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 Judaea; 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 Judaea 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. Judaea 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."