way to the priest.

I may not find a better place for remarking on the variety of our Lord's
treatment of those whom he cured; that is, the variety of the form in
which he conveyed the cure. In the record I do not think we find two
cases treated in the same manner. There is no massing of the people with
him. In his behaviour to men, just as in their relation to his Father,
every man is alone with him. In this case of the ten, as I have said, I
think he sent them away, partly, that this individuality might have an
opportunity of asserting itself. They had stood afar off, therefore he
could not lay the hand of love on each. But now one left the group
and brought his gratitude to the Master's feet, and with a loud voice
glorified God the Healer.

In reflecting then on the details of the various cures we must seek the
causes of their diversity mainly in the individual differences of the
persons cured, not forgetting, at the same time, that all the accounts
are brief, and that our capacity is poor for the task. The whole divine
treatment of man is that of a father to his children--only a father
infinitely more a father than any man can be. Before him stands each, as
much an individual child as if there were no one but him. The relation
is awful in its singleness. Even when God deals with a nation as a
nation, it is only as by this dealing the individual is aroused to
a sense of his own wrong, that he can understand how the nation has
sinned, or can turn himself to work a change. The nation cannot change
save as its members change; and the few who begin the change are the
elect of that nation. Ten righteous individuals would have been just
enough to restore life to the festering masses of Sodom--festering
masses because individual life had ceased, and the nation or community
was nowhere. Even nine could not do it: Sodom must perish. The
individuals must perish now; the nation had perished long since. All
communities are for the divine sake of individual life, for the sake of
the love and truth that is in each heart, and is not cumulative--cannot
be in two as one result. But all that is precious in the individual
heart depends for existence on the relation the individual bears to
other individuals: alone--how can he love? alone--where is his truth? It
is for and by the individuals that the individual lives. A community is
the true development of individual relations. Its very possibility lies
in the conscience of its men and women. No setting right can be done in
the _mass_. There are no masses save in corruption. Vital organizations
result alone from individualities and consequent necessities, which
fitting the one into the other, and working for each other, make
combination not only possible but unavoidable. Then the truth which has
_informed_ in the community reacts on the individual to perfect his
individuality. In a word, the man, in virtue of standing alone in God,
stands _with_ his fellows, and receives from them divine influences
without which he cannot be made perfect. It is in virtue of the living
consciences of its individuals that a common conscience is possible to a
nation.

I cannot work this out here, but I would avoid being misunderstood.
Although I say, every man stands alone in God, I yet say two or many can
meet in God as they cannot meet save in God; nay, that only in God can
two or many truly meet; only as they recognize their oneness with God
can they become one with each other.

In the variety then of his individual treatment of the sick, Jesus did
the works of his Father _as_ his Father does them. For the Spirit of
God speaks to the spirit of the man, and the Providence of God arranges
everything for the best good of the individual--counting the very hairs
of his head. Every man had a cure of his own; every woman had a cure
of her own--all one and the same in principle, each individual in the
application of the principle. This was the foundation of the true
church. And yet the members of that church will try to separate upon
individual and unavoidable differences!

But once more the question recurs: Why say so often that this and
that one's faith had saved him? Was it not enough that he had saved
them?--Our Lord would knit the bond between him and each man by arousing
the man's individuality, which is, in deepest fact, his conscience. The
cure of a man depended upon no uncertain or arbitrary movement of the
feelings of Jesus. He was always ready to heal. No one was ever refused
who asked him. It rested with the man: the healing could not have its
way and enter in, save the man would open his door. It was there for him
if he would take it, or rather when he would allow him to bestow it.
Hence the question and the praise of the patient's faith. There was no
danger then of that diseased self-consciousness which nowadays is always
asking, "Have I faith? Have I faith?" searching, in fact, for grounds of
self-confidence, and turning away the eyes in the search from the only
source whence confidence can flow--the natal home of power and love. How
shall faith be born but of the beholding of the faithful? This diseased
self-contemplation was not indeed a Jewish complaint at all, nor
possible in the bodily presence of the Master. Hence the praise given
to a man's faith could not hurt him; it only made him glad and more
faithful still. This disease itself is in more need of his curing hand
than all the leprosies of Judaea and Samaria.

The cases which remain of this group are of blind men--the first, that
recorded by St Matthew of the two who followed Jesus, crying, "Thou Son
of David, have mercy on us." He asked them if they believed that he was
able to do the thing for them, drawing, I say, the bond between them
closer thereby. They said they did believe it, and at once he touched
their eyes--again the bodily contact, as in the case of the blind man
already considered--especially needful in the case of the blind, to
associate the healing with the healer. But there are differences between
the cases. The man who had not asked to be healed was as it were put
through a longer process of cure--I think that his faith and his will
might be called into exercise; and the bodily contact was made closer to
help the development of his faith and will: he made clay and put it
on his eyes, and the man had to go and wash. Where the prayer and the
confession of faith reveal the spiritual contact already effected, the
cure is immediate. "According to your faith," the Lord said, "be it unto
you."

On these men, as on the leper, he laid the charge of silence, by them,
as by him, sadly disregarded. The fact that he went into the house, and
allowed them to follow him there before he cured them, also shows that
he desired in their case, doubtless because of circumstances, to avoid
publicity, a desire which they foiled. Their gladness overcame, if not
their gratitude, yet the higher faith that is one with obedience. When
the other leper turned back to speak his gratitude, it was but the delay
of a moment in the fulfilling of the command. But the gratitude that
disobeys an injunction, that does what the man is told not to do, and
so plunges into the irretrievable, is a virtue that needs a development
amounting almost to a metamorphosis.

In the one remaining case there is a slight confusion in the records. St
Luke says that it was performed as Jesus entered into Jericho; St Mark
says it was as he went out of Jericho, and gives the name and parentage
of the blind beggar; indeed his account is considerably more minute than
that of the others. St Matthew agrees with St Mark as to the occasion,
but says there were two blind men. We shall follow the account of St
Mark.

Bartimaeus, having learned the cause of the tumultuous passing of feet,
calls, like those former two blind men, upon the Son of David to have
mercy on him.[3] [Footnote 3: In these two cases, the cry is upon the
_Son of David_: I wonder if this had come to be considered by the blind
the correct formula of address to the new prophet. But the cases are
almost too few to justify even a passing conjecture at generalization.]

The multitude finds fault with his crying and calling. I presume he was
noisy in his eagerness after his vanished vision, and the multitude
considered it indecorous. Or perhaps the rebuke arose from that common
resentment of a crowd against any one who makes himself what they
consider unreasonably conspicuous, claiming a share in the attention
of the potentate to which they cannot themselves pretend. But the Lord
stops, and tells them to call the man; and some of them, either being
his friends, or changing their tone when the great man takes notice of
him, begin to congratulate and comfort him. He, casting away his garment
in his eagerness, rises, and is led through the yielding crowd to
the presence of the Lord. To enter in some degree into the personal
knowledge of the man before curing him, and to consolidate his faith,
Jesus, the tones of whose voice, full of the life of God, the cultivated
hearing of a blind man would be best able to interpret, began to talk a
little with him.

"What wilt thou that I should do unto thee?"

"Lord, that I might receive my sight."

"Go thy way; thy faith hath made thee whole."

Immediately he saw; and the first use he made of his sight was to follow
him who had given it.

Neither St Mark nor St Luke, whose accounts are almost exactly the same,
says that he touched the man's eyes. St Matthew says he touched the eyes
of the _two_ blind men whom his account places in otherwise identical
circumstances. With a surrounding crowd who knew them, I think the
touching was less necessary than in private; but there is no need to
inquire which is the more correct account. The former two may have
omitted a fact, or St Matthew _may_ have combined the story with that of
the two blind men already noticed, of which he is the sole narrator. But
in any case there are, I think, but two recorded instances of the blind
praying for cure. Most likely there were more, perhaps there were many
such.

I have now to consider, as suggested by the idea of this group, the
question of prayer generally; for Jesus did the works of him who sent
him: as Jesus did so God does.

I have not seen an argument against what is called the efficacy of
prayer which appears to me to have any force but what is derived from
some narrow conception of the divine nature. If there be a God at all,
it is absurd to suppose that his ways of working should be such as to
destroy his side of the highest relation that can exist between him and
those whom he has cared to make--to destroy, I mean, the relation of the
will of the creator to the individual will of his creature. That God
should bind himself in an iron net of his own laws--that his laws should
bind him in any way, seeing they are just his nature in action--is
sufficiently absurd; but that such laws should interfere with his
deepest relation to his creatures, should be inconsistent with the
highest consequences of that creation which alone gives occasion for
those laws--that, in fact, the will of God should be at strife with the
foregoing action of God, not to say with the very nature of God--that he
should, with an unchangeable order of material causes and effects, cage
in for ever the winged aspirations of the human will which he has made
in the image of his own will, towards its natural air of freedom in His
will, would be pronounced inconceivable, were it not that it has been
conceived and uttered--conceived and uttered, however, only by minds to
which the fact of this relation was, if at all present, then only in the
vaguest and most incomplete form. That he should not leave himself any
_willing_ room towards those to whom he gave need, room to go wrong,
will to turn and look up and pray and hope, is to me grotesquely absurd.
It is far easier to believe that as both--the laws of nature, namely,
and the human will--proceed from the same eternally harmonious thought,
they too are so in harmony, that for the perfect operation of either no
infringement upon the other is needful; and that what seems to be such
infringement would show itself to a deeper knowledge of both as a
perfectly harmonious co-operation. Nor would it matter that we know so
little, were it not that with each fresh discovery we are so ready to
fancy anew that now, at last, we know all about it. We have neither
humility enough to be faithful, nor faith enough to be humble. Unfit to
grasp any whole, yet with an inborn idea of wholeness which ought to be
our safety in urging us ever on towards the Unity, we are constantly
calling each new part the whole, saying we have found the idea, and
casting ourselves on the couch of self-glorification. Thus the very need
of unity is by our pride perverted to our ruin. We say we have found
it, when we have it not. Hence, also, it becomes easy to refuse certain
considerations, yea, certain facts, a place in our system--for
the system will cease to be a system at all the moment they are
acknowledged. They may have in them the very germ of life and truth; but
what is that, if they destroy this Babylon that we have built? Are not
its forms stately and fair? Yea, _can_ there be statelier and fairer?
The main point is simply this, that what it would not be well for God to
give before a man had asked for it, it may be not only well, but best,
to give when he has asked. [Footnote 4: _Well_ and _Best_ must be the
same thing with God when he acts.]

I believe that the first half of our training is up to the asking point;
after that the treatment has a grand new element in it. For God can give
when a man is in the fit condition to receive it, what he cannot give
before because the man cannot receive it. How give instruction in the
harmony of colours or tones to a man who cannot yet distinguish between
shade and shade or tone and tone, upon which distinction all harmony
depends? A man cannot receive except another will give; no more can a
man give if another will not receive; he can only offer. Doubtless, God
works on every man, else he _could_ have no divine tendency at all;
there would be no _thither_ for him to turn his face towards; there
could be at best but a sense of want. But the moment the man has given
in to God--to use a homely phrase--the spirit for which he prays can
work in him all with him, not now (as it _appeared_ then) _against_ him.
Every parent at all worthy of the relation must know that occasions
occur in which the asking of the child makes the giving of the parent
the natural correlative. In a way infinitely higher, yet the same at the
root, for all is of God, He can give when the man asks what he could not
give without, because in the latter case the man would take only the
husk of the gift, and cast the kernel away--a husk poisonous without the
kernel, although wholesome and comforting with it.

But some will say, "We may ask, but it is certain we shall not have
everything we ask for."

No, thank God, certainly not; we shall have nothing which we ourselves,
when capable of judging and choosing with open eyes to its true relation
to ourselves, would not wish and choose to have. If God should give
otherwise, it must be as a healing punishment of inordinate and hurtful
desire. The parable of the father dividing his living at the prayer of
the younger son, must be true of God's individual sons, else it could
not have been true of the Jews on the one hand and the Gentiles on the
other. He will grant some such prayers because he knows that the swine
and their husks will send back his son with quite another prayer on his
lips.

If my supposed interlocutor answers, "What then is the good of praying,
if it is not to go by what I want?" I can only answer, "You have to
learn, and it may be by a hard road." In the kinds of things which men
desire, there are essential differences. In physical well-being, there
is a divine good. In sufficient food and raiment, there is a divine
fitness. In wealth, as such, there is _none_. A man may pray for money
to pay his debts, for healing of the sickness which incapacitates
him for labour or good work, for just judgment in the eyes of his
fellow-men, with an altogether different confidence from that with which
he could pray for wealth, or for bodily might to surpass his fellows, or
for vengeance upon those whose judgment of his merits differed from his
own; although even then the divine soul will with his Saviour say, "If
it be possible: Not my will but thine." For he will know that God gives
only the best.

"But God does not even cure every one who asks him. And so with the
other things you say are good to pray for."

Jesus did not cure all the ills in Judaea. But those he did cure were at
least real ills and real needs. There was a fitness in the condition of
some, a fitness favoured by his own bodily presence amongst them, which
met the virtue ready to go out from him. But God is ever present, and I
have yet to learn that any man prayed for money to be honest with and
to meet the necessities of his family, and did the work of him who had
called him from the market-place of the nation, who did not receive his
penny a-day. If to any one it seems otherwise, I believe the apparent
contradiction will one day be cleared up to his satisfaction. God has
not to satisfy the judgment of men as they are, but as they will be and
must be, having learned the high and perfectly honest and grand way of
things which is his will. For God to give men just what they want would
often be the same as for a man to give gin to the night-wanderer whom he
had it in his power to take home and set to work for wages. But I must
believe that many of the ills of which men complain would be speedily
cured if they would work in the strength of prayer. If the man had
not taken up his bed when Christ bade him, he would have been a great
authority with the scribes and chief priests against the divine mission
of Jesus. The power to work is a diviner gift than a great legacy. But
these are individual affairs to be settled individually between God
and his child. They cannot be pronounced upon generally because of
individual differences. But here as there, now as then, the lack is
_faith_. A man may say, "How can I have faith?" I answer, "How can you
indeed, who do the thing you know you ought not to do, and have not
begun to do the thing you know you ought to do? How should you have
faith? It is not well that you should be cured yet. It would have hurt
these men to cure them if they would not ask. And you do not pray." The
man who has prayed most is, I suspect, the least doubtful whether God
hears prayer now as Jesus heard it then. That we doubt is well, for we
are not yet in the empyrean of simple faith. But I think the man who
believes and prays now, has answers to his prayers even better than
those which came to the sick in Judæa; for although the bodily presence
of Jesus made a difference in their favour, I do believe that the Spirit
of God, after widening its channels for nearly nineteen hundred years,
can flow in greater plenty and richness now. Hence the answers to prayer
must not only not be of quite the same character as then, but they must
be better, coming yet closer to the heart of the need, whether known as
such by him who prays, or not. But the change lies in man's power of
reception, for God is always the same to his children. Only, being
infinite, he must speak to them and act for them in the endless
diversity which their growth and change render necessary. Thus only they
can receive of his fulness who is all in all and unchangeable.

In our imperfect condition both of faith and of understanding, the whole
question of asking and receiving must necessarily be surrounded with
mist and the possibility of mistake. It can be successfully encountered
only by the man who for himself asks and hopes. It lies in too lofty
regions and involves too many unknown conditions to be reduced to
formulas of ours; for God must do only the best, and man is greater and
more needy than himself can know.

Yet he who asks _shall_ receive--of the very best. One promise without
reserve, and only one, because it includes all, remains: the promise of
the Holy Spirit to them who ask it. He who has the Spirit of God, God
himself, in him, has the Life in him, possesses the final cure of all
ill, has in himself the answer to all possible prayer.




VI. MIRACLES GRANTED TO THE PRAYER OF FRIENDS.


If we allow that prayer may in any case be heard for the man himself, it
almost follows that it must be heard for others. It cannot well be in
accordance with the spirit of Christianity, whose essential expression
lies in the sacrifice of its founder, that a man should be heard only
when he prays for himself. The fact that in cases of the preceding group
faith was required on the part of the person healed as essential to his
cure, represents no different principle from that which operates in the
cases of the present group. True, in these the condition is not faith on
the part of the person cured, but faith on the part of him who asks for
his cure. But the possession of faith by the patient was not in the
least essential, as far as the power of Jesus was concerned, to his
bodily cure, although no doubt favourable thereto; it was necessary
only to that spiritual healing, that higher cure, for the sake of
which chiefly the Master brought about the lower. In both cases, the
requisition of faith is for the sake of those who ask--whether for
themselves or for their friends, it matters not. It is a breath to blow
the smoking flax into a flame--a word to draw into closer contact with
himself. He cured many without such demand, as his Father is ever curing
without prayer. Cure itself shall sometimes generate prayer and faith.
Well, therefore, might the cure of others be sometimes granted to
prayer.

Beyond this, however, there is a great fitness in the thing. For so are
men bound together, that no good can come to one but all must share
in it. The children suffer for the father, the father suffers for the
children, and they are also blessed together. If a spiritual good
descend upon the heart of a leader of the nation, the whole people might
rejoice for themselves, for they must be partakers of the unspeakable
gift. To increase the faith of the father may be more for the faith of
the child, healed in answer to his prayer, than anything done for the
child himself. It is an enlarging of one of the many channels in which
the divinest gifts flow. For those gifts chiefly, at first, flow to men
through the hearts and souls of those of their fellows who are nearer
the Father than they, until at length they are thus brought themselves
to speak to God face to face.

Lonely as every man in his highest moments of spiritual vision, yea
in his simplest consciousness of duty, turns his face towards the one
Father, his own individual maker and necessity of his life; painfully
as he may then feel that the best beloved understands not as he
understands, feels not as he feels; he is yet, in his most isolated
adoration of the Father of his spirit, nearer every one of the beloved
than when eye meets eye, heart beats responsive to heart, and the poor
dumb hand seeks by varied pressure to tell the emotion within. Often
then the soul, with its many organs of utterance, feels itself but a
songless bird, whose broken twitter hardens into a cage around it; but
even with all those organs of utterance in full play, he is yet farther
from his fellow-man than when he is praying to the Father in a desert
place apart. The man who prays, in proportion to the purity of his
prayer, becomes a spiritual power, a nerve from the divine brain, yea,
perhaps a ganglion as we call it, whence power anew goes forth upon his
fellows. He is a redistributor, as it were, of the divine blessing; not
in the exercise of his own will--that is the cesspool towards which
all notions of priestly mediation naturally sink--but as the
self-forgetting, God-loving brother of his kind, who would be in the world
as Christ was in the world. When a man prays for his fellow-man, for wife
or child, mother or father, sister or brother or friend, the connection
between the two is so close in God, that the blessing begged may well
flow to the end of the prayer. Such a one then is, in his poor, far-off
way, an advocate with the Father, like his master, Jesus Christ, The
Righteous. He takes his friend into the presence with him, or if not
into the presence, he leaves him with but the veil between them, and
they touch through the veil.

The first instance we have in this kind, occurred at Cana, in the centre
of Galilee, where the first miracle was wrought. It is the second
miracle in St John's record, and is recorded by him only. Doubtless
these two had especially attracted his nature--the turning of water into
wine, and the restoration of a son to his father. The Fatherhood of God
created the fatherhood in man; God's love man's love. And what shall he
do to whom a son is given whom yet he cannot keep? The divine love in
his heart cleaves to the child, and the child is vanishing! What can
this nobleman do but seek the man of whom such wondrous rumours have
reached his ears?

Between Cana and Tiberias, from which came the father with his prayer,
was somewhere about twenty miles.

"He is at the point of death," said the father.

"Except ye see signs and wonders ye will not believe," said Jesus.

"Sir, come down ere my child die."

"Go thy way, thy son liveth."

If the nobleman might have understood the remark the Lord made, he was
in no mood for principles, and respectfully he expostulates with our
Lord for spending time in words when the need was so urgent. The sun of
his life was going down into the darkness. He might deserve reproof, but
even reproof has its season. "Sir, come down ere my child die." Whatever
the Lord meant by the words he urged it no farther. He sends him home
with the assurance of the boy's recovery, showing him none of the signs
or wonders of which he had spoken. Had the man been of unbelieving kind
he would, when he returned and found that all had occurred in the most
natural fashion, that neither here had there been sign or wonder, have
gradually reverted to his old carelessness as to a higher will and its
ordering of things below. But instead of this, when he heard that the
boy began to get better the very hour when Jesus spoke the word--a fact
quite easy to set down as a remarkable coincidence--he believed, and all
his people with him. Probably he was in ideal reality the head of his
house, the main source of household influences--if such, then a man of
faith, for, where a man does not himself look up to the higher, the
lower will hardly look faithfully up to him--surely a fit man to
intercede for his son, with all his house ready to believe with him. It
may be said they too shared in the evidence--such as it was--not much of
a sign or wonder to them. True; but people are not ready to believe
the best evidence except they are predisposed in the direction of that
evidence. If it be said, "they should have thought for themselves," I
answer--To think with their head was no bad sign that they did think for
themselves. A great deal of what is called freedom of thought is merely
the self-assertion which would persuade itself of a freedom it would
possess but cannot without an effort too painful for ignorance and
self-indulgence. The man would _feel_ free without being free. To assert
one's individuality is not necessarily to be free: it _may_ indeed be
but the outcome of absolute slavery.

But if this nobleman was a faithful man, whence our Lord's word, "Except
ye see signs and wonders ye will not believe"? I am not sure. It may
have been as a rebuke to those about him. This man--perhaps, as is said,
a nobleman of Herod's court--may not have been a pure-bred Jew, and
hence our Lord's remark would bear an import such as he uttered more
plainly in the two cases following, that of the Greek woman, and that
of the Roman centurion: "Except _ye_ see signs and wonders ye will not
believe; _but this man_--." With this meaning I should probably have
been content, were it not that the words were plainly addressed to the
man. I do not think this would destroy the interpretation, for the Lord
may have wished to draw the man out, and make him, a Gentile or doubtful
kind of Jew, rebuke the disciples; only the man's love for his son stood
in the way: he could think of nothing, speak of nothing save his son;
but it makes it unsatisfactory. And indeed I prefer the following
interpretation, because we have the other meaning in other places;
also because this is of universal application, and to us of these days
appears to me of special significance and value, applying to the men of
science on the one hand, and the men of superstition on the other.

My impression is, that our Lord, seeing the great faith of the nobleman,
grounded on what he had heard of the Master from others, chiefly of his
signs and wonders, did in this remark require of him a higher faith
still. It sounds to me an expostulation with him. To express in the best
way my feeling concerning it, I would dare to imagine our Lord speaking
in this fashion:--

"Why did you not pray the Father? Why do you want always to _see_? The
door of prayer has been open since ever God made man in his own image:
why are signs and wonders necessary to your faith? But I will do just as
my Father would have done if you had asked him. Only when I do it, it is
a sign and a wonder that you may believe; and I wish you could believe
without it. But believe then for the very work's sake, if you cannot
believe for the word and the truth's sake. Go thy way, thy son liveth."

I would not be understood to say that the Lord _blamed_ him, or others
in him, for needing signs and wonders: it was rather, I think, that the
Lord spoke out of the fulness of his knowledge to awake in them some
infant sense of what constituted all his life--the presence of God;
just as the fingers of the light go searching in the dark mould for the
sleeping seeds, to touch and awake them. The order of creation, the
goings on of life, were ceaselessly flowing from the very heart of the
Father: why should they seek signs and wonders differing from common
things only in being uncommon? In essence there was no difference.
Uncommonness is not excellence, even as commonness is not inferiority.
The sign, the wonder is, in fact, the lower thing, granted only because
of men's hardness of heart and slowness to believe--in itself of
inferior nature to God's chosen way. Yet, if signs and wonders could
help them, have them they should, for neither were they at variance
with the holy laws of life and faithfulness: they were but less usual
utterances of the same. "Go thy way: thy son liveth." The man, noble-man
certainly in this, obeyed, and found his obedience justify his faith.

But his son would have to work out his belief upon grounds differing
from those his father had. In himself he could but recognize the
resumption of the _natural_ sway of life. He would not necessarily know
that it was God working in him. For the cause of his cure, he would only
hear the story of it from his father--good evidence--but he himself had
not seen the face of the Holy One as his father had. In one sense or
another, he must seek and find him. Every generation must do its own
seeking and its own finding. The fault of the fathers often is that
they expect their finding to stand in place of their children's
seeking--expect the children to receive that which has satisfied the
need of their fathers upon their testimony; whereas rightly, their
testimony is not ground for their children's belief, only for their
children's search. That search is faith in the bud. No man can be sure
till he has found for himself. All that is required of the faithful
nature is a willingness to seek. He cannot even know the true nature of
the thing he wants until he has found it; he has but a dim notion of it,
a faint star to guide him eastward to the sunrise. Hopefully, the belief
of the father has the heart in it which will satisfy the need of the
child; but the doubt of this in the child, is the father's first ground
for hoping that the child with his new needs will find for himself the
same well of life--to draw from it with a new bucket, it may be, because
the old will hold water no longer: its staves may be good, but its hoops
are worn asunder; or, rather, it will be but a new rope it needs, which
he has to twist from the hemp growing in his own garden. The son who
was healed might have many questions to ask which the father could not
answer, had never thought of. He had heard of the miracle of Cana; he
had heard of many things done since: he believed that the man could cure
his son, and he had cured him. "Yes," the son might say, "but I must
know more of him; for, if what I hear now be true, I must cast all
at his feet. He cannot be a healer only; he must be the very Lord of
Life--it may be of the Universe." His simple human presence had in
it something against the supposition--contained in it what must
have _appeared_ reason for doubting this conclusion from his deeds,
especially to one who had not seen his divine countenance. But to one at
length enlightened of the great Spirit, his humanity would contain the
highest ground for believing in his divinity, for what it meant would
come out ever and ever loftier and grander. The Lord who had made the
Universe--how _should_ he show it but as the Healer did? He could not
make the universe over again in the eyes of every man. If he did, the
heart of the man could not hold the sight. He must reveal himself as the
curing God--the God who set things which had gone wrong, right again:
_that could_ be done in the eyes of each individual man. This man may be
he--the Messiah--Immanuel, God with-us.

We can imagine such the further thoughts of the son--possibly of the
father first--only he had been so full of the answer to his prayer, of
the cure of his son, that he could not all at once follow things towards
their grand conclusions.

In this case, as in the two which follow, the Lord heals from a
distance. I have not much to remark upon this. There were reasons for
it; one perhaps the necessity of an immediate answer to the prayer;
another probably lay in its fitness to the faith of the supplicants. For
to heal thus, although less of a sign or a wonder to the unbelieving,
had in it an element of finer power upon the faith of such as came not
for the sign or the wonder, but for the cure of the beloved; for he who
loves can believe what he who loves not cannot believe; and he who
loves most can believe most. In this respect, these cures were like the
healing granted to prayer in all ages--not that God is afar off, for
he is closer to every man than his own conscious being is to his
unconscious being--but that we receive the aid from the Unseen. Though
there be no distance with God, it looks like it to men; and when Jesus
cured thus, he cured with the same appearances which attended God's
ordinary healing.

The next case I take up is similar. It belongs to another of my classes,
but as a case of possession there is little distinctive about it, while
as the record of the devotion of a mother to her daughter--a devotion
quickening in her faith so rare and lovely as to delight the very heart
of Jesus with its humble intensity--it is one of the most beautiful of
all the stories of healing.

The woman was a Greek, and had not had the training of the Jew for a
belief in the Messiah. Her misconceptions concerning the healer of whom
she had heard must have been full of fancies derived from the legends of
her race. But she had yet been trained to believe, for her mighty
love of her own child was the best power for the development of the
child-like in herself.

No woman can understand the possible depths of her own affection for her
daughter. I say _daughter_, not _child_, because although love is the
same everywhere, it is nowhere the same. No two loves of individuals in
the same correlation are the same. Much more the love of a woman for her
daughter differs from the love of a father for his son--differs as the
woman differs from the man. There is in it a peculiar tenderness from
the sense of the same womanly consciousness in both of undefendedness
and self-accountable modesty--a modesty, in this case, how terribly
tortured in the mother by the wild behaviour of the daughter under the
impulses of the unclean spirit! Surely if ever there was a misery to
drive a woman to the Healer in an agony of rightful claim and prostrate
entreaty, it was the misery of a mother whose daughter was thus
possessed. The divine nature of her motherhood, of her womanhood, drew
her back to its source to find help for one who shared in the same, but
in whom its waters were sorely troubled and grievously defiled.

She came crying to him. About him stood his disciples, proud of being
Jews. For their sakes this chosen Gentile must be pained a little
further, must bear with her Saviour her part of suffering for the
redemption even of his chosen apostles. They counted themselves the
children, and such as she the dogs. He must show them the divine nature
dwelling in her. For the sake of this revelation he must try her sorely,
but not for long.

"Have mercy on me," she cried, "O Lord, thou son of David; my daughter
is grievously vexed with a devil."

But not a word of reply came from the lips of the Healer. His disciples
must speak first. They must supplicate for their Gentile sister. He
would arouse in them the disapproval of their own exclusiveness, by
putting it on for a moment that they might see it apart from themselves.

Their hearts were moved for the woman.

"Send her away," they said, meaning, "Give her what she wants;" but
to move the heart of love to grant the prayer, they--poor
intercessors--added a selfish reason to justify the deed of goodness,
either that they would avoid being supposed to acknowledge her claim on
a level with that of a Jewess, and would make of it what both Puritans
and priests would call "an uncovenanted mercy," or that they actually
thought it would help to overcome the scruples of the Master. Possibly
it was both. "She crieth after us," they said--meaning, "She is
troublesome." They would have him give as the ungenerous and the unjust
give to the importunate.

But no healing could be granted on such a ground--not even to the prayer
of an apostle. The woman herself must give a better.

"I am not sent," he said, "but unto the lost sheep of the house of
Israel."

They understood the words falsely. We know that he did come for the
Gentiles, and he was training them to see what they were so slow to
understand, that he had other sheep which were not of this fold. He had
need to begin with them thus early. Most of the troubles of his latest,
perhaps greatest apostle, came from the indignation of Jewish Christians
that he preached the good news to the Gentiles as if it had been
originally meant for them. They would have had them enter into its
privileges by the gates of Judaism.

What they did at length understand by these words is expressed in the
additional word of our Lord given by St Mark: "Let the children first be
filled." But even this they could not understand until afterwards. They
could not see that it was for the sake of the Gentiles as much as the
Jews that Jesus came to the Jews first. For whatever glorious exceptions
there were amongst the Gentiles, surpassing even similar amongst the
Jews; and whatever the wide-spread refusal of the Jewish nation, he
_could_ not have been received amongst the Gentiles as amongst the Jews.
In Judæa alone could the leaven work; there alone could the mustard-seed
take fitting root. Once rooted and up, it would become a great tree, and
the birds of the world would nestle in its branches. It was not that God
loved the Jews more than the Gentiles that he chose them first, but that
he must begin somewhere: _why,_ God himself knows, and perhaps has given
us glimmerings.

Upheld by her God-given love, not yet would the woman turn away. Even
such hard words as these could not repulse her.

She came now and fell at his feet. It is as the Master would have it:
she presses only the nearer, she insists only the more; for the devil
has a hold of her daughter.

"Lord, help me," is her cry; for the trouble of her daughter is her own.
The "Help _me_" is far more profound and pathetic than the most vivid
blazon of the daughter's sufferings.

But he answered and said,--

"It is not meet to take the children's bread, and to cast it to dogs."
Terrible words! more dreadful far than any he ever spoke besides! Surely
now she will depart in despair! But the Lord did not mean in them to
speak _his_ mind concerning the relation of Jew and Gentile; for
not only do the future of his church and the teaching of his Spirit
contradict it: but if he did mean what he said, then he acted as was
unmeet, for he did cast a child's bread to a dog. No. He spoke as a Jew
felt, that the elect Jews about him might begin to understand that in
him is neither Jew nor Gentile, but all are brethren.

And he has gained his point. The spirit in the woman has been divinely
goaded into utterance, and out come the glorious words of her love and
faith, casting aside even insult itself as if it had never been--all for
the sake of a daughter. Now, indeed, it is as he would have it.

"Yes, Lord; yet the dogs under the table eat of the children's crumbs."

Or, as St Matthew gives it:

"Truth, Lord: yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their
masters' table."

A retort quite Greek in its readiness, its symmetry, and its point! But
it was not the intellectual merit of the answer that pleased the Master.
Cleverness is cheap. It is the faith he praises, [Footnote 5: Far
more precious than any show of the intellect, even in regard of the
intellect itself. The quickness of her answer was the scintillation of
her intellect under the glow of her affection. Love is the quickening
nurse of the whole nature. Faith in God will do more for the intellect
at length than all the training of the schools. It will make the
best that can be made of the whole man.] which was precious as
rare--unspeakably precious even when it shall be the commonest thing
in the universe, but precious now as the first fruits of a world
redeemed--precious now as coming from the lips of a Gentile--more
precious as coming from the lips of a human mother pleading for her
daughter.

"O woman, great is thy faith: be it unto thee even as thou wilt."

Or, as St Mark gives it, for we cannot afford to lose a varying word,

"For this saying, go thy way; the devil is gone out of thy daughter."
The loving mother has conquered the tormenting devil. She has called in
the mighty aid of the original love. Through the channel of her love it
flows, new-creating, "and her daughter was made whole from that very
hour."

Where, O disciples, are your children and your dogs now? Is not the wall
of partition henceforth destroyed? No; you too have to be made whole
of a worse devil, that of personal and national pride, before you
understand. But the day of the Lord is coming for you, notwithstanding
ye are so incapable of knowing the signs and signals of its approach
that, although its banners are spread across the flaming sky, it must
come upon you as a thief in the night.

For the woman, we may well leave her to the embraces of her daughter.
They are enough for her now.

But endless more will follow, for God is exhaustless in giving where the
human receiving holds out. God be praised that there are such embraces
in the world! that there are mothers who are the salvation of their
children!

We now complete a little family group, as it were, with the story of
another foreigner, a Roman officer, who besought the Lord for his
servant. This captain was at Capernaum at the time, where I presume he
had heard of the cure which Jesus had granted to the nobleman for his
son. It seems almost clear from the quality of his faith, however, that
he must have heard much besides of Jesus--enough to give him matter of
pondering for some time, for I do not think such humble confidence
as his could be, like Jonah's gourd, the growth of a night. He was
evidently a man of noble and large nature. Instead of lording it over
the subject Jews of Capernaum, he had built them a synagogue; and his
behaviour to our Lord is marked by that respect which, shown to any
human being, but especially to a person of lower social condition, is
one of the surest marks of a finely wrought moral temperament. Such a
nature may be beautifully developed, by a military training, in which
obedience and command go together; and the excellence of faith and its
instant response in action, would be more readily understood by the
thoughtful officer of a well-disciplined army than by any one to whom
organization was unknown. Hence arose the parallel the centurion draws
between his own and the Master's position, which so pleased the Lord by
its direct simplicity. But humble as the man was, I doubt if anything
less than some spiritual perception of the nobility of the character
of Jesus, some perception of that which was altogether beyond even the
power of healing, could have generated such perfect reverence, such
childlike confidence as his. It is no wonder the Lord was pleased with
it, for that kind of thing must be just what his Father loves.

According to St Luke, the Roman captain considered himself so unworthy
of notice from the carpenter's son--they of Capernaum, which was "his
own city," knew his reputed parentage well enough--that he got the
elders of the Jews to go and beg for him that he would come and heal his
servant. They bore testimony to his worth, specifying that which would
always be first in the eyes of such as they, that he loved their nation,
and had built them a synagogue. Little they thought how the Lord was
about to honour him above all their nation and all its synagogues. He
went with them at once.

But before they reached the house, the centurion had a fresh inroad of
that divine disease, humility, [Footnote 6: In him it was almost
morbid, one might be tempted to say, were it not that it was own sister
to such mighty faith.] and had sent other friends to say, "Lord, trouble
not thyself, for I am not worthy that thou shouldest enter under my
roof. Wherefore, neither thought I myself worthy to come unto thee; but
say in a word, and my servant shall be healed. For I also am a man set
under authority, having under me soldiers, and I say unto one, Go, and
he goeth; and to another, Come, and he cometh; and to my servant, Do
this, and he doeth it."

This man was a philosopher: he ascended from that to which he was
accustomed to that to which he was not accustomed. Nor did his divine
logic fail him. He begins with acknowledging his own subjection, and
states his own authority; then leaves it to our Lord to understand that
he recognizes in him an authority beyond all, expecting the powers of
nature to obey their Master, just as his soldiers or his servants obey
him. How grandly he must have believed in him!

But beyond suspicion of flattery, he avoids the face of the man whom in
heart he worships. How unlike those who press into the presence of a
phantom-greatness! "A poor creature like me go and talk to him!" the
Roman captain would exclaim. "No, I will worship from afar off." And it
is to be well heeded that the Lord went no further--turned at once. With
the tax-gatherer Zacchaeus he would go home, if but to deliver him from
the hopelessness of his self-contempt; but what occasion was there here?
It was all right here. The centurion was one who needed but to go on. In
heart and soul he was nearer the Lord now than any of the disciples who
followed him. Surely some one among the elders of the Jews, his friends,
would carry him the report of what the Master said. It would not hurt
him. The praise of the truly great will do no harm, save it fall where
it ought not, on the heart of the little. The praise of God never falls
wrong, therefore never does any one harm. The Lord even implies we ought
to seek it. His praise would but glorify the humility and the faith of
this Roman by making both of them deeper and nobler still. There is
something very grand in the Lord's turning away from the house of the
man who had greater faith than any he had found in Israel; for such were
the words he spoke to those who followed him, of whom in all likelihood
the messenger elders were nearest. Having turned to say them, he turned
not again but went his way. St Luke, whose narrative is in other
respects much fuller than St Matthew's (who says that the centurion
himself came to Jesus, and makes no mention of the elders), does not
represent the Master as uttering a single word of cure, but implies
that he just went away marvelling at him; while "they that were sent,
returning to the house, found the servant whole that had been sick." If
any one ask how Jesus could marvel, I answer, Jesus could do more things
than we can well understand. The fact that he marvelled at the great
faith, shows that he is not surprised at the little, and therefore is
able to make all needful and just, yea, and tender allowance.

Here I cannot do better for my readers than give them four lines, dear
to me, but probably unknown to most of them, written, I must tell them,
for the sake of their loving catholicity, by an English Jesuit of the
seventeenth century. They touch the very heart of the relation between
Jesus and the centurion:--

  Thy God was making haste into thy roof;
  Thy humble faith and fear keeps Him aloof:
  He'll be thy guest; because He may not be,
  He'll come--into thy house? No, into thee.

As I said, we thus complete a kind of family group, for surely the true
servant is one of the family: we have the prayer of a father for a
son, of a mother for a daughter, of a master for a servant. Alas! the
dearness of this latter bond is not now known as once. There never was a
rooted institution in parting with which something good was not lost for
a time, however necessary its destruction might be for the welfare of
the race. There are fewer free servants that love their masters and
mistresses now, I fear, than there were Roman bondsmen and bondswomen
who loved theirs. And, on the other hand, very few masters and
mistresses regard the bond between them and their servants with half the
respect and tenderness with which many among the Romans regarded it.
Slavery is a bad thing and of the devil, yet mutual jealousy and
contempt are worse. But the time will yet come when a servant will serve
for love as more than wages; and when the master of such a servant will
honour him even to the making him sit down to meat, and coming forth and
serving him.

The next is the case of the palsied man, so graphically given both by
St Mark and St Luke, and with less of circumstance by St Matthew. This
miracle also was done in Capernaum, called his own city. Pharisees
and doctors of the law from every town in the country, hearing of
his arrival, had gathered to him, and were sitting listening to his
teaching. There was no possibility of getting near him, and the sick
man's friends had carried him up to the roof, taken off the tiles, and
let him down into the presence. It should not be their fault if the poor
fellow was not cured. "Jesus seeing their faith--When Jesus saw their
faith--And when he saw their faith, he said unto the sick of the palsy,
Son, be of good cheer--Son--Man, thy sins are forgiven thee." The
forgiveness of the man's sins is by all of the narrators connected
with the faith of his friends. This is very remarkable. The only other
instance in which similar words are recorded, is that of the woman who
came to him in Simon's house, concerning whom he showed first, that her
love was a sign that her sins were already forgiven. What greater honour
could he honour their faith withal than grant in their name, unasked,
the one mighty boon? They had brought the man to him; to them he forgave
his sins. He looked into his heart, and probably saw, as in the case of
the man whom he cured by the pool of Bethesda, telling him to go and
sin no more, that his own sins had brought upon him this suffering,
a supposition which aids considerably to the understanding of the
consequent conversation; saw, at all events, that the assurance of
forgiveness was what he most needed, whether because his conscience was
oppressed with a sense of guilt, or that he must be brought to think
more of the sin than of the suffering; for it involved an awful rebuke
to the man, if he required it still--that the Lord should, when he came
for healing, present him with forgiveness. Nor did he follow it at once
with the cure of his body, but delayed that for a little, probably for
the man's sake, as probably for the sake of those present, whom he had
been teaching for some time, and in whose hearts he would now fix the
lesson concerning the divine forgiveness which he had preached to them
in bestowing it upon the sick man. For his words meant nothing, except
they meant that God forgave the man. The scribes were right when they
said that none could forgive sins but God--that is, in the full sense in
which forgiveness is still needed by every human being, should all his
fellows whom he has injured have forgiven him already.

They said in their hearts, "He is a blasphemer." This was what he had
expected.

"Why do you think evil in your hearts?" he said, that is, _evil of
me--that I am a blasphemer_.

He would now show them that he was no blasphemer; that he had the power
to forgive, that it was the will of God that he should preach the
remission of sins. How could he show it them? In one way only: by
dismissing the consequence, the punishment of those sins, sealing thus
in the individual case the general truth. He who could say to a man,
by the eternal law suffering the consequences of sin: "Be whole,
well, strong; suffer no more," must have the right to pronounce his
forgiveness; else there was another than God who had to cure with a word
the man whom his Maker had afflicted. If there were such another, the
kingdom of God must be trembling to its fall, for a stronger had invaded
and reversed its decrees. Power does not give the right to pardon, but
its possession may prove the right. "Whether is easier--to say, Thy
sins be forgiven thee, or to say, Rise up and walk?" If only God can do
either, he who can do the one must be able to do the other.

"That ye may know that the Son of man hath power upon earth to forgive
sins--Arise, and take up thy bed, and go thy way into thine house."

Up rose the man, took up that whereon he had lain, and went away,
knowing in himself that his sins _were_ forgiven him, for he was able
to glorify God. It seems to me against our Lord's usual custom with the
scribes and Pharisees to grant them such proof as this. Certainly, to
judge by those recorded, the whole miracle was in aspect and order
somewhat unusual. But I think the men here assembled were either better
than the most of their class, or in a better mood than common, for St
Luke says of them that the power of the Lord was present to heal them.
To such therefore proof might be accorded which was denied to others.
That he might heal these learned doctors around him, he forgave the sins
first and then cured the palsy of the man before him. For their sakes he
performed the miracle thus. Then, _like priests, like people_; for where
their leaders were listening, the people broke open the roof to get the
helpless into his presence.

"They marvelled and glorified God which had given such power unto
men"--"Saying, We never saw it on this fashion."--"They were filled with
fear, saying, We have seen strange things to-day."

And yet Capernaum had to be brought down to hell, and no man can tell
the place where it stood.

Two more cases remain, both related by St Mark alone.

They brought him a man partially deaf and dumb. He led him aside from
the people: he would be alone with him, that he might come the better
into relation with that individuality which, until molten from within,
is so hard to touch. Possibly had the man come of himself, this might
have been less necessary; but I repeat there must have been in every
case reason for the individual treatment in the character and condition
of the patient. These were patent only to the Healer. In this case the
closeness of the personal contact, as in those cases of the blind, is
likewise remarkable. "He put his fingers into his ears, he spit and
touched his tongue." Always in present disease, bodily contact--in
defects of the senses, sometimes of a closer kind. He would generate
assured faith in himself as the healer. But there is another remarkable
particular here, which, as far as I can remember, would be alone in its
kind but for a fuller development of it at the raising of Lazarus. "And
looking up to heaven, he sighed."

What did it mean? What first of all _was_ it?

That look, was it not a look up to his own Father? That sigh, was it not
the unarticulated prayer to the Father of the man who stood beside him?
But did _he_ need to look up as if God was in the sky, seeing that God
was in _him_, in his very deepest, inmost being, in fulness of presence,
and receiving conscious response, such as he could not find anywhere
else--not from the whole gathered universe? Why should he send a sigh,
like a David's dove, to carry the thought of his heart to his Father?
True, if all the words of human language had been blended into one
glorious majesty of speech, and the Lord had sought therein to utter the
love he bore his Father, his voice must needs have sunk into the last
inarticulate resource--the poor sigh, in which evermore speech dies
helplessly triumphant--appealing to the Hearer to supply the lack,
saying _I cannot, but thou knowest_--confessing defeat, but claiming
victory. But the Lord could talk to his Father evermore in the forms of
which words are but the shadows, nay, infinitely more, without forms at
all, in the thoughts which are the souls of the forms. Why then needs he
look up and sigh?--That the man, whose faith was in the merest nascent
condition, might believe that whatever cure came to him from the hand of
the healer, came from the hand of God. Jesus did not care to be believed
in as the doer of the deed, save the deed itself were recognized as
given him of the Father. If they saw him only, and not the Father
through him, there was little gained indeed. The upward look and the
sigh were surely the outward expression of the infrangible link which
bound both the Lord and the man to the Father of all. He would lift the
man's heart up to the source of every gift. No cure would be worthy gift
without that: it might be an injury.

The last case is that of the blind man of Bethsaida, whom likewise he
led apart, out of the town, and whose dull organs he likewise touched
with his spittle. Then comes a difference. The deaf man was at once
cured; when he had laid his hands on the blind man, his vision was but
half-restored. "He asked him if he saw ought? And he looked up and said,
I see the men: for like trees [Footnote 7: Could it be translated,
"_As well as_ (that is besides) trees, I see walkers about"?] I see them
walking about." He could tell they were men and not trees, only by their
motion. The Master laid his hands once more upon his eyes, and when he
looked up again, he saw every man clearly.

In thus graduating the process, our Lord, I think, drew forth,
encouraged, enticed into strength the feeble faith of the man. He
brooded over him with his holy presence of love. He gave the faith time
to grow. He cared more for his faith than his sight. He let him, as it
were, watch him, feel him doing it, that he might know and believe.
There is in this a peculiar resemblance to the ordinary modes God takes
in healing men.

These last miracles are especially full of symbolism and analogy. But in
considering any of the miracles, I do not care to dwell upon this aspect
of them, for in this they are only like all the rest of the doings of
God. Nature is brimful of symbolic and analogical parallels to the
goings and comings, the growth and the changes of the highest nature in
man. It could not be otherwise. For not only did they issue from the
same thought, but the one is made for the other. Nature as an outer
garment for man, or a living house, rather, for man to live in. So
likewise must all the works of him who did the works of the Father bear
the same mark of the original of all.

The one practical lesson contained in this group is nearer the human
fact and the human need than any symbolic meaning, grand as it must be,
which they may likewise contain; nearer also to the constitution of
things, inasmuch as what a man must _do_ is more to the man and to his
Maker than what he can only _think_; inasmuch, also, as the commonest
things are the best, and any man can do right, although he may be unable
to tell the difference between a symbol and a sign:--it is that if ever
there was a Man such as we read about here, then he who prays for his
friends shall be heard of God. I do not say he shall have whatever he
asks for. God forbid. But he shall be heard. And the man who does not
see the good of that, knows nothing of the good of prayer; can, I fear,
as yet, only pray for himself, when most he fancies he is praying for
his friend. Often, indeed, when men suppose they are concerned for the
well-beloved, they are only concerned about what they shall do without
them. Let them pray for themselves instead, for that will be the truer
prayer. I repeat, all prayer is assuredly heard:--what evil matter is
it that it should be answered only in the right time and right way? The
prayer argues a need--that need will be supplied. One day is with the
Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. All who
have prayed shall one day justify God and say--Thy answer is beyond my
prayer, as thy thoughts and thy ways are beyond my thoughts and my ways.




VII. THE CASTING OUT OF DEVILS.


Before attempting to say the little I can concerning this group of
miracles, I would protect myself against possible misapprehension.
The question concerning the nature of what is called _possession_
has nothing whatever to do with that concerning the existence or
nonexistence of a personal and conscious power of evil, the one great
adversary of the kingdom of heaven, commonly called Satan, or the devil.
I say they are two distinct questions, and have so little in common that
the one may be argued without even an allusion to the other.

Many think that in the cases recorded we have but the symptoms of
well-known diseases, which, from their exceptionally painful character,
involving loss of reason, involuntary or convulsive motions, and
other abnormal phenomena, the imaginative and unscientific Easterns
attributed, as the easiest mode of accounting for them, to a foreign
power taking possession of the body and mind of the man. They say there
is no occasion whatever to resort to an explanation involving an agency
of which we know nothing from any experience of our own; that, as our
Lord did not come to rectify men's psychological or physiological
theories, he adopted the mode of speech common amongst them, but cast
out the evil spirits simply by healing the diseases attributed to their
influences.

There seems to me nothing unchristian in this interpretation. All
diseases that trouble humanity may well be regarded as inroads of the
evil powers upon the palaces and temples of God, where only the
Holy Spirit has a right to dwell; and to cast out such, is a marvel
altogether as great as to expel the intruding forces to which the
Jews attributed some of them. Certainly also our Lord must have used
multitudes of human expressions which did not more than adumbrate his
own knowledge. And yet I cannot admit that the solution meets all the
appearances of the difficulty. I say _appearances_, because I could not
be dogmatic here if I would. I know too little, understand too little,
to dare give such an opinion as possesses even the authority of personal
conviction. All I have to say on the subject must therefore come to
little. Perhaps if the marvellous, as such, were to me more difficult
of belief, anything I might have to say on the side of it would have
greater weight. But to me the marvellous is not therefore incredible,
always provided that in itself the marvellous thing appears worthy.
I have no difficulty in receiving the old Jewish belief concerning
possession; and I think it better explains the phenomena recorded than
the growing modern opinion; while the action of matter upon mind may
well be regarded as involving greater mystery than the action of one
spiritual nature upon another. That a man should rave in madness because
some little cell or two in the grey matter of his brain is out of order,
is surely no more within the compass of man's understanding than the
supposition that an evil spirit, getting close to the fountain of a
man's physical life, should disturb all the goings on of that life, even
to the production of the most appalling moral phenomena. In either case
it is not the man himself who originates the resulting actions, but an
external power operating on the man.

"But we do not even know that there are such spirits, and we do know
that a diseased brain is sufficient to account for the worst of the
phenomena recorded." I will not insist on the fact that we do _not_ know
that the diseased brain is enough to account for the phenomena, that we
only know it as in many cases a concomitant of such phenomena; I will
grant so much, and yet insist that, as the explanation does not fit the
statements of the record, and as we know so little of what is, any hint
of unknown possibilities falling from unknown regions, should, even as a
stranger, receive the welcome of contemplation and conjecture, so long
as in itself it involves no moral contradiction. The man who will not
speculate at all, can make no progress. The thinking about the possible
is as genuine, as lawful, and perhaps as edifying an exercise of the
mind as the severest induction. Better lies still beyond. Experiment
itself must follow in the track of sober conjecture; for if we know
already, where is the good of experiment?

There seems to me nothing unreasonable in the supposition of the
existence of spirits who, having once had bodies such as ours, and
having abused the privileges of embodiment, are condemned for a season
to roam about bodiless, ever mourning the loss of their capacity for
the only pleasures they care for, and craving after them in their
imaginations. Such, either in selfish hate of those who have what
they have lost, or from eagerness to come as near the possession of a
corporeal form as they may, might well seek to _enter into_ a man. The
supposition at least is perfectly consistent with the facts recorded.
Possibly also it may be consistent with the phenomena of some of the
forms of the madness of our own day, although all its forms are alike
regarded as resulting from physical causes alone.

The first act of dispossession recorded is that told by St Mark and St
Luke, as taking place at Capernaum, amongst his earliest miracles, and
preceding the cure of Simon's mother-in-law. He was in the synagogue on
the Sabbath day, teaching the congregation, when a man present, who had
an unclean spirit, cried out. If I accept the narrative, I find this cry
far more intelligible on the old than on the new theory. The speaker,
no doubt using the organs of the man, brain and all, for utterance,
recognizes a presence--to him the cause of terror--which he addresses as
the Holy One of God. This holy one he would propitiate by entreaty and
the flattering acknowledgment of his divine mission, with the hope
of being left unmolested in the usurpation and cruelty by which he
ministered to his own shadowy self-indulgences. Could anything be more
consistently diabolic?

What other word could Jesus address to such than, "Hold thy peace, and
come out of him"? A being in such a condition could not be permitted to
hold converse with the Saviour; for he recognized no salvation but what
lay in the continuance of his own pleasures at the expense of another.
The form of the rebuke plainly assumes that it was not the man but some
one in the man who had spoken; and the narrative goes on to say that
when the devil had thrown him down and torn him and cried with a loud
voice--his rage and disappointment, I presume, finding its last futile
utterance in the torture of his captive--he came out of him and left him
unhurt. Thereupon the people questioned amongst themselves saying, "What
thing is this? It is a teaching new, and with authority: he commandeth
even the unclean spirits, and they obey him;" [Footnote 8: St Mark, i. 27.
Authorized Version revised by Dean Alford.] thus connecting at once his
power over the unclean spirits with the doctrine he taught, just as our
Lord in an after-instance associates power over demons with spiritual
condition. It was the truth in him that made him strong against the
powers of untruth.

Many such cures were performed, but the individual instances recorded
are few. The next is that of the man--dumb, according to St Luke, both
blind and dumb, according to St Matthew--who spake and saw as soon
as the devil was cast out of him. With unerring instinct the people
concluded that he who did such deeds must be the Son of David; the
devils themselves, according to St Mark, were wont to acknowledge him
the Son of God; the Scribes and Pharisees, the would-be guides of
the people, alone refused the witness, and in the very imbecility of
unbelief, eager after any theory that might seem to cover the facts
without acknowledging a divine mission in one who would not admit
_their_ authority, attributed to Beelzebub himself the deliverance of
distressed mortals from the powers of evil.

Regarding the kingdom of God as a thing of externals, they were
fortified against recognizing in Jesus himself or in his doctrine any
sign that he was the enemy of Satan, and might even persuade themselves
that such a cure was only one of Satan's tricks for the advancement of
his kingdom with the many by a partial emancipation of the individual.
But our Lord attributes this false conclusion to its true cause--to
no incapacity or mistake of judgement; to no over-refining about the
possible chicaneries of Beelzebub; but to a preference for any evil
which would support them in their authority with the people--in itself
an evil. Careless altogether about truth itself, they would not give
a moment's quarter to any individual utterance of it which tended to
destroy their honourable position in the nation. Each man to himself was
his own god. The Spirit of God they shut out. To them forgiveness was
not offered. They must pay the uttermost farthing--whatever that may
mean--and frightful as the doom must be. That he spoke thus against them
was but a further carrying out of his mission, a further inroad upon the
kingdom of that Beelzebub. And yet they were the accredited authorities
in the church of that day; and he who does not realize this, does not
understand the battle our Lord had to fight for the emancipation of the
people. It was for the sake of the people that he called the Pharisees
_hypocrites_, and not for their own sakes, for how should he argue with
men who taught religion for their own aggrandizement?

It is to be noted that our Lord recognizes the power of others besides
himself to cast out devils. "By whom do your children cast them out?"
_Did you ever say of them it was by Beelzebub? Why say it of me_? What
he claims he freely allows. The Saviour had no tinge of that jealousy
of rival teaching--as if truth could be two, and could avoid being
one--which makes so many of his followers grasp at any waif of false
argument. He knew that all good is of God, and not of the devil. All
were _with_ him who destroyed the power of the devil.

They who were cured, and they in whom self-worship was not blinding the
judgment, had no doubt that he was fighting Satan on his usurped ground.
Torture was what might be expected of Satan; healing what might be
expected of God. The reality of the healing, the loss of the man,
morally as well as physically, to the kingdom of evil, was witnessed in
all the signs that followed. Our Lord rests his argument on the fact
that Satan had lost these men.

We hear next, from St Luke, of certain women who followed him, having
been healed of evil spirits and infirmities, amongst whom is mentioned
"Mary, called Magdalene, out of whom went seven devils." No wonder a
woman thus delivered should devote her restored self to the service of
him who had recreated her. We hear nothing of the circumstances of the
cure, only the result in her constant ministration. Hers is a curious
instance of the worthlessness of what some think it a mark of
high-mindedness to regard alone--the opinion, namely, of posterity.
Without a fragment of evidence, this woman has been all but universally
regarded as impure. But what a trifle to her! Down in this squabbling
nursery of the race, the name of Mary Magdalene may be degraded even to
a subject for pictorial sentimentalities; but the woman herself is with
that Jesus who set her free. To the end of time they may call her what
they please: to her it is worth but a smile of holy amusement. And just
as worthy is the applause of posterity associated with a name. To God
alone we live or die. Let us fall, as, thank him, we must, into his
hands. Let him judge us. Posterity may be wiser than we; but posterity
is not our judge.

We come now to a narrative containing more of the marvellous than all
the rest. The miracle was wrought on the south-eastern side of the
lake--St Matthew says, upon two demoniacs; St Mark and St Luke make
mention only of one. The accounts given by the latter Evangelists are
much more circumstantial than that by the former. It was a case of
peculiarly frightful character. The man, possessed of many demons, was
ferocious, and of marvellous strength, breaking chains and fetters, and
untameable. It is impossible to analyse the phenomena, saying which
were the actions of the man, and which those of the possessing demons.
Externally all were the man's, done by the man finally, some part, I
presume, from his own poor withered will, far the greater from the
urging of the demons. Even in the case of a man driven by appetite or
passion, it is impossible to say how much is to be attributed to the man
himself, and how much to that lower nature in him which he ought to keep
in subjection, but which, having been allowed to get the upper hand, has
become a possessing demon. He met the Lord worshipping, and, as in a
former instance, praying for such clemency as devils can value. Was it
the devils, then, that urged the man into the presence of the Lord?
Was it not rather the other spirit, the spirit of life, which not the
presence of a legion of the wicked ones could drive from him? Was it not
the spirit of the Father in him which brought him, ignorant, fearing,
yet vaguely hoping perhaps, to the feet of the Son? He knew not why he
came; but he came--drawn or driven; he could not keep away. When he
came, however, the words at least of his prayer were moulded by the
devils--"I adjure thee by God that thou torment me not." Think of the
man, tortured by such awful presences, praying to the healer not to
torment him! The prayer was compelled into this shape by the indwelling
demons. They would have him pray for indulgence for them. But the Lord
heard the deeper prayer, that is, the need and misery of the man, the
horror that made him cry and cut himself with stones--and commanded the
unclean spirit to come out of him. Thereupon, St Mark says, "he besought
him much that he would not send them out of the country." Probably the
country was one the condition of whose inhabitants afforded the demons
unusual opportunities for their coveted pseudo-embodiment. St Luke says,
"They besought him that he would not command them to go out into the
deep"--to such beings awful, chiefly because there they must be alone,
afar from matter and all its forms. In such loneliness the good man
would be filled with the eternal presence of the living God; but they
would be aware only of their greedy, hungry selves--desires without
objects. No. Here were swine. "Send us into the swine, that we may enter
into them." Deprived of the abode they preferred, debarred from men,
swine would serve their turn. But even the swine--animals created to
look unclean, for a type to humanity of the very form and fashion of its
greed--could not endure their presence. The man had cut himself with
stones in his misery; the swine in theirs rushed into the waters of the
lake and were drowned. The evil spirits, I presume, having no further
leave, had to go to their deep after all.

The destruction of the swine must not be regarded as miraculous. But
there must have been a special reason in the character and condition
of the people of Gadara for his allowing this destruction of their
property. I suppose that although it worked vexation and dismay at
first, it prepared the way for some after-reception of the gospel. Now,
seeing him who had been a raving maniac, sitting at the feet of Jesus,
clothed and in his right mind, and hearing what had come to the swine,
they were filled with fear, and prayed the healer to depart from them.

But who can imagine the delight of the man when that wild troop of
maddening and defiling demons, which had possessed him with all
uncleanness, vanished! Scarce had he time to know that he was naked,
before the hands of loving human beings, in whom the good Spirit ruled,
were taking off their own garments, and putting them upon him. He was
a man once more, and amongst men with human faces, human hearts, human
ways. He was with his own; and that supreme form and face of the man who
had set him free was binding them all into one holy family. Now he could
pray of himself the true prayer of a soul which knew what it wanted, and
could say what it meant. He sat down like a child at the feet of the man
who had cured him; and when, yielding at once to the desire of those who
would be rid of his presence, Jesus went down to the boat, he followed,
praying that he might be with him; for what could he desire but to
be near that power which had restored him his divine self, and the
consciousness thereof--his own true existence, that of which God was
thinking when he made him?

But he would be still nearer the Lord in doing his work than in
following him about. It is remarkable that while more than once our Lord
charged the healed to be silent, he leaves this man as his apostle--his
witness with those who had banished him from their coasts. Something
may be attributed to the different natures of the individuals; some in
preaching him would also preach themselves, and so hurt both. But this
man was not of such. To be with the Lord was all his prayer. Therefore
he was fit to be without him, and to aid his work apart. But I think it
more likely that the reason lay in the condition of the people. Judæa
was in a state of excitement about him--that excitement had unhealthy
elements, and must not be fanned. In some places the Lord would not
speak at all. Through some he would pass unknown. But here all was
different. He had destroyed their swine; they had prayed him to depart;
if he took from them this one sign of his real presence, that is, of the
love which heals, not the power which destroys, it would be to abandon
them.

But it is very noteworthy that he sent the man to his own house, to his
own friends. They must be the most open to such a message as his, and
from such lips--the lips of their own flesh and blood. He had been
raving in tombs and deserts, tormented with a legion of devils; now he
was one of themselves again, with love in his eyes, adoration in the
very tones of his voice, and help in his hands--reason once more supreme
on the throne of his humanity. He obeyed, and published in Gadara, and
the rest of the cities of Decapolis, the great things, as Jesus himself
called them, which God had done for him. For it was God who had done
them. He was doing the works of his Father.

One more instance remains, having likewise peculiar points of
difficulty, and therefore of interest.

When Jesus was on the mount of transfiguration, a dumb, epileptic,
and lunatic boy was brought by his father to those disciples who were
awaiting his return.

But they could do nothing. To their disappointment, and probably to
their chagrin, they found themselves powerless over the evil spirit.
When Jesus appeared, the father begged of him the aid which his
disciples could not give: "Master, I beseech thee, look upon my son, for
he is mine only child."

Whoever has held in his arms his child in delirium, calling to his
father for aid as if he were distant far, and beating the air in wild
and aimless defence, will be able to enter a little into the trouble of
this man's soul. To have the child, and yet see him tormented in some
region inaccessible; to hold him to the heart and yet be unable to reach
the thick-coming fancies which distract him; to find himself with a
great abyss between him and his child, across which the cry of the
child comes, but back across which no answering voice can reach the
consciousness of the sufferer--is terror and misery indeed. But imagine
in the case before us the intervals as well--the stupidity, the vacant
gaze, the hanging lip, the pale flaccid countenance and bloodshot eyes,
idiocy alternated with madness--no voice of human speech, only the
animal babble of the uneducated dumb--the misery of his falling down
anywhere, now in the fire, now in the water, and the divine shines out
as nowhere else--for the father loves his only child even to agony.

What was there in such a child to love? _Everything_: the human was
there, else whence the torture of that which was not human? whence
the pathos of those eyes, hardly up to the dog's in intelligence, yet
omnipotent over the father's heart? God was there. The misery was that
the devil was there too. Thence came the crying and tears. "Rescue the
divine; send the devil to the deep," was the unformed prayer in the
father's soul.

Before replying to his prayer, Jesus uttered words that could not have
been addressed to the father, inasmuch as he was neither faithless nor
perverse. Which then of those present did he address thus? To which of
them did he say, "How long shall I be with you? How long shall I suffer
you?" I have thought it was the bystanders: but why they? They had not
surely reached the point of such rebuke. I have thought it was the
disciples, because perhaps it was their pride that rendered them unable
to cast out the demon, seeing they tried it without faith enough in
God. But the form of address does not seem to belong to them: the word
generation could not well apply to those whom he had chosen out of that
generation. I have thought, and gladly would I continue to think, if
I could honestly, that the words were intended for the devils who
tormented his countrymen and friends; and but for St Mark's story, I
might have held to it. He, however, gives us one point which neither St
Matthew nor St Luke mention--that "when he came to his disciples he saw
a great multitude about them, and the scribes questioning with them." He
says the multitude were greatly amazed when they saw him--why, I do not
know, except it be that he came just at the point where his presence was
needful to give the one answer to the scribes pressing hard upon his
disciples because they could not cast out this devil. These scribes,
these men of accredited education, who, from their position as students
of the law and the interpretations thereof, arrogated to themselves a
mastery over the faith of the people, but were themselves so careless
about the truth as to be utterly opaque to its illuminating power--these
scribes, I say, I do think it was whom our Lord addressed as "faithless
and perverse generation." The immediately following request to the
father of the boy, "Bring him unto me," was the one answer to their
arguments.

A fresh paroxysm was the first result. But repressing all haste, the
Lord will care for the father as much as for the child. He will help his
growing faith.

"How long is it ago since thus hath come unto him?"

"From a child. And oft-times it hath cast him into the fire, and
into the waters, to destroy him; but if thou canst do anything, have
compassion on us, and help us." [Footnote 9: Again the _us_--so full of
pathos.] "_If thou canst_?" [Footnote 10: The oldest manuscripts. (_Dean
Alford_). "If thou canst have faith--All things," &c. ("New Translation
of the Gospel of St Mark." _Rev. F.H. Godwin_).] All things are possible
to him that believeth."

"Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief."

Whether the words of Jesus, "him that believeth," meant himself as
believing in the Father, and therefore gifted with all power, or the man
as believing in him, and therefore capable of being the recipient of
the effects of that power, I am not sure. I incline to the former. The
result is the same, for the man resolves the question practically and
personally: what was needful in him should be in him. "I believe; help
thou mine unbelief."

In the honesty of his heart, lest he should be saying more than was
true--for how could he be certain that Jesus would cure his son? or how
could he measure and estimate his own faith?--he appeals to the Lord of
Truth for all that he ought to be, and think, and believe. "Help thou
mine unbelief." It is the very triumph of faith. The unbelief itself
cast like any other care upon him who careth for us, is the highest
exercise of belief. It is the greatest effort lying in the power of the
man. No man can help doubt. The true man alone, that is, the faithful
man, can appeal to the Truth to enable him to believe what is true, and
refuse what is false. How this applies especially to our own time and
the need of the living generations, is easy to see. Of all prayers it is
the one for us.

Possibly our Lord might have held a little farther talk with him, but
the people came crowding about. "He rebuked the foul spirit, saying unto
him, Thou dumb and deaf spirit, I charge thee, come out of him, and
enter no more into him. And the spirit cried and rent him sore, and came
out of him: and he was as one dead; insomuch that many said, He is dead.
But Jesus took him by the hand, and lifted him up; and he arose."

"Why could not we cast him out?" asked his disciples as soon as they
were alone.

"This kind can come forth by nothing but by prayer and fasting."

What does this answer imply? The prayer and fasting must clearly be
on the part of those who would heal. They cannot be required of one
possessed with a demon. If he could fast and pray, the demon would be
gone already.

It implies that a great purity of soul is needful in him who would
master the powers of evil. I take prayer and fasting to indicate
a condition of mind elevated above the cares of the world and the
pleasures of the senses, in close communion with the God of life;
therefore by its very purity an awe and terror to the unclean spirits, a
fit cloud whence the thunder of the word might issue against them. The
expulsion would appear to be the result of moral, and hence natural,
superiority--a command resting upon oneness with the ultimate will of
the Supreme, in like manner as an evil man is sometimes cowed in the
presence of a good man. The disciples had not attained this lofty
condition of faith.

From this I lean to think that the words of our Lord--"All things
are possible to him that believeth"--apply to our Lord himself. The
disciples could not help the child: "If thou canst do anything," said
the father. "All things are possible to him that believeth," says our
Lord. _He_ can help him. That it was the lack of faith in the disciples
which rendered the thing impossible for them, St Matthew informs us
explicitly, for he gives the reply of our Lord more fully than the rest:
"Because of your unbelief," he said, and followed with the assertion
that faith could remove mountains.

But the words--_"This kind"_--suggest that the case had its
peculiarities. It would appear--although I am not certain of this
interpretation--that some kinds of spirits required for their expulsion,
or at least some cases of possession required for their cure, more than
others of the presence of God in the healer. I do not care to dwell upon
this farther than to say that there are points in the narrative which
seem to indicate that it was an unusually bad case. The Lord asked how
long he had been ill, and was told, from childhood. The demon--to use
the language of our ignorance--had had time and opportunity, in his
undeveloped condition, to lay thorough hold upon him; and when he did
yield to the superior command of the Lord, he left him as dead--so close
had been the possession, that for a time the natural powers could not
operate when deprived of the presence of a force which had so long
usurped, maltreated, and exhausted, while falsely sustaining them. The
disciples, although they had already the power to cast out demons, could
not cast this one out, and were surprised to find it so. There appears
to me no absurdity, if we admit the demons at all, in admitting also
that some had greater force than others, be it regarded as courage or
obstinacy, or merely as grasp upon the captive mortal.

In all these stories there is much of comfort both to the friends of
those who are insane, and to those who are themselves aware of their own
partial or occasional insanity. For such sorrow as that of Charles and
Mary Lamb, walking together towards the asylum, when the hour had come
for her to repair thither, is there not some assuagement here? It may be
answered--We have no ground to hope for such cure now. I think we
have; but if our faith will not reach so far, we may at least, like
Athanasius, recognize the friendship of Death, for death is the divine
cure of many ills.

But we all need like healing. No man who does not yet love the truth
with his whole being, who does not love God with all his heart and soul
and strength and mind, and his neighbour as himself, is in his sound
mind, or can act as a rational being, save more or less approximately.
This is as true as it would be of us if possessed by other spirits
than our own. Every word of unkindness, God help us! every unfair hard
judgment, every trembling regard of the outward and fearless disregard
of the inward life, is a siding with the spirit of evil against the
spirit of good, with our lower and accidental selves, against our higher
and essential--our true selves. These the spirit of good would set free
from all possession but his own, for that is their original life. Out
of us, too, the evil spirits can go by that prayer alone in which a man
draws nigh to the Holy. Nor can we have any power over the evil spirit
in others except in proportion as by such prayer we cast the evil spirit
out of ourselves.




VIII. THE RAISING OF THE DEAD.


I linger on the threshold. How shall I enter the temple of this wonder?
Through all ages men of all degrees and forms of religion have hoped at
least for a continuance of life beyond its seeming extinction. Without
such a hope, how could they have endured the existence they had? True,
there are in our day men who profess unbelief in that future, and yet
lead an enjoyable life, nor even say to themselves, "Let us eat and
drink, for to-morrow we die;" but say instead, with nobleness, "Let us
do what good we may, for there are men to come after us." Of all things
let him who would be a Christian be fair to every man and every class of
men. Before, however, I could be satisfied that I understood the mental
condition of such, I should require a deeper insight than I possess in
respect of other men. These, however numerous they seem in our day,
would appear to be exceptions to the race. No doubt there have always
been those who from absorption in the present and its pleasures, have
not cared about the future, have not troubled themselves with the
thought of it. Some of them would rather not think of it, because if
there be such a future, they cannot be easy concerning their part in it;
while others are simply occupied with the poor present--a present grand
indeed if it be the part of an endless whole, but poor indeed if it
stand alone. But here are thoughtful men, who say, "There is no
more. Let us make the best of this." Nor is their notion of _best_
contemptible, although in the eyes of some of us, to whom the only worth
of being lies in the hope of becoming that which, at the rate of present
progress, must take ages to be realized, it is poor. I will venture one
or two words on the matter.

Their ideal does not approach the ideal of Christianity for _this_ life
even.

Before I can tell whether their words are a true representation of
themselves, in relation to this future, I must know both their conscious
and unconscious being. No wonder I should be loath to judge them.

No poet of high rank, as far as I know, ever disbelieved in the future.
He might fear that there was none; but that very fear is faith. The
greatest poet of the present day believes with ardour. That it is not
proven to the intellect, I heartily admit. But if it were true, it were
such as the intellect could not grasp, for the understanding must be the
offspring of the life--in itself essential. How should the intellect
understand its own origin and nature? It is too poor to grasp this
question; for the continuity of existence depends on the nature of
existence, not upon external relations. If after death we should be
conscious that we yet live, we shall even then, I think, be no more
able to prove a further continuance of life, than we can now prove our
present being. It may be easier to believe--that will be all. But we
constantly act upon grounds which we cannot prove, and if we cannot feel
so sure of life beyond the grave as of common every-day things, at least
the want of proof ought neither to destroy our hope concerning it, nor
prevent the action demanded by its bare possibility.

But last, I do say this, that those men, who, disbelieving in a future
state, do yet live up to the conscience within them, however much lower
the requirements of that conscience may be than those of a conscience
which believes itself enlightened from "the Lord, who is that spirit,"
shall enter the other life in an immeasurably more enviable relation
thereto than those who say _Lord, Lord_, and do not the things he says
to them.

It may seem strange that our Lord says so little about the life to
come--as we call it--though in truth it is one life with the present--as
the leaf and the blossom are one life. Even in argument with the
Sadducees he supports his side upon words accepted by them, and upon the
nature of God, but says nothing of the question from a human point of
regard. He seems always to have taken it for granted, ever turning the
minds of his scholars towards that which was deeper and lay at its
root--the life itself--the oneness with God and his will, upon which the
continuance of our conscious being follows of a necessity, and without
which if the latter were possible, it would be for human beings an utter
evil.

When he speaks of the world beyond, it is as _his Father's house_. He
says there are many mansions there. He attempts in no way to explain.
Man's own imagination enlightened of the spirit of truth, and working
with his experience and affections, was a far safer guide than his
intellect with the best schooling which even our Lord could have given
it. The memory of the poorest home of a fisherman on the shore of
the Galilean lake, where he as a child had spent his years of divine
carelessness in his father's house, would, at the words of our Lord _my
Father's house_, convey to Peter or James or John more truth concerning
the many mansions than a revelation to their intellect, had it been
possible, as clear as the Apocalypse itself is obscure.

When he said "I have overcome the _world_" he had overcome the cause of
all doubt, the belief in the outside appearances and not in the living
truth: he left it to his followers to say, from their own experience
knowing the thing, not merely from the belief of his resurrection, "He
has conquered death and the grave. O Death, where is thy sting? O Grave,
where is thy victory?" It is the inward life of truth that conquers
the outward death of appearance; and nothing else, no revelation from
without, could conquer it.

These miracles of our Lord are the nearest we come to news of any kind
concerning--I cannot say _from_--the other world. I except of course our
Lord's own resurrection. Of that I shall yet speak as a miracle,
for miracle it was, as certainly as any of our Lord's, whatever
interpretation be put upon the word. And I say _the nearest to news we
come_, because not one of those raised from the dead gives _us_ at least
an atom of information. Is it possible they may have told their friends
something which has filtered down to us in any shape?

I turn to the cases on record. They are only three. The day after he
cured the servant of the centurion at Capernaum, Jesus went to Nain, and
as they approached the gate--but I cannot part the story from the lovely
words in which it is told by St Luke: "There was a dead man carried out,
the only son of his mother, and she was a widow; and much people of the
city was with her. And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her,
and said unto her, Weep not. And he came and touched the bier; and they
that bare him stood still. And he said, Young man, I say unto thee,
Arise. And he that was dead sat up, and began to speak. And he delivered
him to his mother."

In each of the cases there is an especial fitness in the miracle. This
youth was the only son of a widow; the daughter of Jairus was his "one
only daughter;" Lazarus was the brother of two orphan sisters.

I will not attempt by any lingering over the simple details to render
the record more impressive. That lingering ought to be on the part of
the reader of the narrative itself. Friends crowded around a loss--the
centre of the gathering that which _was not_--the sole presence the
hopeless sign of a vanished treasure--an open gulf, as it were, down
which love and tears and sad memories went plunging in a soundless
cataract: the weeping mother--the dead man borne in the midst. They
were going to the house of death, but Life was between them and it--was
walking to meet them, although they knew it not. A face of tender pity
looks 

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