# The Miracles of Our Lord: A Modern Paraphrase

*The Miracles of Our Lord, by George MacDonald, restated paragraph by paragraph in modern English. This paraphrase follows the order and content of the original without adding interpretation. Drafted with the help of AI.*

## I. INTRODUCTION

I have been asked to write some papers on our Lord's miracles. I attempt it because the miracles are one way his unseen life found expression, so through them we must be able to know something of that life. He came, the Word of God, that we might know God, so every word of his is needed for knowing God, and we must understand, as far as we can, every word and action of his, his actions being only another form of word. I believe this is the immediate purpose of our creation, and that it will in the end unravel what every man now sees as the knotted tangle of the universe.

Believing in the miracles seems to me to need no great faith---true faith is a power, not a mere yielding. Far harder things can be believed, and a man is asked to believe in the miracles only as part of believing in Jesus. If he can believe there is a God, he can believe that a God who made creatures able to hunger and thirst for him must be able to speak a word to guide them. And a God worthy and capable of being God will speak the clearest, grandest word his creatures can understand. For us that word must be all the expressions of his visible works gathered into an infinite human face, lit by an infinite human soul behind it: that potential essence of man, if I may use a word of my own, which was in the beginning with God. If God thus answers the cry of the noblest of his creatures (for all who cry after him are such), it is natural to expect that the messenger's deeds would be the Father's works done in little. If he came to show his Father in miniature, as it were (in these unspeakable things we can only use figures, and the homeliest may be the holiest)---to tone down a great voice that men could hear only as inarticulate thunder into a still small voice they could take as human speech---then the works the Father does too widely for men to see, the Son must do briefly and sharply before their eyes.

This, I think, is the true nature of the miracles: an epitome of God's processes in nature, seen in immediate connection with their source, which is lost to men's eyes, and too often to their hearts, in the far-receding steps of continuous law. Jesus did his Father's works thus so that men might see the will of God at work.

An honest reader may object: do you not rank the miracles below the ordinary processes of nature? I answer that the miracles are far mightier than nature as common eyes see it, cut off from a living Will, but less than nature seen with God at its heart. In the name of him who delighted to say "My Father is greater than I," I say that his miracles of bread and wine were far less grand and beautiful than the works they represented: the Father making corn grow in the valleys and grapes drink the sunlight on the hillsides, with all their delicate mystery of birth. But praised be the Son, who condensed these mysteries and let us see the gifts come at once from gracious hands---hands that love could kiss and nails could wound.

Some might find the New Testament story easier to accept if the miracles did not stand in the way; yet they might accept both if they could see the true heart of the miracles. At the surface they see a violation of nature's laws; at the heart, at least a possible fulfilment of her deepest laws.

With these I am not mainly concerned now, nor with those who cannot believe in any God and to whom a miracle is therefore absurd. Of the latter I will say only that perhaps it is better to believe in no God than in such a God as they have so far imagined; perhaps they are nearer to true faith---unless they actually prefer the Unconscious generating the Conscious to a self-existent Love, creative because it is love. Such people have never loved woman or child except in a way that lets them accept death carrying the beloved back to the maternal dust. But I doubt anyone would choose a sleepwalking Pan over a wakeful Father; at least, they cannot know the Father and choose the Pan.

Let us then recognize the Father's works as epitomized in the Son's miracles: what in the Father's hands are the mighty motions and conquests of life are, in the Son's, miracles. I do not believe he valued working miracles as he valued speaking the truth; but all he did had one root, *obedience*, in which alone any son is free. And the highest obedience is simply following the Father---doing what the Father does, since every true father wills his child to be as he is in his deepest love and highest hope. All that Jesus does is of his Father, and what his works mean concerning him, they mean concerning the Father.

I shrink from the notion of a formal design in any great life, so unlike the free spontaneity of nature (and he is the Nature of nature). Still, I cannot help observing that his first miracle was one of creation---or at least more like creation to our eyes than almost any other. Who can say it was creation, not knowing what creation is or what the process was here?

## II. THE BEGINNING OF MIRACLES

Jesus already had disciples, though he had done no mighty works yet; they followed him for himself and for his words. With his mother they went with him to a wedding feast. More human than anyone there, with no self-conscious reserve, he shared their rejoicing fully, 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 old legend that he was never known to smile I regard as utterly false, almost as incredible as a geometrical absurdity. A divine artist tracing the spiritual lines of that company would have settled on his face as the centre from which the gladness spread, as he sat, I seem to see, in the background beside his mother. But something is coming that will change his mood---and he would be no true man if his mood never changed. His holy will and tender, strong heart never changed, but his feeling did, for mood should often reflect changing circumstance. The change comes from his mother, who whispers that they have no more wine. The bridegroom's means had run out; like his guests he was probably of humble calling, a craftsman or fisherman. It must have been a painful little trial to him if he knew, but I doubt he heard of the want before it was supplied.

Nothing in this by itself could change his mood: the failing of the wine was no catastrophe, at least to him, and his mother had merely told him a fact. But there is more than words in common speech, and what wrought the change was the tone and look woven through hers. She knew her son was no common man and believed in him with an unripe, unshaped faith, which, joined to her ignorance and fancy, led her to expect the great things of the world from him. Such a faith must fail so that it may grow, as imperfection must fail to make room for strength. It is well for the weak that their faith fail them, for it may be resting its wings on some brittle twig of fancy instead of a branch of the tree of life.

But what in her look and tone could change his mood? Her implied request could not offend him, for he granted it, and he would never do what he disapproved even at his mother's asking. Her *thoughts* lay not in her words but in her expression, and it was to those thoughts he replied. His answer, so little to do with her spoken request, is therefore the key to her thoughts and to his. Misunderstand it and we may misunderstand the miracle, and certainly risk misunderstanding him, which is far worse. How many children are troubled that Jesus should speak to his mother as our translation makes them suppose: "Woman, what have I to do with thee? Mine hour is not yet come." His hour for the miracle *had* come, for he worked it; and if he had to do with any human soul, it was his mother. "Woman" sounds strange to us, but that is our fault: we let words fall from their rank and put them to degraded uses. To a true man what word is fuller of grace and tender imagery? He used it to his mother, and the good custom of the time was fulfilled in it as it came from lips that were the open gates of a heart of infinite meanings. Any word he used had more of the human in it than before.

What he actually said was: "Woman, what is there common to thee and me? My hour is not yet come." What! was not their humanity common? Was she not fit, and therefore chosen, to bear him? But his words did not touch their relation; they referred to the present state of her mind and expectation. Her hope and his intent were at variance, and his words were addressed to her hope. Paraphrasing reverently, for the sake of the spirit above the word, I think I may say---

"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 his thoughts, and in hers? She thought the time had come to show his power and reveal how great he was, to begin the glory that in her notion would end in a righteous monarch---a second Solomon, forsooth, to put down the mighty and exalt the lowly. Here was a chance to work like a prophet of old and show whose mother she was.

And what did the glow of her face and the tone of "They have no wine" make Jesus think of? Perhaps the decease he must accomplish at Jerusalem; perhaps a throne of glory between two thieves; certainly a kingdom of heaven unlike the one in her imagination, though he was its king. A kingdom of exulting obedience, not acquiescence and still less compulsion, lay germed in his bosom, and he must be laid in the grave before it could send its first green leaves into the human world. No earthly throne for him, then, and no triumph for his mother such as she dreamed! Nothing was common in their visioned ends. Hence the change of mood, and the words that seem so strange and so little to do with hers.

But no change of mood could change his feeling toward mother or friends. She, though she could ill understand him, never fancied unkindness in his words; she read his face too, and found there such an answer to her prayer for her friends that she waited for nothing more and said at once to the servants, with a mother's confidence, "Do whatever he tells you."

If anyone objects that I imagine too much, I say first that the Gospel records are very brief; second, that the germs of true understanding lie in this small seed, and our hearts are the soil where it must unfold; third, that we are bound to understand the story, and these suppositions let me understand it in a way worthy of what I have learned of Him. I must refuse any interpretation unworthy of Him, for accepting one would sin against the Holy Ghost. If I am wrong about what I accept or reject, I must, when the fact is revealed, cast away the one and do justice to the other. Meanwhile this interpretation accounts for his words in a way he will not be displeased with, even if it misses the fact. That St John saw it in the story, bare as he tells it, becomes more probable when we remember how he and his brother James asked the Lord for the highest rank in his kingdom and received an answer evidently flowing from the same feeling I have attributed to his answer here.

The servants filled the water-pots to the brim, drew out, and took it to the governor of the feast, who said the good wine had been kept until now. That wine from our Lord would be the best is so much a matter of course it seems absurd to remark. What the Father makes, and is ever working toward, is *the Best;* so the wine our Lord made 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; to rise above temptation men must have it, by the will of him who makes the grapes and the wine. Men will even call Jesus a wine-bibber; what matters it, so long as he lives as the Father wills?

I dare not be misunderstood. God chooses that men be tried, but let a man beware of tempting his neighbour. God knows how much, and where and when; man is his brother's keeper and must keep him according to his knowledge. A man may do God's will for others and be condemned in it because he sought his own will. That our Lord gave this company wine does not prove he would give any company wine; to some he refused even bread. Shall man dig a pit at every street corner for the poor to fall into, wasting their money on what is not bread, because he gave wine to wedding guests? Let the poor man be tempted as God wills, for God's end is victory; let man not tempt him, for man's end is his neighbour's fall, or at best he ignores it for gain, and he shall receive according to his works.

For one who can thank God freely for his good wine, there is glad significance in our Lord's first miracle being water turned into wine. It symbolizes what he has done for the world in glorifying all things: with his divine alchemy he turns water into wine, common things into radiant mysteries, every meal into a eucharist, and the jaws of the sepulchre into an outgoing gate. I do not mean that he changes God's things or ways, but that he changes men's hearts and eyes, so that God's facts and meanings become their faiths and hopes. The destroying spirit who works in the commonplace is ever covering the deep and clouding the high; those who listen to him cannot have great things, for they do not themselves aspire. They believe, perhaps, in the truth and grace of their first child, and when they have spoiled him laugh at the praises of childhood. From all this low and fearful incapacity he who made 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 wine was his first miracle, and the feeding of the multitudes the only other creative one, also suggests thoughts about the symbol he left of his relation to his brethren. In the eucharistic wine and bread he reminds us how utterly he gives himself for the gladness and strength of his Father's children. More, since he is the radiation of the Father's glory, they symbolize how utterly the Father gives himself to his children and wants them to share his being. If Jesus was the Father's son, is it hard to believe he would give men bread and wine?

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

Power in itself is a poor thing; if it could stand alone, which it cannot, it would be a horror. Lonely power could never create; only the love at the root of power, the power of power, can. What was his glory, then? That, like his Father, he ministered to men's wants. Had they not needed the wine, he would not have made it for any show of power. Man's need meeting his love let that glory shine out, and for it above all we worship him. Power is no object of adoration; those who worship it are slaves. Those who trembled at the thunder from the mountain went and worshipped a golden calf; Moses went into the thick darkness to find his God.

How far Mary's expectation, that her son would impress the guests by majesty of might and rouse their enthusiasm, was from his thoughts is plain from the fact that even the ruler of the feast did not see the miracle, and many guests would give the report little credit. It was done so quietly, with so little warning, in two simple acts---filling the water-pots and drawing out---that it was plainly done to minister. He did it not even to show his goodness but *to be good*; only this could show his Father's goodness. It was done because all circumstances met---the presence of the powerful, and his mother's prayer---to make it fit that his heart's love should go out in giving his merry-making brothers and sisters more and better wine.

In this too the miracle resembles his Father's working. God ministers so gently and unobtrusively that men often drink his wine, as these guests did, without knowing whence it comes or thinking that the giver is beside them, even in their hearts. God will not compel adoration; that would bring only pagan worship to his altars. He rouses a sense of need that grows into longing, and makes men feel after him, until by their search they become able to see him and he can reveal the glory of their Father; meanwhile he keeps quiet behind his works. And when men find his wine good yet do not search for the giver, he plagues them with sore plagues, that the good wine of life may not become an evil thing to them, and so to him and the universe. It would seem that the correlative of creation is search: as God has *made us*, we must *find* him; thus our action reflects his, and he glorifies us with a share in the end of all things, which is that the Father and his children be one in thought, judgment, feeling and intent---that they mean the same thing. St John says Jesus thus "manifested forth his glory, and his disciples believed on him." I doubt any but his disciples knew of the miracle, or that any others believed on him because of it. It is possible to see a miracle and not believe in it; many who saw our Lord's miracles believed in the miracle and yet did not believe in him.

I wonder how many Christians so thoroughly believe God made them that they can laugh in God's name, understanding that he invented laughter and gave it to his children. Such belief would sharpen their enjoyment and slay both the sneering laughter men grimace to the fiends and the feeble laughter with neither heart nor intellect in it. It would also help them see the depth of this miracle. The Lord of gladness delights in a merry heart's laughter. These guests could surely have done without more and better wine, but the Father has no esteem for bare existence and works, even by suffering, to make life richer. His gifts go to the overflowing of the cup, and when it would overflow he deepens its hollow and widens its brim. Our Lord is profuse like his Father and will, at his own sternest cost, be lavish to his brethren. Yet even those who know where the good wine comes from, and joyously thank the giver, shall one day cry out, like the ruler of the feast to one who had not given it, "You have kept the good wine until now."

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

The order in which I take the miracles matters little for my purpose. For this chapter I choose the cure of St Peter's mother-in-law. Bare as the story is, it could be shaped with artistic effect---the woman tossing in the fever, the entering Life---but that is not the side I care to view it from.

Nor do I want the bystanders' view, though three of them testify in the three Gospels, and their differences almost show where each stood: one says Jesus stood over her, another that he touched her hand, the third that he lifted her up. They agree that the fever left her and she served them.---Here, as before, I look at the miracle from the point of view of the person healed.

Pain, sickness, delirium and madness, as much infringements of nature's laws as the miracles, are such real presences in human experience that a God unrelated to them cannot be the God of the human race. Whoever cannot find God in the fog of suffering, like whoever forgets him in the sunshine of health, has learned little from St Paul or St John. A religion that sheds no glow across this evil air is only a dim reflection of the true, and who will mourn to find that out? Some are so anxious about themselves that, rather than say "I do not have it; it is better than anything I have known," they say "I have it, but it is little use in the hour of trial." Let us rejoice that the glory is great even if we dare not call it ours; then we shall try harder to lay hold of it.

So long as men must toss through the dark night crying "Would God it were morning," and find little comfort in the grey dawn, we must see God as one to be believed in, or at least cried to, across the flats of distress and mountains of pain. Those who would help the suffering must sometimes look for him through their eyes and help them think from their own point of vision, not ours. So I write now chiefly for those who know suffering. First, all suffering is against the ideal order of things. No man can love pain; it is ugly and abhorrent, and the finer a person's bodily and mental constitution, the more it recoils. No one could dislike it as the Saviour must have. God dislikes it, and so is on our side: he knows it is grievous to bear and would cast it out of his universe save for reasons.

But, one will say, how can this help me when agony racks me and weariness lies on me like a gravestone? Is it nothing to be reminded that suffering is by nature transitory, against God's first and final will, a means and not an end---that it will pass away? Is that not what you want? God made man for lordly skies, sunshine, colours, free winds and sweet odours; however needful the fogs may be to the soul, he gladly sends them away and lets the dayspring from on high visit his children again. While they suffer he broods 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 some have done it, so to rest on the immutable Health, and see one's sickness as a passing aberration, that the soul is sustained, as a man in a weary dream is comforted by telling himself it is only a dream and waking is sure. God would have us reasonable and strong, and is pleased by every effort of his children to rise above evil's invasion of body or mind. Few attain this; but there is a better thing, easier to many, I trust: 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 tossed from side to side, trying in vain to ease a nameless misery. Her head ached; dreary forms rose in aimless dreams and senseless words repeated themselves until her brain was sick of them. Now she was the centre where innumerable atoms converged, now driven along in an uproar of hideous globes, faces grinning and mocking. Her mind kept trying to recover itself and kept being swept away; and through it all ran a nameless unrest, not an ache or burning or stinging but a bodily grief, dark and drear. How could they have borne such before He had come?

A sudden ceasing of uncontrolled motion; coolness gliding through burning skin; a waking into repose; a sense of all-pervading well-being, of strength conquering weakness, light displacing darkness, life urging at the heart; and behold! she is sitting up, a hand clasping hers, a face looking into hers. He has judged the evil thing and it is gone, her distresses folding away like the cerements of death. She is new-born, and all things with her, and he who makes all things new is there. She knows the healing flowed from him; he gave her of his life. The cloud of her suffering floats away, almost forgotten in grateful joy. She rises. The sun is shining---it had been shining all the time, waiting for her---and the lake of Galilee glitters. 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, though I shall have a better occasion later, that none of those whom our Lord cures wants to keep the privileges of the invalid. The joy of health is labour; the restored must be fellow-workers with God. This woman, lifted out of the whelming sand of the fever, hastens to her ministrations; she is used to hard work, and now that all is well she must be at it again.

But who had lifted her up? She saw a young man by her side. Was it the young Jesus she had heard of---for Capernaum is not far from Nazareth, and report of his wisdom and goodness, for he had grown in favour with man as well as God, must have spread? Was it he, to whom God had given such power, or John, of whom she had also heard? Whether prophet or son of a prophet, Jesus or John, she does not wait to ask; here are guests, and something to be done. Questions will keep; work must be despatched. She rose and ministered to them.

If we ask who he is, he is the Son of God, come to do the works of his Father. Where, then, is the Father's healing? All the world over, in every man's life, almost in every man's experience, though unrecognized. As in moods of selfishness our hearts are insensible to the tenderest love of the families around us, so the degrading spirit of the commonplace lets us live amid ministrations without knowing them, until it is hard to believe the very heart of God would care to do what his hand alone does every moment. I have assumed my reader confesses there is a God, or at least hopes there is. If anyone objects that science now forbids such belief, I am not writing for him; I may be honoured to say a word to him some day. To my chosen reader I say that I see no middle course between believing that every easing of pain, every dawn of hope across the troubled spirit, every recovery, is God's doing, and believing there is no God at all---none, at least, that *I* could believe in. Had Christians believed in God better and more grandly, the present phase of unbelief, which is no doubt needful and had to come some time, would not have come in our day. It will vanish when it must, but believers are more to blame for it than unbelievers. The common belief in God is rationally untenable: half to an insensate nature and 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, not because he has believed in Him. I would not be hard; there are many degrees in faith, and a man may be on the right track, learning of Christ, yet poor and weak. But there is no *standing* room between absolute faith and absolute unbelief. Either not a sparrow falls without Him, or there is no God and we are fatherless children. Those who try to live in the limbo between are only driven of the wind and tossed.

Has my reader 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 it seems there is no life left in the world but misery---"pain, pain ever, for ever"? Then surely he has known the turn of the tide, when pain abates, sweet sleep falls on soul and body, and a faint hope glimmers across the gloom; or the sudden waking from sleep and fever together, the consciousness that life is the law of things, when the garment of pain that, like Dejanira's fabled garment, ate into his being folds back and he looks out new-born. It is God, his law of life conquering the law of death. Tell me not of natural laws as if I denied them. The question is whether they wheel on of themselves in a symmetry of mathematical shapes, or whether their perfect order and unbroken certainty express a perfect intellect informed by a perfect heart. Law is truth: has it a soul of thought or not? If not, farewell hope and love and possible perfection; but I will hope on and fight the invading unbelief, for the horror of being the sport of insensate law, the more perfect the more terrible, is hell and perdition. If a man tells me science says God is not a likely being, I answer, probably not, such as you can suppose him, who have given your keen powers to observing outer things only; but you have given me no reason to fear that the God I mean is not the very heart of the lovely order you see so much better than I. My God may be above and beyond and in all that.

In healing, then, as in all the miracles, Jesus does the Father's works. God is our Saviour: the Son comes healing the sick, doing before our eyes what the Father, for reasons of his own, does from behind the veil of his creation and its laws. The cure comes by law, through the physician who brings the law to bear on us; we awake, and lo! it is God the Saviour. Every recovery is as much his work as the birth of a child, and as much the Father's as if the Son had wrought it by his word before the multitude.

To combat again the vulgar notion that the essence of miracles lies in their power, need I dwell further on this one? No one who honours the Saviour will imagine him, entering the chamber where the woman lay tormented, saying "Here is a chance to show how mighty my Father is!" There was suffering, and here was healing. What I can imagine him saying is, "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, meeting the starving on his own estate, thought "Now I can show how rich I am!" and laid gold on the bare table? The receivers might be grateful, but a poor neighbour's arm under the dying man's head would gather deeper gratitude and tenderer love. Heart alone can satisfy heart; only God's love can gather 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 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 these miracles, seen from the healed person's side. In the many cases of which we have no individual record, the experience must have been similar: the evil thing that opposed their life departed, they knew in themselves they were healed, they saw the face and form from which the healing had gone out, and they believed in the man. What they believed *about* him beyond that he had healed them and was good, I cannot say; they differed, but they believed in him. The strongest of ties now bound his life to theirs. He was the central thought of their being, their minds lay open to his influence, which worked in time by holy gradations, and endless currents of life began to flow to them from the unsealed fountain. Gratitude woke the conscience, and they began to recoil from evil deeds and thoughts as jarring with the new friendship. Mere acquaintance with a good man is a powerful antidote to evil; knowing *such* a man as the healed knew him was the mightiest of divine influences.

In these miracles our Lord must have laid one of the largest foundation-stones of his church. The healed knew him henceforth not by comprehension but with their whole being. They went home to recall and love afresh; I wonder what their talk of him was like. Soon they had to be public martyrs, witnesses to what they knew, come what might, and after his departure those who loved him had to gather and testify together. Next to his immediate disciples, those he had cured must have been the very heart of the young church, with personal love for the personal helper at its core. The church had begun in the mother Mary's first gush of affection, and now "great was the company of those that published" the news. The Father's works had drawn the children's hearts, and they spoke of the Elder Brother who brought those works to their doors. The remembrances of those who had heard him, the grateful convictions of those he had healed, the tender memories of those he had blessed in his arms---these were the fine, fibrous roots that gave the church existence, growth and continuance, sucking in the rains of the descending Spirit that was the life of the tree. Individual life is the life of the church.

But why did he not cure all the sick in Judæa? Because not all were ready; many would not have believed in him if cured. Their illness had not yet ripened them to the possibility of faith, and a cure would have left them deeper in evil. "He did not many mighty works there because of their unbelief." God will cure a man, and he will be the better for it even before he has learned to thank him; but to see the healer and acknowledge the outstretched hand yet not believe in the healer is terrible. I think the Lord kept his personal healing for those it would bring at once into some relation of heart and will with himself; hence his frequent demand of faith, apparently always answered: at the word, flickering belief, the smoking flax, burst into flame. Physical evil is a moral good, a mighty means to a lofty end. Pain is an evil, but also a good that it would be a great injury to take from a man before it had done its work. Then it becomes all evil, and must pass.

I now proceed to a group of cases in which, as far as we can judge, our Lord gave restoration unsolicited. Other instances fall into other groups, gathered for other features.

The first, recorded by St Luke alone, is the woman with "a spirit of infirmity eighteen years," bowed together and unable to lift herself up. It may belong with demoniacal possession, but I prefer to take it here, doubting that the phrase "a spirit of infirmity," even with our Lord's words defending her against the ruler of the synagogue---"whom Satan hath bound"---requires that. It matters little from our present point of view.

Bowed earthward, her eye's necessary blank the ground and not the horizon, the divine form deformed toward that of the four-footed animals, this woman had been in bondage eighteen years. Faith needs us to believe every trouble fitted to the one who bears it, and every physical evil not merely the result of moral evil but its antidote; yet no one should dare judge the relation between moral condition and suffering in individual cases, and our Lord warned us from it. But as love and truth prevail, physical evil will vanish from the earth; the righteousness of descendants will destroy the disease their ancestor's unrighteousness transmitted. To destroy physical evil otherwise than by redeeming human nature from moral evil would ruin the world. What made it right that this woman bear these bonds eighteen years, who can tell? Certainly God had not forgotten her. What it may have preserved her from, one may conjecture but hardly has the right to say. Nor can we tell whether she bore it with the patience common among the afflicted or with the natural repining of one made to behold the sun and doomed to regard the ground; patience would be rewarded by the cure, and even repining might be destroyed by the deliverance, gratitude begetting sorrow for vanished impatience. At any rate the right hour had come when the darkness must flee.

Supported, I presume, by a staff that made her yet more like the lower animals, she had crept to the synagogue---a good sign, for the synagogue was not its ruler. Nothing suggests she came to seek Jesus, or saw him before the word of her deliverance; bowed together, she most likely heard him before she saw him.

But he saw her. Our translation says he called her to him; I think the word means 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 God works in his human beings! The head bent with sin, care, sorrow and pain is lifted; the grovelling will looks heavenward; earth is no longer the one object of the aspiring spirit; we no longer even bend to God's will but raise ourselves toward it, for his will has become ours, and that will is our sanctification.

Although she did not beg the Son to cure her, she may have prayed the Father much. Anyhow she was plainly ready: she glorified God. That is enough. She thanked the man who cured her, no doubt, but she glorified the known Saviour, God, from whom comes every good and perfect gift.

She had her share in the miracle too, as God gives everyone a share in what he does for him: with the given power, *she* had to *lift herself* up. Such active faith is the response needed if a man is to be a child of God and not a mere instrument on which his power plays a soulless tune.

In this preventing of prayer, this answering before the call, this bringing of blessing to the door, by which I have grouped this miracle with the next ones, Jesus did as his Father does every day. If men had no deliverance from the ills that come on them, even those they bring on themselves, except at their cry, where would the world be? But God's help is ever coming, ever setting free those whom Satan has bound, ever giving fresh occasion and impulse to glorify the God of their salvation. 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. These are the descending angels of God. The passion that blotted out the child will revive; strife will renew wrath and hate; ambition and greed will blot out the earth's beauty; envy will blind him to his own blessedness; self-conceit will revive the prejudices whose strength lies in his weakness. But he has glimpsed the peace he must fight himself to gain, has for one moment felt what he might be if he trusted God, and the memory may return in the hour of temptation. As the commonest things in nature are the loveliest, so the commonest agencies in humanity are the most powerful. Sickness and recovery have a larger share in men's deliverance than the keenest eyes can see: the facts are isolated in individuals, or too slow and obscure to be remembered when their effects appear. The kingdom cometh not with observation; the working of its leaven must be chiefly unseen. Like creative energy itself, it works "in secret shadow, far from all men's sight."

The teaching that follows immediately, on the kingdom's small beginnings symbolized in the mustard seed and the leaven, may refer directly to this woman's cure, and show that he regarded her glorifying God for her recovery as one of those beginnings of a mighty growth. The same similes occur in another connection in St Matthew and St Mark; but even without such instances it is reasonable to suppose that the Lord, given the variety of place, audience and occasion, the disciples' dullness, and the perfection of the similes, would use the same ones again and again.

The second miracle of the group, recorded by all the Evangelists except St John, is the man with the withered hand. Like the preceding, it was done in the synagogue. All of this group except the last, whose circumstances are peculiar, were performed on the Sabbath, and each gave rise to discussion of the deed's lawfulness. St Mark says they watched to see whether he would heal on the Sabbath; St Luke adds that he knew their thoughts and met them with the question of lawfulness; St Matthew says they challenged him by asking whether it was lawful. The man could hardly have missed seeing that something afoot concerned him. But there is no sign of a request.

Few can have lived half the average human life without at some time feeling the body a burden and a possible deliverance from it an enfranchisement. If man's spirit were filled with God's Spirit, the body would be a living house, an obedient servant, a humble mediator by the senses between his thoughts and God's. But when every breath must be sent for and brought with much labour and small consolation, when pain turns faith into a shadow of hope, when the withered limb hangs lost and cumbersome, an inert simulacrum of power swinging lifeless to and fro, then even the physical man understands his share in the creation's groaning after the sonship. When at a word from such a mouth as that of Jesus of Nazareth the withered, distorted, contemptible hand obeyed, spread its fingers filled with old human might, and became capable again of friendship's grasp, love's caress, and labour for the bread that sustains life, little would the man care that others, even rulers of synagogues, Scribes and Pharisees, questioned the rectitude of his healer. The power that restored God's gift and completed humanity must be of God. Arguments from old books, customs and learned interpretations might set God's will against the laws of his world, but the man whose hand was restored whole knew it fitting that his hands should match. Their glosses could not keep his heart from gladness, and being glad whom should he praise but God? Nor could he look on the face of Jesus and doubt that such a man would do only right. It was not Satan but God who had set him free.

Here, plainly by the record, our Lord gave the man his share in the miracle, not of mere acquiescence but of active will. If man is God's child he must share in the Father's works, and without the share faith gives, cure will be of little avail. "Stretch forth thine hand," said the Healer; the man made the effort, and the withered hand obeyed. *In* the act came the cure; without it the will would never have taken form in the outstretching. So it is in all spiritual redemption.

Think how gladly the man would use his new hand, now God's hand. But was the other not God's too, as much? Had God's power not been present all these years in the left hand that served him, and in his whole frame? Through loss and restoration in one part he would understand possession in the whole.

But as the restored limb is to the man, so is the healed man to his brethren. In every man the power by which he does the commonest things is God's. The power is not *of us*: our power does it, but we do not make the power. Plain as this is, it is the hardest lesson to learn with conviction and thanksgiving. God has put us just far enough from himself that we can use the divine thing in us, our own will, in returning toward our source. Then we shall learn that we are infinitely greater and more blessed as the outcome of a perfect self-constituting will than we could be by turning any imagined independence of origin into fact---a truth no man can understand or truly acknowledge except as he becomes one with his origin, the will of God. While opposition exists between maker and made, the creature's judgment is in confusion and cannot perceive the mighty liberty of holy dependence, where God's will is the man's absolutely free choice, or a unity possible not between independent wills but only in unspeakable love between the causing Will and the caused will. Those who cannot see how the human will can be free in dependence on God's have not realized that God's will made man's, that when it most pants for freedom it is the child of God's will, and so there can be no natural opposition between them. More, God's whole labour is that man's will be free as his own is free, by the perfect love of what is true, harmonious, lawful, creative. If a man asks, "Might not God make my will intending to over-ride and enslave it?" I answer that such a Will could not create, could not be God, for it involves the false and contrarious: it would make a will so that it be no will, and to create in order to uncreate is not divine. A free will is not liberty to do whatever one likes but the power to do whatever one sees ought to be done, even against overwhelming impulse. There lies freedom indeed.

I come now to the man paralysed thirty-eight years, a story of great pathos. For many of those years he had haunted the borders of legendary magic; I take the angel troubling the pool as only a current superstition. How different from our Lord's healing! What he gave was free to all; no cure weakened his hand for the rest; none were poorer that one was enriched. The pool legend fostered the evil passion of emulation in a most selfish form. Nowhere in the divine arrangements is my gain another's loss. If it is said this was how God chose who should be healed, I answer that the effort required was contrary to all we most admire in humanity: by that rule Sir Philip Sidney ought to have drunk the water he gave the soldier. Does the doctrine of Christ, by which we must interpret God's ways, countenance a man's rushing ahead of the rest and winning the boon because, as the ablest to plunge first into the eddies the fantastic angel left, he had the least need of it? Or if the prize went to those helped by friends, surely most in need was one who, like this man, had no friends either to plunge him in the waters of fabled hope or to comfort him in the disappointments that alone divided the months of a life of empty expectation.

But the Master comes near. In him the power of life rests "in its own calm home, its crystal shrine," and whoever believes in him need not make haste. He knew it was time for this man to be healed and did not wait to be asked, though the man did not know even his name. "Do you want to be made well?" "Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is troubled; while I am coming, another gets in before me." "Rise, take up your bed, and walk."

Our Lord delays the cure with no further speech. The man knows nothing of him, and he asks no faith of him but obedience, giving 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, and be willing to believe it is open and that we have strength to walk it. God's gift glides into man's choice, and we must follow with our effort in the track of his foregoing power; to refuse is to destroy the gift. His cure is not for those who choose to be invalids; they must be willing to be made whole, even if that means carrying their beds and walking. Some keep to bed who have strength to rise. There is a self-care and self-pity, a laziness and conceit of incapacity, as unhealing for the body as unhealthy for the mind, corrupting dignity and destroying sympathy. Who but invalids need such miracles? Yet some are not cured because they will not be healed: they will not stretch out the hand, rise or walk, and above all will not work, though for their illness the work they hate may be the only cure or at least the best relief. Labour is not in itself an evil like sickness but often a divine, blissful remedy. Nor is the duty only for those who must labour for support: no wealth frees anyone from work in a world whose God is ever working. He who does not work has not discovered what God made him for, and is a false note in the orchestra of the universe. Wealth is prepayment, and obliges one in honour to do corresponding work. He who does not know what to do has never seriously asked himself what he ought to do.

A class the very opposite of these falls, as extremes meet, into a similar fault: they will not be healed either, for they will not take the repose God gives his beloved. Some sicknesses are cured by rest, others by labour.

The right way is to meet the sickness as God would have it met, submitting or resisting according to the conditions of cure. Whatever is not of faith is sin: she who will not go to her couch and rest in the Lord is as much to blame as she who will not rise and go to her work.

There is reason to suppose this man had brought his infirmity on himself---not merely by neglecting physical laws but by doing what he knew was wrong. When the Lord found him afterward, having first let the gladness of deliverance have full sway, he gave him the lesson that all health depends on purity of life: "Behold, thou art made whole: sin no more lest a worse thing come unto thee." It is the only recorded cure where Jesus gives such a warning, so I think the probability is as I say. That we may be to blame for our sufferings is no reason not to go to God to deliver us; David knew this, and set it out in the 107th Psalm.

In the very next case Jesus will not admit that the man's blindness from birth was due to the sin of either the man or his parents, who, to judge by their behaviour in the persecution that followed, 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? The work of creation, for one, rather than healing. The man had suffered nothing by being born blind; God had made him only less blessed than his fellows, meaning him equal faculty and greater enjoyment afterward and the honour of revealing God's works to men. In him Jesus created sight before men's eyes. As God said at first "Let there be light," so his work is still to give light to the world, and Jesus must work it and *be* the light of the world, in all its degrees and kinds, reaching every corner where work may be done, rousing sleepy hearts and opening blind eyes.

Jesus saw the man, the disciples asked their question, and as soon as he had answered, "he spat on the ground, made clay of the spittle, and anointed the eyes of the blind man with the clay."---Why the clay, the spittle, the touch?---Because the man who could not see him must yet be brought into sensible contact with him, and know the healing came from the one who touched him. Our Lord took pains because the man was blind. For the man's share, having as it were blinded him a second time with clay, he sends him to wash it off at the pool, so that clay and blindness depart together by the act of his faith: as if the Lord said, "I blinded thee: now, go and see." These are the links of the chain binding the man to the Lord: the voice, if he heard it, defending him and his parents from the disciples' judgment; the claim to be the light of the world, which the blind man knew only as something he lacked; the sound of spitting; the fingers' touch; the clay; 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, except in a conception only less dim than the man's blindness, the glory that burst on him when, as the clay left his eyes, the light of the world invaded his astonished soul? The very idea may make one tremble. Blackness of darkness---not an invading stranger but the companion always at home, the negation never understood because the assertion was unknown, creation not erased and remembered but uncreated to his eyes! Then 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 such a wonder, and the vision was as fresh as if he had that moment been created, the first of men.

But the best remained. A man had said "I am the light of the world," and here was the light of the world. The words had been vague as a dark form in darkness; now the thing itself had invaded his soul. He had not yet seen the face of the creator of his vision, but he believed in him, for he defended him against the charge of wickedness as Jesus had defended him: when they said "Give God the praise; we know this man is a sinner," he replied "God does not hear sinners, and this man has opened my eyes." No wonder that when Jesus found him and asked "Do you believe in the Son of God?" he answered "Who is he, Lord, that I might believe in him?" He was ready; he had only to know which was he, to worship him. Here at last was the Light of the world, and straightway the world had burst on him in light! Would he ever need further proof that there was a God of men? I suspect he had a grander idea of the Son of God than any disciple yet. The would-be refutations of experience (never since the world began had anyone opened the eyes of one born blind), the authorities' objection that the man was not of God because he broke the Sabbath, all perplexities of *how* and *why*, could not shake his confidence: "One thing I know, that whereas I was blind, now I see." He could not convince the Jews that Jesus must be a good man, nor could he doubt it himself, whose whole being had been enlightened and glorified by him. With light in the eyes, the brain and the heart, permeating and unifying his physical and moral nature and showing him to himself as one whole, how could he doubt!

The miracles were for the persons they passed on. To spectators they were something, but to their subjects of unspeakable value and endless influence. They reached others truly through the healed themselves, whose lives witnessed to a truth far beyond what their tongues, which could witness only to a fact, could say.

In this miracle as in all the rest Jesus did in little the Father's great work; for how many more are those to whom God has given the marvel of vision than the blind 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 vision only to care for his body or indulge his mind can hardly understand the gift of God in its marvel. But the man on whose soul the grandeur of the heavens, earth, sea and fountains of waters has once arisen will understand what a divine *invention*, what a mighty gift, are these very common eyes, the light that enlightens the world, and the sight that comes of both. He will understand what a believer the man born blind must have become---how the inburst of splendour might make him so able to believe that nothing would be too grand and good for him afterward, not even the doctrine hardest to commonplace humanity though most natural to those who have seen it: that the God of the light is faithful, loving, upright, honest and self-denying, utterly devoted to the uttermost good of those he has made.

Such is the Father of lights who enlightens the world and every man that comes into it. Every pulse of light on every brain is from him, every feeling of law and order, every hint of right, every desire after the true, all aspiration and longing for light, every perception that this is true and that ought to be done. His infinite and varied light, gathered into one point---for how shall we speak of these things except in figures?---and embodied in Jesus, became *the* light of the world. The light is no longer only diffused: in him man "beholds the light *and whence it flows*." Not merely is our chamber lit; we see the lamp. So we turn again to God, the Father of lights, even of The Light of the World, knowing now that all 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 faint human glimmering 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, also on the Sabbath, in the house of one of the chief Pharisees. Our Lord had gone there to an apparently large entertainment, for the following parable is spoken "to those which were bidden, when he marked how they chose out the chief rooms."

\[Footnote: 1. Not *rooms*, but *reclining places* at the table.\] This at least suggests the man may have been a guest; houses were open enough that an uninvited person could easily get in. 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 translation "took him and healed him and let him go" seems against this, but only because it is indefinite enough to mean he sent him away, which the original does not. It means he *took him*, went to him and laid hands on him, thus connecting the cure with himself, and then released him and turned at once to the other guests, justifying himself by appeal to their own righteous conduct toward the ass and the ox. I think the man stayed reclining to enjoy the appetite of health at a good meal---unless the gladness of relieved breath, the sense of lightness and strength, the restored obedience of body, and the presence of his healer made him too happy to care about dinner. I come now to the last of the group, exceptional in that it was not the cure of a disease or natural defect but the repair of an injury inflicted by one of his own followers. This too is recorded by St Luke alone; the other evangelists give the occasion but not the miracle, the blow but not the touch. I shall not compare their accounts, which vary but do not conflict, but confine myself to St Luke's. Peter, doubtless meaning to cleave the head of a servant of the high priest who had come to take Jesus, with an unaccustomed hand perhaps trembling with rage and fear, missed his aim and cut off only the man's ear. Jesus said, "Suffer ye thus far." I think there should be a question mark---"Is it thus far ye suffer?" "Is this the limit of your patience?"---but I do not know. Then "he touched his ear and healed him." Hardly had the wound reached the true sting of its pain before the gentle hand of him the servant had come to drag to torture dismissed the agony as if it had never been. Whether he restored the ear or left its loss as a reminder of the part the man had taken against his Lord and the return the Lord made, we do not know. Nor do we know whether the man turned back ashamed and contrite, having felt in his own person the life in Jesus, or followed the capture to the end. Possibly Peter's blow was the form God's favour took, preparing the way, like the blindness from birth, for the glory to be manifested in him. But the Lord would countenance no violence 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 awaiting him, his heart was not hardened to another's pain, nor did it matter that the sufferer was an enemy, one taking him to the cross. There was suffering; here was healing. He came to do the works of him that sent him, and did good to those who 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. First, though, I must treat one case that lies between the last group and this: the woman who came behind Jesus in the crowd. Its classification is uncertain, and it raises peculiar difficulties.

At Capernaum, apparently, our Lord was on his way with Jairus to see the man's daughter, followed by a crowd that had heard the ruler's request. A woman ill for twelve years came behind him and touched the hem of his garment, saying within herself, "If I may but touch his garment, I shall be whole." So far it was a prayer. But it was no true prayer, since she expected to be healed without the healer's knowledge or will. She did not ask; she thought, in innocent theft, to steal a cure.

St Matthew's account gives me no difficulty: she was made whole from that hour, he says, after Jesus had turned, seen her and spoken. St Mark and St Luke say she was cured at the touch, and that his words only confirmed it. They also show Jesus not knowing what had happened, except that a cure had been wrought, without his volition, by contact with his person. He felt a saving influence pass from him, and so knew, in a crowd pressing hard enough that many must have touched him, that someone had touched him with special intent. The accounts differ without being incongruous, but the added circumstances raise inquiries of the hardest kind, which I cannot claim to have satisfied. First is the mode of the cure, which seems at first sight, apart from the healer's will, to be magic: an influence without a sufficient origin. I would not reject the testimony, for my ignorance of such matters is nearly complete. But I cannot rest without a credible supposition on which the thing might happen without dimming the glory of the one this history is about. The difficulty is that she could be cured by his garment without (not against) his will. I think it all comes from our helpless ignorance of the relations of thought and matter. I say thought rather than spirit because people who reflect on spirit usually picture some vague form of matter. All religion rests on the belief or instinct that matter is the result of mind, spirit, thought; the relation between them is too close for us to understand. Here is my suggestion about the miracle as St Mark and St Luke give it.

If even inanimate things hold healing power of various kinds, and the world may hold absolute cure parted into a thousand forms, who can tell what cure may lie in a perfect body informed, indeed caused, by a perfect spirit? If stones and plants heal by the will of God in them, might not the perfect health of a body in which the Son of God dwelt carry a necessarily healing power? The crowd around him, of whom we hear of no influence received, may seem to refute this. But who can tell what he did even for them, recognized only as a conscious well-being? Those nearest would mostly be the strong, with no empty channel hungering for his life. And who can tell how the faith of her heart, calming or arousing her whole nature, made the woman more fit to receive the sacred influence? She did not pray, but her faith was alive, though small as a mustard seed. Why might not health from the fountain of health flow into the empty channel of her weakness? I shrink from the subject, because of the vulgar forms such speculation has taken in the hands of charlatans, but one must be honest in sorting the probable from the impossible. Fact is not the sole legitimate object of inquiry; if it were, farewell to God, religion and hope. The soul hungers for what lies at the root of fact and of law.

I have anticipated a chapter of speculation still to come. A greater difficulty, for some, is the representation of the Lord as ignorant of the cure, knowing it only by the reaction on his own person of the influence that went out from him to fill the vacuum of suffering the divine nature abhors. This gives me no concern. Our Lord says himself, in one case at least, that he did not know, that only his Father knew. He could discern a necessary future result, but not the day or the hour. Omniscience is a consequence of the divine nature, not an essential. God knows because he creates; the Father knows because he orders; the Son knows because he obeys. The Son neither needs nor desires the Father's perfect knowledge; his sole care is to do the Father's will, and in that lies his essential divinity. Although he knew one apostle would betray him, I doubt that when he chose Judas he knew Judas was the one. We must take his words as true: he disclaims perfect knowledge, and once speaks to his Father with an *if it be possible*. Those who think omniscience essential to divinity are driven to say Christ was not divine, which is their punishment for putting knowledge level with love. No one who does so can worship in spirit and in truth; his heaven will be in the clouds, not in the sky.

But now we come to the holy of holies of the story. Jesus could not leave the woman with half a gift. She had stolen the half; she must come and take the other half from his hand, which means she must know who had healed her. Her will and his must meet, and her eyes and his, her voice and his ears. It is the only recorded case in which he says *Daughter*. It was not because she was younger than he; they cannot have differed much in age.

With a woman's modesty, deepened by the painful shrinking of her peculiar suffering, she dared not show herself, and meant only to gather a crumb unseen from under his table. I do not believe our Lord wanted her to tell her tale of grief and, as she saw it, shame; it would have been enough had she stood before him silent. Nor did she come in weakness, for knowing herself healed must have been strength. Yet she trembled. Filled with awe and gratitude, she fell at his feet and, hiding her face in her hands, I presume, forgot the multitude and was alone with the Son of Man. Love, gratitude and holy awe joined 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," as in David's "Search me and know me." He had a right to know all, painful as it was. It was her sacrifice to the Lord, and hiding anything would now hurt more than telling it, for it would be a barrier between them; she would be one-fold, her whole being open. I do not mean such thoughts took shape in her mind, but a single consciousness can sometimes be represented only by analysing it into twenty thoughts. He accepted the offering and let her tell all.

It was painful, and he understood it well. His heart yearned to shield her from her innocent shame, to make a heaven about her whose radiance would hide it by its very clarity. Her story appealed to all that was tenderest in humanity, for the secret her modesty had hidden her conscience had spoken aloud; so the tenderest word the language could afford must be hers. "Daughter," he said. It was the fullest reward he could give, and the sign of his perfect love. The degrading spirit of the commonplace, which lowers everything to its own capacity to believe, will say it was an eastern idiom more common than with us. I say that whatever Jesus did or said, he did and said like other men and as no other man did. If he said *Daughter*, it meant what any man would mean by it, and what no man was good enough, great enough or loving enough to mean. In him the Father spoke to this one woman the eternal truth of his relation to all the women he has made, though individually it can be heard only by those who lift filial eyes and lay bare a filial heart. If she dared not lift her eyes before the men present, she might depart in shameless peace, having been called *Daughter*. It was the deepest gift of the divine nature, the recognition of the eternal in her by him who made it; between true father and true daughter nothing is painful. Possibly, the moment she knew herself healed, she felt compunction over how she had gained the cure and thought him offended when he called; her contrition for the little fault, if fault it was, may have added to the agony of her confession. But he soothes her: "Be of good comfort." He heals the shy, suffering spirit where old marks of deep wounds remained, and confirms the cure she perhaps feared would be taken from her: "Go in peace, and be whole of thy plague." More, he attributes the cure to her own faith: "Thy faith hath made thee whole." She must not be left in danger of associating power with the mere garment of the divine. She must be brought face to face with her healer, not left kneeling on the outer threshold of the temple but taken to the Saviour's heart, and only then is she redeemed utterly. He gives no reproach for what she had condemned; if it was evil, confessing it made it vanish from between them for ever. Her faith was ignorant, but it was true. The very strength of it, working in ignorance, may have made her extend his power to the skirts of his garments, and he met that ignorance not with rebuke but with more grace. If even her ignorance was so full of faith, of what confidence was she not capable? Through the garment of his Son the Father would cure her who believed enough to touch it. The kernel of faith was none the worse for its uncomely shell of ignorance and mistake. When did he ever quench the smoking flax? He is never slow to commend; the first quiver of an upturning eyelid is faith to him. He commends the feeblest faith in the ignorant soul, and rebukes it only lightly in apostolic souls where it ought to be greater. However poor, her faith was enough to save her. Between death and the least movement of life lies a gulf wider than between the gates of heaven and the depths of hell. He said "*Daughter*."

I come now to the first plain request: the leper who fell before him saying, "Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean." This lovely human plea appeals to the power in the one addressed; his power is the man's claim. Plenty and need, strength and weakness, health and disease make a poor bond between men, whose plenty, strength and health can only supplement, support and mitigate, never satisfy, transform or slay. But with God, whose power is all creative, any need of his creatures is a perfect bond; his magnificence must flow into the channels of the indigence he has created.

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

His complaint was sore to mind as well as body: it made him an outcast and ashamed, and no one would come near. Physical evil had come to the surface in him; he was "full of leprosy." Men shrink from skin diseases more than from any other.\[2\] \[Footnote 2: They are also among the hardest to cure, as the skin diseases of the soul linger after the heart is largely cured: the petulance, fastidiousness, censoriousness and disagreeableness of so many good people, all in the moral skin, are exceedingly repulsive. I say good people, not *very good*, nor Christ-*like*.\]

Jesus could have cured him with a word. Was there no need to touch him? There was every need, for no one else would. The healthy human hand, always more or less healing, was never laid on him; he was despised and rejected. The Lord must comfort and cure his sore heart as well as his body, and of all men a leper needed the touch of the hand of love. Spenser says, "Entire affection hateth nicer hands." It was not for our master, our brother, our ideal man, to draw in his skirts and speak a lofty word of healing so that the man might first be clean. The man was his brother with an evil disease clinging to 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 the touch went before the word. By it the leper knew what kind of God there is in the earth: not the God of the priests, but one only he can reveal to his own. It was to the leper what *Daughter* was to the woman in the crowd, and *Neither do I* to the woman in the temple: the sign of the perfect presence, the outermost sign revealing the innermost heart.

Let me linger on this meeting of creative health and destroying disease. The health flowed out; the disease could not enter, and Jesus was not defiled. Even if he could have been, he would not have drawn back: he respected the human body in its worst state, and so acknowledged it as his own. The reader must call up the analogies between curing body and soul, though they are more than analogies, for here they were combined in one act: the touch went to the man's heart. Hand to hand cures a bodily disease; heart to heart Jesus will visit the man deep in evil habits who still lifts to him a despairing cry, and his healthful heart will cure the heart spotted with plague, so that it comes 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: go to the priest and hold his tongue. Doing is easier than abstaining. He went to the priest, and did not hold his tongue.

That the Lord sent him to the priest needs no explanation. He constantly recognized the sacred customs of his country, and seeing more in them than the priests did was no reason to pass them by. The testimony he wanted the man to bear lay in offering the gift Moses commanded: his healing was in harmony with the ancient law, coming from the same source and in time completing what the law began. The only other thing he required, silence, the man did not give. Probably he needed the injunction more for his own sake than the master's: he was talkative and demonstrative, his better life always in danger of evaporating in words, and the Lord wanted him to think and give the seed time to root before putting leaves out into the world. Are there not some today who, having glimpsed truth across the darkness of a moral leprosy, begin at once to blaze it abroad and teach their fellows from an intellectual twilight in which they see men as trees walking, instead of retiring for a time into the wilderness to be still and commune with their own hearts? The Lord had touched this man; his nature was in commotion with gratitude, his self-conceit swelled high, and his tongue would not be still. Perhaps he thought himself favoured above his fellow-lepers, a selfish mistake that makes men talkative. He would befriend his healer against his will, only to impede 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." The man could not yet understand the kingdom that cometh not with observation, and out of presumption mixed with affection he would serve the Lord otherwise than by doing his will. He had his reward: a 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 toward Samaria. They stood afar off in a group, probably afraid of offending him by coming nearer, and cried, "Jesus, Master, have mercy on us." Instead of pronouncing their cure, he told them to go and show themselves to the priests. This was partly for the priests' sake, perhaps to justify his mission, but more certainly to give the men something to obey, as he often did. It also served, as the sequel shows, to individualize their relation to him: as a group they were not enough; it must be man to man. Their bond was a common suffering; it must become a common faith in the healer, and individual faith must break up the group for a deeper reunion. His intention worked in them, at first with small apparent result. They obeyed and set off, their faith so small it was hardly recognizable. Going, they found themselves cured. Nine held on their way; the tenth, forgetting in his gratitude the Master's word, turned back and fell at his feet. A moral martinet, a scribe or a Pharisee, might say 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 besides; the Lord's own devotion burned up the letter with the fire of love, fulfilling and setting it aside, and high love needs no letter to guide it. The letter is all that weak faith is capable of, and well for those who keep it, but ill for those who do not outgrow it, forgetting it *by outgrowing it*.

This man was a stranger, as the Jews called him, a Samaritan, and the Lord praised him to his followers: "See, Jews, who think yourselves the great praisers of God! Ten lepers are cleansed; where are the nine? One comes back to glorify God, and he a Samaritan!" To the man he says, "Arise, go thy way; thy faith hath made thee whole." Again he commends individual faith. Was it not the faith of the others too that healed them? Doubtless; had it been enough to bring them back, he would have told them their faith had saved them. But they were content to be healed, and until their love, the deeper faith, brought them to his feet, their faith was not ripe for praise. Probably this man's faith had prompted the cry of all ten, and he was the salt of the little group of outcasts, the righteous tenth. The others were content with the cure; he forgot it in his gratitude, and a moment more would have overtaken them on the way to the priest.

I may not find a better place to remark on the variety of our Lord's treatment of those he cured; the record shows, I think, no two cases treated alike. He does not mass people together: in his dealings, as in their relation to his Father, every man is alone with him. With the ten, I think he sent them away partly so that this individuality could assert itself. They had stood afar off, so he could not lay the hand of love on each; now one left the group and brought his gratitude to the Master's feet, glorifying God the Healer with a loud voice.

In reflecting on the cures, then, we must seek the causes of their diversity mainly in the individual differences of those cured, remembering that the accounts are brief and our capacity poor. God treats man as a father treats his children, only infinitely more a father than any man can be; each stands before him as an individual child, as if there were no one else, and the relation is awful in its singleness. Even when God deals with a nation as a nation, the individual must be aroused to a sense of his own wrong before he can understand how the nation sinned or turn to change it. A nation changes only as its members change, and the few who begin the change are its elect. Ten righteous individuals would have restored life to the festering masses of Sodom, festering because individual life had ceased and the community was nowhere; even nine could not. All communities exist for the sake of individual life, for the love and truth in each heart, which are not cumulative. Yet all that is precious in the individual heart depends on his relation to other individuals: alone, how can he love, and where is his truth? A community is the true development of individual relations, and its possibility lies in the conscience of its men and women. No setting right can be done in the *mass*; there are no masses except in corruption. Vital organizations come only from individualities and the needs that follow, which fit into each other and make combination unavoidable. Then the truth that has *informed* the community reacts to perfect the individual. By standing alone in God a man stands *with* his fellows and receives from them divine influences without which he cannot be perfected; a common conscience in a nation is possible only through the living consciences of its individuals.

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

In the variety of his treatment of the sick, then, Jesus did the works of his Father *as* his Father does them. The Spirit of God speaks to the spirit of the man, and God's Providence arranges everything for the individual's best good, counting even the hairs of his head. Every man and woman had a cure of their own, one in principle, individual in application. This was the foundation of the true church. And yet its members will try to separate over individual and unavoidable differences!

But once more the question recurs: why say so often that this one's or 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. A cure did not depend on any uncertain or arbitrary movement of Jesus's feelings. He was always ready to heal, and no one who asked was ever refused. It rested with the man: the healing could not enter unless he opened his door. There was then no danger of the diseased self-consciousness that nowadays keeps asking, "Have I faith? Have I faith?", searching for grounds of self-confidence and turning its eyes from the only source of confidence, the native home of power and love. How shall faith be born except from beholding the faithful? That disease was not a Jewish complaint, nor possible in the Master's bodily presence, so praise of a man's faith made him glad and more faithful. This disease needs his curing hand more than all the leprosies of Judaea and Samaria.

The remaining cases in this group are of blind men. First, in St Matthew, two followed Jesus crying, "Thou Son of David, have mercy on us." He asked whether they believed he was able to do it, drawing the bond closer, and when they said they did, at once touched their eyes: again bodily contact, as with the blind man already considered, especially needed with the blind to link the healing to the healer. But there are differences. The man who had not asked to be healed went through a longer process, I think to call his faith and will into exercise, with closer contact to help them develop: he made clay, put it on his eyes, and sent him to wash. Where prayer and confession of faith show the spiritual contact already made, the cure is immediate. "According to your faith," the Lord said, "be it unto you."

On these men, as on the leper, he laid a charge of silence, and they too sadly disregarded it. That he went into the house and let them follow before curing them shows he wanted to avoid publicity, a wish they foiled. Their gladness overcame the higher faith that is one with obedience. The other leper's turning back to give thanks was only a moment's delay in fulfilling the command, but a gratitude that disobeys an injunction and plunges into the irretrievable needs a development almost amounting to a metamorphosis to be a virtue.

In the one remaining case the records are slightly confused. St Luke says it happened as Jesus entered Jericho; St Mark says as he left it, and gives the beggar's name and parentage, in a considerably more detailed account; St Matthew agrees with St Mark about the occasion but has two blind men. We shall follow St Mark.

Bartimaeus, having learned the cause of the tumultuous passing of feet, calls, like the former two, on the Son of David to have mercy on him.\[3\] \[Footnote 3: In these two cases the cry is to the *Son of David*. I wonder whether the blind had come to think it the correct form of address to the new prophet, but the cases are too few to justify even a passing guess at generalization.\]

The multitude finds fault with his crying. I presume he was noisy in his eagerness after his vanished vision and they thought it indecorous; or perhaps it was the common resentment of a crowd at anyone who makes himself unreasonably conspicuous, claiming attention they cannot claim themselves. But the Lord stops and tells them to call him, and some of them, either friends or changing their tone now that the great man takes notice, begin to comfort him. Casting away his garment in his eagerness, he rises and is led through the yielding crowd to the Lord. To enter somewhat into the man's personal knowledge before curing him, and to consolidate his faith, Jesus began to talk a little with him, in tones full of the life of God that a blind man's cultivated hearing would best interpret.

"What do you want me to do for you?"

"Lord, that I might receive my sight."

"Go your way; your faith has made you whole."

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

Neither St Mark nor St Luke, whose accounts are almost the same, says he touched the man's eyes; St Matthew says he touched the eyes of the *two* blind men he places in otherwise identical circumstances. With a crowd around who knew them, touching was less necessary than in private, and there is no need to decide which account is more correct: the first two may have omitted a fact, or St Matthew *may* have combined this story with the earlier one of two blind men, of which he alone tells. In any case there are, I think, only two recorded instances of the blind praying for cure; most likely there were more, perhaps many.

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

I have not seen an argument against the efficacy of prayer that has force except from some narrow conception of the divine nature. If there is a God, it is absurd to suppose his ways of working destroy his side of the highest relation that can exist between him and those he has made: the relation of the creator's will to the individual will of his creature. That God should be bound by laws that are just his nature in action is absurd enough. But that such laws should contradict the highest consequences of the creation that alone gives occasion for them, setting God's will against his own earlier action and nature; that an unchangeable order of material causes and effects should cage for ever the winged aspirations of the human will, made in the image of his own, away from its natural air of freedom in his will: this would be called inconceivable were it not that it has been conceived and uttered, though only by minds to which this relation was, if present at all, present only vaguely. That he should leave himself no *willing* room toward those to whom he gave need, room to go wrong and then turn and look up and pray and hope, is to me grotesquely absurd. It is far easier to believe that the laws of nature and the human will, proceeding from the same eternally harmonious thought, are in harmony, so that neither need infringe on the other, and what seems an infringement would show itself, to a deeper knowledge of both, as perfectly harmonious co-operation. It would not matter that we know so little, were we not so ready to fancy at each discovery that now we know all. 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 that ought to keep us pressing toward Unity, we keep calling each new part the whole and settling onto the couch of self-glorification, and so pride perverts our very need of unity to our ruin. Then it is easy to refuse certain considerations, even facts, a place in our system, since it would cease to be a system once they were admitted. They may hold the germ of life and truth, but what is that if they destroy this Babylon we have built? The main point is this: what it would not be well for God to give before a man asks, 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 the first half of our training is up to the asking point; after that the treatment has a grand new element. God can give, when a man is fit to receive, what he cannot give before because the man cannot receive it. How could you teach the harmony of colours or tones to someone who cannot yet tell shade from shade or tone from tone? A man cannot receive unless another gives; no more can a man give if another will not receive; he can only offer. Doubtless God works on every man, or he *could* have no divine tendency, no *thither* to turn toward, only a sense of want. But once the man has given in to God, the spirit he prays for can work in him, all with him and no longer (as it *appeared* then) *against* him. Every worthy parent knows there are occasions when the child's asking makes the giving natural. In a way infinitely higher, yet the same at root, God can give when the man asks what he could not give without the asking, since otherwise the man would take the husk of the gift and cast the kernel away, a husk poisonous without the kernel, wholesome with it.

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

No, thank God. We shall have nothing we would not ourselves wish to have if we could judge with open eyes its true relation to us. If God gives otherwise, it must be as a healing punishment of excessive and harmful desire. The parable of the father who divided his living at the younger son's request must be true of God's individual sons, or it could not have been true of the Jews and the Gentiles. He will grant some such prayers because he knows the swine and their husks will send his son back with quite another prayer.

If my supposed questioner asks, "What then is the good of praying, if it is not to go by what I want?" I can only say, "You have to learn, and it may be by a hard road." The things men desire differ essentially. In physical well-being there is a divine good; in sufficient food and clothing, a divine fitness; in wealth as such, *none*. A man may pray for money to pay his debts, for healing of the sickness that keeps him from labour, or for just judgment from his fellows, with a confidence altogether unlike what he could have praying for wealth, for bodily might to surpass others, or for vengeance on those who judged him differently. Even then the divine soul will say with his Saviour, "If it be possible: Not my will but thine," for he knows 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 cured were real ills and real needs. There was a fitness in the condition of some, favoured by his bodily presence, which met the virtue ready to go out from him. But God is always present, and I have yet to learn of any man who prayed for money to be honest with and meet his family's needs, and did the work of him who called him from the market-place of the nation, who did not receive his penny a day. If it seems otherwise to anyone, I believe the contradiction will one day be cleared up. God has to satisfy the judgment of men not as they are but as they will be once they have learned his high, honest and grand way of things. To give men just what they want would often be like giving gin to the night-wanderer whom one could take home and set to work. I believe many of the ills men complain of would be quickly cured if they worked in the strength of prayer. Had the man 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 between God and his child, and cannot be pronounced on in general. Here as there, now as then, what is lacking is *faith*. A man may say, "How can I have faith?" I answer, "How can you, when you do what you know you ought not and have not begun to do what you know you ought? 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. But the man who believes and prays now has answers even better than those the sick in Judaea received: although Jesus's bodily presence favoured them, the Spirit of God, after widening its channels for nearly nineteen hundred years, can flow in greater plenty and richness now. So answers to prayer must not only differ from those then but be better, coming closer to the heart of the need, whether the one praying knows it or not. The change lies in man's power of reception, for God is always the same to his children; only, being infinite, he must speak and act for them in the endless diversity their growth requires, so that they can receive of the fulness of him who is all in all and unchangeable.

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

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

## VI. MIRACLES GRANTED TO THE PRAYER OF FRIENDS

If prayer may be heard for a man himself, it almost follows that it must be heard for others. It cannot fit the spirit of Christianity, whose essential expression is its founder's sacrifice, that a man be heard only when he prays for himself. In the preceding group faith was required of the person healed; here it is required of the one who asks. This is no different principle. The patient's faith was not essential to his bodily cure, though it favoured it; it was necessary to the higher, spiritual cure for which the Master chiefly brought about the lower. In both cases the demand for faith is for the sake of those who ask, whether for themselves or friends: a breath to blow the smoking flax into flame, a word to draw them closer to him. He cured many without such a demand, as his Father is ever curing without prayer, and cure itself will sometimes generate prayer and faith. So it was well that the cure of others should sometimes be granted to prayer.

Beyond this, there is a great fitness in the thing. Men are so bound together that no good comes to one without all sharing it: children suffer for the father, the father for the children, and they are blessed together. A spiritual good coming to a leader of the nation is one the whole people share. To increase the father's faith may do more for the faith of the child healed at his prayer than anything done for the child himself. It enlarges one of the many channels of the divinest gifts, which flow to men at first chiefly through fellows nearer the Father than they, until they too speak to God face to face.

Every man, in his highest moments of spiritual vision and even his simplest sense of duty, turns lonely to the one Father, his own maker. He may painfully feel that the best beloved does not understand as he does, yet in his most isolated adoration he is nearer every beloved person than when eye meets eye or the poor dumb hand tries to tell the emotion within. The man who prays becomes, in proportion to the purity of his prayer, a spiritual power, a nerve from the divine brain, from which power goes forth anew upon his fellows. He redistributes the divine blessing, not by exercising his own will (the cesspool toward which all notions of priestly mediation sink) but as the self-forgetting, God-loving brother of his kind, who would be in the world as Christ was. When a man prays for wife, child, parent, sibling or friend, the connection between them is so close in God that the blessing begged may well flow to the end of the prayer. Such a man is, in his poor, far-off way, an advocate with the Father like Jesus Christ the Righteous. He takes his friend into the presence with him, or leaves him with only the veil between, and they touch through the veil.

The first instance of this kind occurred at Cana in Galilee, where the first miracle was wrought. It is the second miracle in St John's record, and his alone; these two evidently attracted him especially, water turned into wine and a son restored to his father. God's Fatherhood created fatherhood in man. What shall a father do who is given a son he cannot keep, the divine love in his heart cleaving to a vanishing child? What can this nobleman do but seek the man of whom such wondrous rumours have reached him?

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

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

"Unless you see signs and wonders you will not believe," said Jesus.

"Sir, come down before my child dies."

"Go your way; your son lives."

If the nobleman understood the Lord's remark at all, he was in no mood for principles, and respectfully protests at time spent in words when the need was urgent. Whatever the Lord meant, he pressed it no further, but sent him home with the assurance of the boy's recovery, showing none of the signs or wonders he had spoken of. An unbelieving man, finding that all had happened naturally, would have slipped back into carelessness about a higher will. But when this man heard that the boy began to mend the very hour Jesus spoke, a fact easily dismissed as coincidence, he believed, and all his household with him. He was probably the real head of his house, the main source of its influences; if so, a man of faith, for where a man does not look up to the higher, the lower will hardly look up faithfully to him; a fit man to intercede for his son. It may be said they shared in the evidence, hardly a sign or wonder to them. True; but people are not ready to believe the best evidence unless predisposed toward it. If it be said, "They should have thought for themselves," I answer that thinking with their head was no bad sign that they did. Much of what is called freedom of thought is mere self-assertion that persuades itself of a freedom it cannot have without an effort too painful for ignorance and self-indulgence; to assert one's individuality is not necessarily to be free, and may come of absolute slavery.

But if the nobleman was a man of faith, why did our Lord say, "Except ye see signs and wonders ye will not believe"? I am not sure. It may have been a rebuke to those about him. If he was, as is said, a nobleman of Herod's court and not a pure-bred Jew, the remark would carry what the Lord spoke more plainly in the next two cases, the Greek woman and the Roman centurion: "Except *ye* see signs and wonders ye will not believe; *but this man*---." The words, though, were plainly addressed to the man. Even so, the Lord may have wanted to draw him out, a Gentile or doubtful Jew, to rebuke the disciples; but his love for his son stood in the way, which makes it unsatisfactory. I prefer another interpretation, since the first is found elsewhere and this one is universal and of special value to us, applying to men of science and men of superstition alike.

My impression is that our Lord, seeing the nobleman's great faith, grounded on what he had heard of the Master, chiefly of his signs and wonders, required in this remark a higher faith still. It sounds to me like an expostulation. I would dare to imagine him speaking so:

"Why do you not pray to the Father? Why must you always *see*? The door of prayer has been open since God made man in his own image; why do you need signs and wonders? But I will do just what my Father would have done had you 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. If you cannot believe for the word and the truth, believe for the work's sake. Go your way; your son lives."

I would not say that the Lord *blamed* him, or others in him, for needing signs and wonders. Rather, he spoke out of the fulness of his knowledge to awake in them some infant sense of what made up all his life, the presence of God, as the fingers of the light go searching in the dark mould for the sleeping seeds. The order of creation and the goings on of life flowed ceaselessly from the Father's heart; why seek signs and wonders that differ from common things only in being uncommon? Uncommonness is not excellence, nor commonness inferiority. The sign and wonder is the lower thing, granted only for men's hardness of heart. Yet if it could help them, they should have it, for it was not at variance with the holy laws of life but a less usual utterance of the same. "Go your way; your son lives." The man, a noble man in this at least, obeyed, and found his obedience justify his faith.

But his son would have to work out his belief on different grounds from his father's. In himself he could recognize only the resumption of the *natural* sway of life, and would not necessarily know that God was working in him. He would hear the story of his cure from his father, good evidence, but he had not seen the face of the Holy One as his father had. He must seek and find him. The fault of fathers is often to expect their finding to stand in place of their children's seeking; but their testimony is ground only for the children's search, not for their belief. That search is faith in the bud. No man can be sure till he has found for himself, and all a faithful nature need have is willingness to seek; he cannot even know what he wants until he finds it, having only a faint star to guide him eastward to the sunrise. Hopefully the father's belief has in it what will satisfy the child's need; but the child's doubt of it is the father's first ground for hoping the child, with new needs, will find the same well of life for himself. He believed the man had cured his son. "Yes," the son might say, "but I must know more of him; if what I hear now is true, I must cast all at his feet. He cannot be a healer only; he must be the very Lord of Life, perhaps of the Universe." His simple human presence contained what must have *appeared* reason to doubt this conclusion, especially to one who had not seen his divine countenance. But to one at length enlightened by the great Spirit, his humanity would hold the highest ground for believing in his divinity, for what it meant would come out ever loftier. How *should* the Lord who made the Universe show it, but as the Healer did? He could not make the universe over again in every man's sight; the heart could not hold it. He must reveal himself as the curing God, who sets right what has gone wrong, and *that could* be done in each man's sight. This man may be he, the Messiah, Immanuel, God with us.

We can imagine such further thoughts in the son, or perhaps in the father first, only he was so full of the answer to his prayer that he could not at once follow things to their grand conclusions.

In this case, as in the next two, the Lord heals from a distance. There were reasons: perhaps the need for an immediate answer, and probably its fitness to the faith of the supplicants. To heal thus, though less of a sign or wonder to the unbelieving, worked a finer power on those who came not for the sign but for the cure of the beloved; he who loves can believe what he who loves not cannot, and he who loves most can believe most. These cures were like the healing granted to prayer in all ages, which seems to come from the Unseen. God is not afar off, being closer to every man than his conscious being is to his unconscious being, but though there is no distance with God, it looks like it to men, and Jesus cured with the same appearances that attend God's ordinary healing.

The next case 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 a mother's devotion quickening in her a faith so rare and lovely that it delighted the heart of Jesus, it is one of the most beautiful of the healing stories.

The woman was a Greek, without the Jew's training for belief in the Messiah; her notions of the healer must have been full of fancies from the legends of her race. Yet she had been trained to believe, for her mighty love for her child was the best power for developing 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; a woman's love for her daughter differs from a father's love for his son as the woman differs from the man. It has a peculiar tenderness from the same womanly consciousness in both of undefendedness and modesty, a modesty here terribly tortured in the mother by the wild behaviour of the daughter under the unclean spirit. No misery could drive a woman more rightly to the Healer in agony of claim and prostrate entreaty. The divine nature of her motherhood drew her back to its source for help for one who shared in it, but in whom its waters were troubled and defiled.

She came crying to him. About him stood his disciples, proud of being Jews, who counted themselves the children and her kind the dogs. For their sakes this chosen Gentile must be pained a little further, sharing with her Saviour in the suffering for the redemption even of his chosen apostles. He must show them the divine nature in her, and so must try her sorely, but not for long.

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

But not a word came from the Healer. His disciples must speak first and supplicate for their Gentile sister; he would rouse their disapproval of their own exclusiveness by putting it on himself for a moment, so that they could see it apart from themselves.

Their hearts were moved for the woman.

"Send her away," they said, meaning "Give her what she wants"; but, poor intercessors, they added a selfish reason: either to avoid seeming to acknowledge her claim on a level with a Jewess's, making it what Puritans and priests call "an uncovenanted mercy," or because they thought it would help overcome the Master's scruples. Possibly both. "She crieth after us," meaning "She is troublesome." They would have him give as the ungenerous and unjust give to the importunate.

But no healing could be granted on such a ground, not even to an apostle's prayer. The woman herself must give a better.

"I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel," he said.

They understood the words wrongly. He did come for the Gentiles, and was training them to see what they were so slow to grasp, that he had other sheep not of this fold. Most of the troubles of his latest and perhaps greatest apostle came from Jewish Christians' indignation that he preached the good news to Gentiles as if meant for them; they would have had Gentiles enter through the gates of Judaism.

What they at length understood by these words is expressed in St Mark's further word: "Let the children first be filled." They could not see that Jesus came to the Jews first as much for the Gentiles' sake as for the Jews'. Whatever glorious exceptions there were among the Gentiles, and whatever the Jewish nation's widespread refusal, he *could* not have been received among the Gentiles as among the Jews. Only in Judaea could the leaven work or the mustard seed take root; once up, it would become a great tree for the birds of the world to nest in. God did not choose the Jews first because he loved them more, but because he must begin somewhere; *why*, God himself knows, and perhaps has given us glimmerings.

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

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

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

But he answered and said,---

"It is not right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs." Terrible words, more dreadful than any he ever spoke! Surely now she will depart in despair! But the Lord did not mean to speak *his* mind on Jew and Gentile: his church's future and his Spirit's teaching contradict it, and if he meant it he acted wrongly, throwing a child's bread to a dog. He spoke as a Jew felt, so that the elect Jews about him might begin to understand that in him there 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, all for a daughter's sake.

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

Or, as St Matthew gives it:

"True, Lord; yet the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters' table."

A retort quite Greek in its readiness, symmetry and point! But it was not the cleverness that pleased the Master; cleverness is cheap. It is the faith he praises, \[Footnote 5: Far more precious than any show of intellect, even for the intellect. Her quick answer was her intellect sparkling in the glow of her affection. Love quickens the whole nature, and faith in God will do more for the intellect in the end than all the schools.\] 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 redeemed world, as coming from a Gentile, and more as coming from a human mother pleading for her daughter.

"O woman, great is your faith; let it be for you as you wish."

Or, as St Mark gives it (we cannot afford to lose a varying word):

"For this saying, go your way; the devil is gone out of your daughter." The loving mother has conquered the tormenting devil. She has called in the mighty aid of the original love, which flows new-creating through the channel of her love, "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 destroyed? No; you too must be made whole of a worse devil, personal and national pride, before you understand. But the day of the Lord is coming for you, though you cannot read the signs of its approach, and it must come upon you as a thief in the night.

For the woman, we may well leave her to her daughter's embraces. 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, and mothers who are the salvation of their children!

We now complete a little family group with another foreigner, a Roman officer who begged the Lord for his servant. This captain was at Capernaum, where I presume he had heard of the nobleman's son's cure. The quality of his faith suggests he had heard much more of Jesus, enough to ponder for some time, for such humble confidence could hardly be, like Jonah's gourd, the growth of a night. Instead of lording it over the subject Jews of Capernaum he had built them a synagogue, and his respect toward our Lord, as toward any human being and especially one of lower station, 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; a thoughtful officer of a well-disciplined army would understand faith and its instant response in action more readily than anyone unfamiliar with organization. Hence the parallel he draws between his position and the Master's, which so pleased the Lord by its simplicity. But humble as he was, I doubt that anything less than some spiritual perception of the nobility of Jesus's character, of something beyond even the power of healing, could have produced such reverence and childlike confidence. No wonder the Lord was pleased; that must be what his Father loves.

According to St Luke, the Roman captain thought himself so unworthy of notice from the carpenter's son (the people of Capernaum, "his own city," knew his reputed parentage) that he got the Jewish elders to beg Jesus to come and heal his servant. They testified to his worth, naming what would count first with such men: that he loved their nation and had built them a synagogue. Little did they think how the Lord was about to honour him above their whole nation and 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, \[Footnote 6: In him it was almost morbid, one might say, were it not sister to such mighty faith.\] and sent friends to say, "Lord, do not trouble yourself; I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, nor did I think myself worthy to come to you. But say the word, and my servant will be healed. For I too am a man under authority, with soldiers under me: I say to one, Go, and he goes; to another, Come, and he comes; to my servant, Do this, and he does it."

This man was a philosopher: he ascended from what he was used to, to what he was not. He acknowledges his own subjection and states his authority, and leaves our Lord to understand that he recognizes in him an authority beyond all, expecting the powers of nature to obey their Master as his soldiers and servants obey him. How grandly he must have believed in him!

Beyond suspicion of flattery, he avoids the face of the man whom in heart he worships. "A poor creature like me go and talk to him!" the Roman captain would exclaim. "No, I will worship from afar off." And note that the Lord went no further; he turned at once. With Zacchaeus he would go home, if only to deliver him from the hopelessness of his self-contempt; here all was right, and the centurion needed only to go on, being in heart and soul nearer the Lord than any of the disciples who followed him. Surely one of the elders would carry him the Master's words; God's praise never falls wrong and never does anyone harm, and this would only deepen the humility and faith of the Roman. 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; those were the words he spoke to his followers, and having turned to say them he did not turn again but went his way. St Luke does not represent the Master as uttering a word of cure (St Matthew says the centurion himself came to Jesus, and mentions no elders), but implies that he went away marvelling, while "they that were sent, returning to the house, found the servant whole that had been sick." If anyone asks how Jesus could marvel, I answer that Jesus could do more things than we can well understand. That he marvelled at great faith shows he is not surprised at little, and so is able to make all needful, just and tender allowance.

Here I cannot do better for my readers than give four lines dear to me, though probably unknown to most of them, written, I must say, 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 the true servant is one of the family: a father's prayer for a son, a mother's for a daughter, a master's for a servant. Alas, the dearness of this last bond is not known now as once. No rooted institution was ever parted with without losing something good for a time, however necessary its destruction. I fear fewer free servants love their masters now than Roman bondsmen loved theirs, and few masters regard the bond with half the respect and tenderness many Romans did. Slavery is bad and of the devil, yet mutual jealousy and contempt are worse. But the time will come when a servant will serve for love as more than wages, and his master will honour him even to making him sit down to meat, and coming forth and serving him.

The next is the palsied man, graphically given by St Mark and St Luke, and with less circumstance by St Matthew, again at Capernaum, his own city. Pharisees and doctors of the law from every town, hearing of his arrival, had gathered to listen. There was no getting near him, so the sick man's friends carried him to the roof, took off the tiles and let him down into the presence. "Jesus seeing their faith ... said unto the sick of the palsy, Son, be of good cheer ... Man, thy sins are forgiven thee." All the narrators connect the forgiveness with the friends' faith, which is very remarkable. The only other such instance is the woman in Simon's house, of whom he showed first that her love was a sign her sins were already forgiven. What greater honour could he give their faith than to grant in their name, unasked, the one mighty boon? He looked into the man's heart and probably saw, as with the man he cured by the pool of Bethesda and told to sin no more, that his own sins had brought this suffering on him. At any rate he saw that the assurance of forgiveness was what the man most needed, whether because his conscience was oppressed or because he must be brought to think more of the sin than the suffering; it was an awful rebuke, if he still required it, that the Lord should present forgiveness to one who came for healing. Nor did he follow it at once with the cure, but delayed a little, probably for the man's sake and for the sake of those present, in whose hearts he would fix the lesson on divine forgiveness by bestowing it on the sick man. His words meant nothing unless they meant that God forgave the man. The scribes were right that none can forgive sins but God, in the full sense in which forgiveness is still needed by every human being even after all those he has injured have forgiven him.

"He is a blasphemer," they said in their hearts. 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 he was no blasphemer: that he had the power to forgive, and that it was God's will that he preach the remission of sins. How could he show it? Only by dismissing the consequence, the punishment of those sins, sealing the general truth in the individual case. He who could say to a man suffering the eternal law's consequence of sin, "Be whole, well, strong; suffer no more," must have the right to pronounce forgiveness; otherwise another than God cured with a word the man his Maker had afflicted, and God's kingdom must be trembling to its fall, a stronger having reversed its decrees. Power does not give the right to pardon, but it may prove the right. "Which 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 can do the other.

"That you may know that the Son of man has power on earth to forgive sins---Arise, take up your bed, and go home."

Up rose the man, took up what he had lain on, and went away, knowing in himself that his sins *were* forgiven, for he was able to glorify God. It seems against our Lord's usual custom with the scribes and Pharisees to grant them such proof. But I think these men were better than most of their class, or in a better mood, for St Luke says the power of the Lord was present to heal them. To heal these learned doctors, he forgave the sins first and then cured the palsy; for their sakes he performed the miracle thus. And *like priests, like people*: where their leaders listened, the people broke open the roof to get the helpless into his presence.

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

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, to come into better relation with that individuality which, until melted from within, is so hard to touch. In every case the patient's character and condition, patent only to the Healer, gave reason for individual treatment. Here, as with the blind, the closeness of contact is remarkable: "He put his fingers into his ears, he spit and touched his tongue." Always with present disease there was bodily contact, with defects of the senses sometimes a closer kind, to generate assured faith in himself as healer. But there is one more remarkable particular, which as far as I remember would be alone in its kind but for a fuller development 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 an unspoken prayer for the man beside him? But did *he* need to look up as if God were in the sky, when God was in *him*, in fulness of presence, answering consciously as nothing else could? True, even all human language blended into one glorious speech to utter his love for his Father would end in the last inarticulate resource, the sigh, saying *I cannot, but thou knowest*, confessing defeat but claiming victory. But the Lord could talk with his Father evermore in the forms of which words are shadows, indeed without forms, in the thoughts that are the souls of forms. Why then look up and sigh? So that the man, whose faith was barely beginning, might believe that whatever cure came from the healer's hand came from God's. Jesus did not care to be believed in as the doer of the deed unless the deed were recognized as given him of the Father; if they saw only him and not the Father through him, little was gained. The look and the sigh expressed the unbreakable link binding both the Lord and the man to the Father of all. He would lift the man's heart to the source of every gift; no cure would be a worthy gift without that, and might be an injury.

The last case is the blind man of Bethsaida, whom likewise he led apart, out of the town, touching his dull organs with spittle. Then comes a difference: the deaf man was cured at once, but when he laid his hands on the blind man, his sight was only half restored. Asked if he saw anything, 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 on his eyes, and when he looked up again he saw everyone clearly.

In thus graduating the process, our Lord, I think, drew out and enticed into strength the man's feeble faith. He brooded over him with his holy presence of love and gave his faith time to grow; he cared more for his faith than his sight. He let him feel him doing it, that he might know and believe. This resembles the ordinary modes God takes in healing men.

These last miracles are especially full of symbolism and analogy. But I do not care to dwell on that in any of the miracles, for in this they are like all God's other doings. Nature is brimful of symbolic and analogical parallels to the growth and changes of the highest nature in man. It could not be otherwise, for they issue from the same thought, and nature is made for man, an outer garment, or rather a living house for him. So the works of him who did the Father's works must bear the same mark.

The one practical lesson of this group is nearer the human fact and need than any symbolic meaning, grand as that must be, and nearer the constitution of things, since what a man must *do* matters more than what he can only *think*, and any man can do right though he cannot tell a symbol from a sign. It is this: 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. God forbid. But he shall be heard. The man who does not see the good of that knows nothing of the good of prayer, and can, I fear, still only pray for himself even when he fancies he is praying for his friend. Often, when men suppose they are concerned for the well-beloved, they are only concerned about what they will do without them; let them pray for themselves instead, the truer prayer. All prayer is assuredly heard; what matter that it is answered only in the right time and way? The prayer argues a need, and that need will be supplied. One day is with the Lord as a thousand years. All who have prayed shall one day justify God and say, Your answer is beyond my prayer, as your thoughts and ways are beyond mine.

## VII. THE CASTING OUT OF DEVILS

Before saying the little I can about this group of miracles, I want to guard against a misunderstanding. The question of *possession* has nothing to do with whether there exists a personal, conscious power of evil, the great adversary of the kingdom of heaven, commonly called Satan or the devil. The two questions are distinct, and either can be argued without alluding to the other.

Many think the recorded cases show only the symptoms of well-known diseases, whose exceptionally painful character, with loss of reason, convulsive motions and other abnormal phenomena, led the imaginative and unscientific Easterns to attribute them to a foreign power taking possession of body and mind. They say our Lord did not come to correct men's psychological or physiological theories, and adopted the common way of speaking, but cast out the evil spirits simply by healing the diseases attributed to them.

I see nothing unchristian in this interpretation. All diseases may well be regarded as inroads of evil powers on the temples of God, where only the Holy Spirit has a right to dwell, and to cast them out is as great a marvel as to expel the intruding forces to which the Jews attributed some of them. Yet I cannot admit that this solution meets all the appearances of the difficulty. I say *appearances* because I know too little to be dogmatic. But I do not find the marvellous incredible, provided it is itself worthy. I have no difficulty receiving the old Jewish belief about possession, and I think it explains the recorded phenomena better than the growing modern opinion; the action of matter on mind may well be a greater mystery than the action of one spirit on another. That a man should rave because a cell or two in his brain is out of order is no more within man's understanding than that an evil spirit, getting close to the fountain of his physical life, should disturb all its goings on, even to appalling moral phenomena. In either case an external power acts on the man.

"But we do not even know that there are such spirits, and we do know that a diseased brain is enough to account for the worst of the phenomena recorded." I will not insist that we do *not* know a diseased brain is enough; grant it. The explanation still does not fit the statements of the record, and we know so little of what is that any hint of unknown possibilities should be welcomed, even as a stranger, with contemplation and conjecture, so long as it involves no moral contradiction. The man who will not speculate can make no progress. Thinking about the possible is as lawful as the severest induction, and experiment itself must follow sober conjecture, for if we already know, what is experiment for?

There seems nothing unreasonable in supposing spirits who once had bodies like ours and, having abused embodiment, are condemned for a season to roam bodiless, mourning the loss of the only pleasures they care for and craving them in imagination. Out of hate for those who have what they lost, or eagerness to come as near a body as they can, such spirits might well seek to *enter into* a man. This is consistent with the recorded facts, and possibly with some forms of the madness of our own day, though all its forms are now put down to physical causes alone.

The first dispossession recorded, by St Mark and St Luke, took place at Capernaum, among his earliest miracles, before the cure of Simon's mother-in-law. While he taught in the synagogue on the Sabbath, a man with an unclean spirit cried out. This cry is far more intelligible on the old theory than the new. The speaker, using the man's organs, brain and all, recognizes a terrifying presence and addresses it as the Holy One of God. He would propitiate it by entreaty and flattery, hoping to be left undisturbed in the usurpation and cruelty by which he fed his own shadowy self-indulgence. Could anything be more consistently diabolic?

What other word could Jesus address to such a being than "Hold thy peace, and come out of him"? It could not be allowed to converse with the Saviour, for it recognized no salvation but the continuance of its own pleasures at another's expense. The rebuke plainly assumes that someone in the man, not the man, had spoken. The narrative says the devil threw him down, tore him and cried with a loud voice, then came out and left him unhurt. The people asked among themselves, "What thing is this? It is a teaching new, and with authority: he commandeth even the unclean spirits, and they obey him;" \[Footnote 8: St Mark, i. 27. Authorized Version revised by Dean Alford.\] connecting his power over unclean spirits with his teaching, as our Lord later associates power over demons with spiritual condition. It was the truth in him that made him strong against the powers of untruth.

The next recorded case is the man, dumb according to St Luke, blind and dumb according to St Matthew, who spoke and saw as soon as the devil was cast out. With unerring instinct the people concluded that one who did such deeds must be the Son of David; the devils themselves, according to St Mark, acknowledged him as the Son of God. Only the scribes and Pharisees, the would-be guides of the people, refused the witness, and, eager for any theory that would explain the facts without acknowledging a divine mission in one who would not admit *their* authority, attributed to Beelzebub himself the deliverance of mortals from evil.

Regarding the kingdom of God as a matter of externals, they were fortified against seeing in Jesus or his teaching any sign that he was Satan's enemy, and might even persuade themselves that such a cure was one of Satan's tricks to advance his kingdom with the many by a partial emancipation of the individual. But our Lord traces their false conclusion to its true cause: not incapacity, nor over-refined suspicion of Beelzebub's chicaneries, but a preference for any evil that would support them in their authority with the people, itself an evil. They shut out the Spirit of God, and forgiveness was not offered them; they must pay the uttermost farthing. Yet they were the accredited authorities in the church of that day, and whoever does not realize this does not understand the battle our Lord had to fight for the people's emancipation. It was for the people's sake, not their own, that he called the Pharisees *hypocrites*, for how should he argue with men who taught religion for their own aggrandizement?

Note 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?* He had no tinge of jealousy of rival teaching, as if truth could be two, which makes so many of his followers grasp at any waif of false argument. He knew that all good is of God, not the devil, and that all were *with* him who destroyed the devil's power.

Those who were cured, and those in whom self-worship was not blinding the judgment, had no doubt he was fighting Satan on his usurped ground: torture is what one expects of Satan, healing of God. The signs that followed witnessed the reality of the healing, and that the man was lost, morally as well as physically, to the kingdom of evil. Our Lord rests his argument on the fact that Satan had lost these men.

Next, St Luke tells of certain women who followed him, healed of evil spirits and infirmities, among them "Mary, called Magdalene, out of whom went seven devils." No wonder a woman so delivered devoted her restored self to the one who had recreated her. Hers is a curious instance of the worthlessness of what some think high-minded to regard alone, the opinion of posterity. Without a fragment of evidence, she has been almost universally regarded as impure. But what is that to her! In this squabbling nursery of the race her name may be degraded even to a subject for pictorial sentimentalities, but she herself is with the Jesus who set her free. They may call her what they please; to her it is worth a smile of holy amusement, and posterity's applause is just as worthless. To God alone we live or die. Let us fall, as thank him we must, into his hands, and let him judge us. Posterity may be wiser than we, but it is not our judge.

We come now to a narrative with more of the marvellous than all the rest. It took place on the south-eastern side of the lake; St Matthew says two demoniacs were involved, St Mark and St Luke only one. The man, possessed of many demons, was ferocious, of marvellous strength, breaking chains and fetters, untameable. It is impossible to say which phenomena were the man's own actions and which the demons'; externally all were the man's, some part, I presume, from his own poor withered will, far the greater from the demons' urging. So too with a man driven by passion: the lower nature he ought to keep in subjection, once it has the upper hand, becomes a possessing demon. He met the Lord worshipping and, as in a former instance, praying for such clemency as devils can value. Did the devils urge the man into the Lord's presence? Was it not rather the spirit of the Father in him, which a legion of the wicked could not drive from him, bringing him, ignorant, fearing, yet perhaps vaguely hoping, to the feet of the Son? He could not keep away, drawn or driven. But the words of his prayer were moulded by the devils: "I adjure thee by God that thou torment me not." The indwelling demons forced the prayer into this shape, wanting him to pray for indulgence for them. But the Lord heard the deeper prayer, the man's need and misery, the horror that made him cry out and cut himself with stones, and commanded the unclean spirit to come out. St Mark says they begged not to be sent out of the country, probably because its inhabitants' condition gave them unusual opportunities for their coveted pseudo-embodiment. St Luke says they begged not to be commanded into the deep, which to such beings is awful chiefly because there they must be alone, afar from matter and its forms; such loneliness would fill a good man with the 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." Denied their preferred abode and debarred from men, swine would serve. But even the swine, created to look unclean as a type of humanity's greed, could not endure their presence. The man in his misery had cut himself with stones; the swine in theirs rushed into 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 loss of their property; I suppose that although it worked vexation and dismay at first, it prepared the way for some later reception of the gospel. Now, seeing the former maniac at Jesus's feet, clothed and in his right mind, and hearing what had happened to the swine, they were afraid and asked the healer to leave.

But who can imagine the man's delight when that wild troop of maddening, defiling demons vanished! Scarcely had he time to know he was naked before loving people, ruled by the good Spirit, were taking off their own garments to put on him. He was a man again, among men with human faces, hearts and ways, and the supreme face of the one who had set him free bound them all into one holy family. Now he could pray of himself the true prayer of a soul that knew what it wanted. He sat like a child at his healer's feet, and when Jesus, yielding at once to those who wanted rid of him, went down to the boat, he followed, praying to be with him; for what could he desire but to be near the power that had restored his divine self, his own true existence, what God was thinking of when he made him?

But he would be nearer the Lord doing his work than 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 to those who had banished him from their coasts. Some, in preaching him, would also preach themselves, but this man was not such. More likely, the reason lay in the condition of the people. Judaea was in an unhealthy excitement about him that must not be fanned; in some places the Lord would not speak at all, and through some he would pass unknown. He had destroyed these people's swine and they had asked him to leave; if he took from them this one sign of his real presence, of the love that heals rather than the power that destroys, it would be to abandon them.

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

One more instance remains, likewise with peculiar points of difficulty, and so of interest.

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

But they could do nothing. To their disappointment, and probably chagrin, they found themselves powerless over the evil spirit. When Jesus appeared, the father begged of him the aid they 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 as if from far away and beating the air in wild, aimless defence, will be able to enter a little into this man's trouble. To have a great abyss between him and his child, across which the child's cry comes but no answering voice reaches the sufferer, is terror and misery indeed. But imagine here the intervals too: the vacant gaze, the hanging lip, the pale, flaccid face and bloodshot eyes, idiocy alternating with madness, only the animal babble of the uneducated dumb, and his falling down anywhere, now in the fire, now in the water. The divine shines out here 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 what was not human? whence the pathos of those eyes, hardly up to a dog's in intelligence, yet all-powerful over the father's heart? God was there. The misery was that the devil was there too. "Rescue the divine; send the devil to the deep" was the father's unformed prayer.

Before replying to his prayer, Jesus uttered words that could not have been addressed to the father, who was neither faithless nor perverse. To whom then? "How long shall I be with you? How long shall I suffer you?" I have thought it was the bystanders, but they had surely not reached the point of such rebuke. I have thought it was the disciples, whose pride and lack of faith in God left them unable to cast out the demon; but the form of address does not seem theirs, and *generation* hardly applies to those he had chosen out of it. I have thought, and gladly would I still think if I honestly could, that the words were meant for the devils who tormented his countrymen; but for St Mark's story I might have held to it. He gives one point neither St Matthew nor St Luke mention: when Jesus came to his disciples "he saw a great multitude about them, and the scribes questioning with them." The multitude were greatly amazed at the sight of him, perhaps because he came just when his presence was needed to answer the scribes pressing his disciples for failing to cast out the devil. These scribes, accredited men of education who arrogated to themselves mastery over the people's faith yet were opaque to the light of truth, I do think were those he addressed as "faithless and perverse generation." His request to the father that followed, "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, and will help his growing faith.

"How long has he been like this?"

"From a child. Often it has thrown him into the fire and into the water 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 Jesus's words "him that believeth" meant himself as believing in the Father, and so gifted with all power, or the man as believing in him, and so able to receive that power's effects, I am not sure. I incline to the former. Either way, the man settles the question practically and personally: what was needed in him should be in him. "I believe; help thou mine unbelief."

In the honesty of his heart, lest he say more than was true (for how could he be sure Jesus would cure his son, or measure his own faith?), he appeals to the Lord of Truth for all he ought to be, think and believe: "Help thou mine unbelief." It is the very triumph of faith. Unbelief itself, cast like any other care on him who cares for us, is the highest exercise of belief, the greatest effort in the man's power. No man can help doubt; only the faithful man can appeal to the Truth to enable him to believe what is true and refuse what is false. How this applies to our own time is easy to see; of all prayers it is the one for us.

Possibly our Lord might have talked with him further, but the people came crowding about. He rebuked the foul spirit: "Thou dumb and deaf spirit, I charge thee, come out of him, and enter no more into him." The spirit cried out and tore him badly and came out, and he lay as one dead, so that many said he was dead. But Jesus took him by the hand and lifted him up, and he arose.

"Why could we not cast him out?" his disciples asked 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 by a demon, for if he could fast and pray, the demon would be gone already.

It implies that great purity of soul is needed to master the powers of evil. I take prayer and fasting to mean a mind raised above the cares of the world and the pleasures of the senses, in close communion with the God of life, and so, by its very purity, an awe and terror to unclean spirits. The expulsion would appear to be the result of moral, and so natural, superiority, a command resting on oneness with the ultimate will of the Supreme, as an evil man is sometimes cowed in the presence of a good one. The disciples had not attained this lofty faith.

This leads me to think that the words "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. St Matthew, giving our Lord's reply more fully, says explicitly that the disciples' lack of faith made it impossible for them: "Because of your unbelief," he said, and added that faith could remove mountains.

But the words *"This kind"* suggest the case had its peculiarities. It would appear, though I am not certain of this interpretation, that some kinds of spirits, or at least some cases of possession, required more of God's presence in the healer for their cure. 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 in the boy's undeveloped condition to lay thorough hold on him, and when it yielded to the Lord's superior command it left him as dead, so close had the possession been that the natural powers, long usurped, maltreated and exhausted yet falsely sustained, could not for a time work without it. The disciples, though they already had power to cast out demons, could not cast this one out and were surprised. If we admit demons at all, there is no absurdity in admitting that some had greater force than others, whether called courage, obstinacy or grasp on the captive.

In all these stories there is much comfort for the friends of the insane and for those aware of their own partial or occasional insanity. For such sorrow as that of Charles and Mary Lamb, walking together toward the asylum when the hour had come for her to go, is there not some assuagement here? It may be answered that 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, the divine cure of many ills.

But we all need like healing. No one who does not yet love the truth with his whole being, who does not love God with all his heart, soul, strength and mind, and his neighbour as himself, is in his sound mind or can act as a rational being, except approximately; this is as true of us as if we were possessed by spirits other than our own. Every word of unkindness, God help us, every unfair, hard judgment, every trembling regard for the outward and fearless disregard of the inward life, sides with the spirit of evil against the spirit of good, our lower and accidental selves against our higher and essential, true selves. The spirit of good would set these free from all possession but his own, for that is their original life. The evil spirits can go out of us only by that prayer in which a man draws near to the Holy, and we can have power over the evil spirit in others only in proportion as by such prayer we cast it out of ourselves.

## VIII. THE RAISING OF THE DEAD

I linger on the threshold. In every age, men of every religion have hoped at least for life beyond its seeming end; without that hope, how could they have endured the life they had? There are men now who profess unbelief in a future and yet live well, saying not "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die" but, nobly, "Let us do what good we may, for there are men to come after us." Still, I could not claim to understand them, and they seem exceptions to the race. There have always been those absorbed in the present who never think of the future: some because, if there is one, they cannot be easy about their part in it; others because they are occupied with the poor present---grand if part of an endless whole, poor if alone. But here are thoughtful men who say, "There is no more. Let us make the best of this." Their idea of *best* is not contemptible, though poor to those of us for whom being is worth only the hope of becoming what, at present rates, will take ages to realize. I will venture a word or two on the matter.

Their ideal does not approach Christianity's even for *this* life. To know whether their words truly represent them in relation to the future, I would have to know their conscious and unconscious being; no wonder I am loath to judge them.

No poet of high rank, as far as I know, ever disbelieved in the future. He might fear there was none, but that very fear is faith. The greatest poet of the present day believes with ardour. I admit it is not proven to the intellect; but were it true, it would be beyond the intellect's grasp, for understanding is the offspring of life and cannot understand its own origin, and continuity of existence depends on the nature of existence, not external relations. Even after death we shall be no more able to prove a further life than we can now prove our present being; it may be easier to believe, that is all. We constantly act on grounds we cannot prove, and the want of proof should neither destroy our hope of life beyond the grave nor prevent the action its bare possibility demands.

But I say this last: those who disbelieve in a future state yet live up to their conscience, however much lower its demands than those of a conscience enlightened by "the Lord, who is that spirit," will enter the other life in a far more enviable relation to it than those who say *Lord, Lord* and do not do what he says.

It may seem strange that our Lord says so little about the life to come---though it is one life with the present, as leaf and blossom are one. Even with the Sadducees he argues from words they accepted and from the nature of God, not from a human point of view. He seems always to take it for granted and turns his scholars to its root: the life itself, oneness with God and his will. Continuance of conscious being follows from that, and without it would be an utter evil.

When he speaks of the world beyond, it is as *his Father's house* with many mansions, and he does not explain. Man's imagination, enlightened by the spirit of truth and working with experience and affection, was a far safer guide than an intellect schooled even by our Lord. At the words *my Father's house*, the memory of a poor fisherman's home on the Galilean shore, where as a child he had spent his years of divine carelessness, would tell Peter or James or John more about the many mansions than a revelation to their intellect as clear as the Apocalypse is obscure.

When he said "I have overcome the *world*," he had overcome the cause of all doubt: belief in outside appearances rather than the living truth. He left it to his followers to say, from their own experience and not merely from belief in his resurrection, "O Death, where is thy sting? O Grave, where is thy victory?" Only the inward life of truth conquers the outward death of appearance; no revelation from without could.

These miracles are the nearest we come to news of the other world---I cannot say *from* it. I except our Lord's own resurrection, which I shall treat as the miracle it was, whatever interpretation is put on the word. I say *nearest* because not one of those raised gives *us* an atom of information. Could they have told their friends something that has filtered down to us?

I turn to the cases on record. They are only three. The day after he cured the centurion's servant at Capernaum, Jesus went to Nain, and as they approached the gate---but I cannot part the story from the lovely words in which St Luke tells it: "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 case the miracle has a special fitness: this youth was a widow's only son; Jairus's daughter was his "one only daughter"; Lazarus was the brother of two orphan sisters.

I will not make the record more impressive by lingering over its details; that belongs to the reader. Friends crowd around a loss: 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, walking to meet them unknown. He lays his hand on the bier; the bearers, recognizing authority, stand. A word, and the dead sits up; a moment more, and he is in his mother's arms. O mother! were you more favoured than other mothers? Or were you made the type of the universal mother with a dead son, his raising a foretaste of the bliss of all such mothers? An exception would have ill met your need, for your motherhood could be justified only on universal grounds; it must go mourning still, even with your son restored, for its claims are universal or they *are* not. In God's dealings there are no exceptions, and Jesus wrought no new thing, only the works of the Father. What matters it that the dead come not back to us, if we go to them? It is tenfold better. Dear as home is, he who loves it best must know that what he calls home is only a shadow of home, the open porch where the winds of the world rave while the glowing fire of the true home casts lovely gleams from within.

Certainly this mother did not lose her son again; doubtless she died first, knowing at last she had only to wait. The dead have their sorrow too, but once they find it is well with them they wait by the mouth of the coming stream better than the living, who watch the going stream carry their loves to the unknown ocean. The dead sit by the river-mouths of Time; the living mourn on its higher banks.

The mother's joy no one can conceive, not even a mother who hopes one day to find a lost son. Had it all been a dream? A dream in this sense: the final, which alone is fully God's will, casts the look of a dream over all before it. When we last awake we shall know we dreamed; every honest judgment, feeling, hope and desire will show itself a dream, but one whose waking is lovelier, with nothing lost and all gained in restored completeness. How triumphantly this mother would die when her turn came!

And how calmly the restored son would go about the world's duties. \[Footnote:11 Those who can take the trouble, and are capable of understanding it, will do well to study Robert Browning\'s \"Epistle of an Arab Physician.\"\]

He sat up and began to speak.

It is vain to look into what God has hidden; surely it is no chance that we are left in the dark. "He began to speak." Why does the Evangelist give no hint of what he said? Would not all who have lost someone they love, even grandchildren weeping for a beloved gray head, have blessed God for St Luke's record of it? For my part, I thank God he was silent.

Pictures of heaven made by prophecy's attempt to utter its visions in the poor forms of earth's glory make me see that it is better to walk by faith than by a fancied sight. The region beyond must differ so much from ours, gathering all our goods into one surpassing excellence, that any description by the had-been-dead would have bred wretched misconceptions, which might please lower stages of Christian development but would obstruct its growth. It is well that St Luke is silent; or that the friends heard the returning spirit's words only as a child's babble, meaningless to them, answered only by caresses.

The daughter of Jairus is told briefly by St Matthew, more fully by St Luke, most fully by St Mark. A ruler of the synagogue at Capernaum falls at our Lord's feet, saying his little daughter, about twelve, is at the point of death, and begs him to lay his hands on her. Our Lord goes with him, followed by many people, but on the way a touch arrests him. He makes no haste to outstrip death. We can imagine the father's impatience as the Lord stood and asked who touched him: his daughter was dying; Death would not wait.

But the woman's heart and soul must not be passed by. The father must wait a little yet. The will of God cannot be outstripped.

Then word came from the ruler's house: "Your daughter is dead; why trouble the Master any further?" "Death has won the race!" the father may have said bitterly within. But Jesus never tried men's faith without feeding its strength, and with the trial gives the way of escape. At once, not leaving the word to work its despair, he said, "Do not be afraid; only believe." These plain words held more for the man's peace than all the consolations of philosophy and enforcements of morality, even than the raising of his daughter. To rouse a man's hopeful, trusting nature, to make him look up into the unknown region of mysterious possibilities, does infinitely more for him than removing the direst evil without it; to rouse the hope that there may be a God with a heart like our own does more for the humanity in us than conviction that some being made heaven and earth. Jesus is the express image of God's substance, and in him we know God's heart; nourishing faith in himself was the best thing he could do for the man.

We hear no word from the ruler. No wonder: the compressed lip and uplifted eye would say more to the Saviour's heart than words.

He seems to have stopped the crowd and let them go no farther. They could not all see, and he did not wish them to; it was not good for men to see too many miracles. They would feast their eyes and cease to wonder or think; the miracle, cut off from religion, would become common, and some would say she had only slept. A wonder is a poor thing for faith, and to those who had not prayed for it, nor could give thanks for it, nor felt in it the love of God, it would be only a wonder.

Jesus must have hated display. God's greatest work has never been done in crowds but in closets, and when it comes out it acts upon individuals. A crowd is not a divine thing: not a body, its atoms not members one of another, but a chaos over which the Spirit of God has yet to move before each goes to his place and joins the organized chorus of the human creation. The crowd must be dispersed that the church may be formed.

The crowd's relation to the miracle is reflected in what came to the friends of the house. To them, wailing greatly in the Eastern fashion, he said on entering, "Why make this ado, and weep? The damsel is not dead, but sleepeth." They laughed him to scorn. He put them all out.

What did he mean? Not that his words were literal, as we distinguish death from sleep; not coma, lethargy or suspended animation, for the narrative plainly means us to believe she was dead after the fashion we call death. That this was not to be dead after the fashion our Lord called death is a blessed and lovely fact.

Nor can it mean she was not dead as others are because he was about to wake her so soon; they did not know that, so it gave no ground for the reproach, "Why make this ado, and weep?"

Nor does it come only from his seeing death and sleep as alike, each needing God's power to awake from; he sees the differences too, and how death looks to us, and his knowledge could be no reason for reproaching our ignorance. These people professed to believe in the resurrection of the dead, and did, after some feeble fashion; they were not Sadducees, being friends of a synagogue ruler. Our Lord did not bring the news of resurrection to the world, which all peoples had believed from the first; the resurrection he taught was far deeper, from dead works to serve the living and true God. But for most Christians too, practical faith in the resurrection of the body, though in their creed, is a poor affair; in grief they think little of it and live almost wholly in the present, not saved by hope. His reproach was that they did not draw from their own creed the consolation they should: if the child was to be restored one day, she was not dead as their lamentations implied. Any of them who believed God and the prophets might have said, "Hope, and fear not---only believe." In this sense, I think, our Lord spoke.

This simple reading makes the miracle itself grander. The sequel stands to the words as if, bringing the maid out by the hand, he had said, "See---I told you she was not dead but sleeping." The words apply to all death: the Lord brings his knowledge of what we do not know to feed our feeble faith. It is as if he told us our notion of death is wrong; we would be nearer the truth calling it sleep, for it is only a passing appearance and no right cause for our misery. I think it was from this word, and the same utterance about Lazarus, that St Paul so often says sleep for death; death as we feel it seems to have vanished from his mind, and he speaks of things in continuity, never saying before death or after death. When he raised the dead, the Son did neither more nor less than the Father's work, what he is always doing; he only made it manifest a little sooner.

But those he spoke to laughed. They knew she was dead, and their unfaithfulness blinded them to his meaning; they were unfit to see the proof of what he said. Only a faithful heart can understand the proof of the truest things; only faith toward God can lay hold of his facts. There is a foregoing fitness. So he put them out, and took into the chamber only the father and mother, whose love and sorrow made them readier to be persuaded of mighty things, and the three disciples, whose faith made them fit to behold otherwise dangerous wonders. There lay the damsel, dead toward men, sleeping toward God.

He said, "Damsel, I say unto thee, arise." "Her spirit came again," she rose and walked at once, and he commanded that she be given food. In the joy of restoration they might forget that the healthier a worn, exhausted body becomes, the more it needs food, which in its commonness might well support the miracle. Raising the dead and feeding the living are equally divine and in harmony with the same law; we understand the body's power to take that food no better than the power that went out from Jesus to make her body capable of using it.

He charges the parents to be silent---perhaps for his own sake, since he did not want to be made a mere wonder, but more probably for theirs: so the holy thing might not evaporate in speech or be defiled by foolish talk and self-importance, but take root in silence and bear fruit in humility, uprightness and faith.

And now for Lazarus. One might think Jesus' desire for his friend's presence through his own coming trouble had a share in this miracle, were it not that we never find him working a miracle for himself. He knew the Father's perfect will and left all to him. Those who cannot know that will and do not care for it must fall into trouble to learn God as the Saviour from their own doings; this Jesus had not to learn. Even his resurrection was all for others: wrought in him, not for him.

He knew Lazarus was dying, stayed where he was, and let him die. A hard and therefore precious lesson lay in that death for sisters and friends---the more the love, the more precious the lesson---the lesson in every death, with the same end for all who love: resurrection. The raising of Lazarus is the type of the raising of all the dead. Of Lazarus, as of Jairus's daughter, he said "he sleepeth; but I go that I may awake him out of sleep." He slept as every dead man sleeps.

Read the story. Try to think not only what the disciples felt but what Jesus was thinking: how he, who saw the other side, regarded the death he was about to destroy.

"Lord, if you had been here," said Martha, "my brother would not have died." Did she mean to hint at what she had not faith enough to ask?

"Your brother will rise again," said the Lord. Her faith was so weak that she took little comfort from it. She knew what he meant: the general, far-off resurrection, a very little thing to her. It was true he would rise, but what was that to the present grief? A thousand years may be one day to God, but for Martha one day was a thousand years; only he who entirely believes in God finds the thousand years one day too. Jesus would help her through such faith, and so he asserts his might most strongly: "I am the resurrection and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live!" The death of not believing in God---the God revealed in Jesus---is the only death; the other is nowhere but in the fears and fancies of unbelief. "And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die": for him there is nothing that is what death looks to us.

"Do you believe this?" Martha was an honest woman. She did not fully understand, so could only assent, but she believed in him, and that much she told him plainly.

"Yes, Lord: I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who was to come into the world."

With that hope and confession arising in her, she gave the loveliest sign: she went and called her sister. But even in the profounder Mary faith reached only as far as her sister's words: "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died."

When he saw her trouble, and that of the Jews with her, he was troubled too. Why? The purest sympathy with what was about to vanish would not make him groan in spirit. We have a right, even a duty, to understand it if we can, for he showed it.

I think it was caused by an invading sense of the general misery of humanity for lack of that faith in the Father without which the Son could do or endure nothing---if the Father ceased, the Son must cease. The darkness between God and his creatures gave room for their weeping over their dead, and was filled with it; to them death must appear an unmitigated, irremediable evil. Nothing could help but the faith in infinite love he had come to bring, and how hard it was to persuade them to receive it, and how many weeping generations of loving hearts must follow! His Father was with them all, but how slowly and painfully would each learn the one precious fact!

"Where have you laid him?" he asked. "Lord, come and see," they answered, in such mournful accents of human misery that he wept with them.

They come to the grave. "Take away the stone."

Martha, who believed in the Resurrection and the Life, said, "Lord, by this time there is a stench, for he has been dead four days." In the relations of mortality to immortality, of body to soul, there are painful, even ugly things, which by common consent we mention only in dire necessity and with shame. Decay, and all that makes the most beloved of God's created *appearances* a terror so that we ask the earth to take our dead out of sight, was uppermost with Martha even before him to whom Death was a slave. Careful of his feelings, she would not have the stone removed, for her brother's sake also. But had it been as she feared, who is so tender with feeble flesh as the Son of Man, so unready to impute a shame it could not help or be fastidious over the painful working of the laws of his own world?

Entire affection hateth nicer hands.\

And at the worst, what was decay to him, who could recall the disuniting atoms under the restored law of imperial life?

"Did I not tell you that if you would believe you would see the glory of God?" I say again: the *essential* glory of God who raises all the dead, not merely an *exceptional* glory in raising this one man.

They should see not corruption but glory: no evil odour of dissolution, but glowing life springing from the place of the dead, light born from the very bosom of the darkness.

They took away the friendly stone. Then Jesus spoke, not to the dead man but to the living Father, so that the people about him would know it as the Father's work: "Father, I thank you that you have heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I said it because of the people standing by, that they may believe you sent me." So they might believe the work was God's, see the Father justify what the Son said, and receive him and all he did as the Father's manifestation, trusting a God whose will was such as this. And now---"Lazarus, come forth."

Slowly, toiling, hand and foot bound in grave clothes, he that had been dead struggled out to the light. When did corruption and glory ever meet and embrace as now! What ready hands, eager almost to helplessness, reached trembling for the feeble man returning from his strange journey, to carry him into the day---their poor day, which they thought *all* the day, forgetting the higher day he had left for their sakes: content to walk in moonlight a little longer, glad of his sisters' embraces, and---perhaps, I do not know---comforted with news of the heavenly regions!

Joy of all joys! The dead come back! Is it any wonder that this Mary spent three hundred pence on ointment for the feet of the Raiser of the Dead?

I doubt he told them anything. I do not think he could make even his own flesh and blood---womankind, quick to understand---know the things he had seen and heard and felt. Our beloved brother Tennyson says all that can be said, in his book *In Memoriam*:

| \'Where wert thou, brother, those four days?\'
| There lives no record of reply,
| Which telling what it is to die,
| Had surely added praise to praise.

| Behold a man raised up by Christ!
| The rest remaineth unrevealed;
| He told it not; or something sealed
| The lips of that Evangelist.

Why are we left in such ignorance? Without the raising of the dead and the Saviour's own rising, Christianity would not have given what it could of *hope*. Hope is not faith, but neither is faith sight, and with hope we are not miserable men. But Christianity could not interfere with the discipline needed for its own fulfilment or depose the schoolmaster that leads to Christ. One main doubt and terror driving men toward the revelation in Jesus is Death. How can a man imagine he is complete in himself and can do without a Father in heaven, when he knows neither the mystery he sprang from by birth nor the one he goes to by death? God has given us room away from himself, as Robert Browning says:---

\...\"God, whose pleasure brought\

| Man into being, stands away,
| As it were, an hand-breadth off, to give
| Room for the newly-made to live,
| And look at Him from a place apart,
| And use His gifts of brain and heart\"---

and this room, in its time-symbol, is bounded by darkness on both sides. Whence I came and whither I go are dark: how can I live in peace without the God who ordered it so? Faith is my only refuge---absolute belief in a being so far beyond me that he can do all for this *me* with utter satisfaction to this *me*, guarding its rights as jealously as his own, from which they spring, that he may make me at last one with himself, my deeper self, since his thought of me is my life. Not to know him, even if I could live happily without him, is death.

It may be said, "Why all this? Why not go on like a brave man to meet your fate, careless of what that fate may be?"

"But what if this fate *should* depend on myself? Am I to be careless then?" I answer.

"The fate is so uncertain! If it be annihilation, why quail before it? Cowardice at least is contemptible."

"Is not indifference more contemptible? Is it no grief that one who has once thought should not care to go on, and this glory perish? Is life not a good with all its pain, to be clung to? Have you never grudged the coming sleep, because you cease for the time to *be* so much? I think the man who can go to sleep without faith in God has yet to learn what being is; yet he who knows not God cannot have much to lose in losing being. And yet---did he never love man or woman or child? Is he content to go on loving them now, careless whether love is perishable? If it is, why not kill himself, since it is all a lie, a false appearance of what our best nature calls aloud for and cannot have? If I knew for certain there was no life beyond this, the noble thing would be to make the best of this, even to try after what is written in the Gospel, for that is the noblest. But not to be sure of annihilation, yet choose it and act as if it were true, seems to me the sign of a nature at strife with immortality, bound for the dust by its own choice."

The man will say, "That is yielding everything. Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die. I am of the dust, for I believe in nothing beyond."

"No," I return. "I recognize another law in myself, infinitely higher. I think it is in you too, though you are at strife with it, and it will revive in you to your blessed discontent. By that I will walk, not by yours: a law that bids me strive after what I am not but may become, striving in me against sin and down-dragging decay, one with my will, and, if true, bound at last to make all one. If I am made to live, I ought not to be willing to cease. This unwillingness, above all to cease to love my own, may well be the sign I am made to live. To pass away with no way of making reparation to those I have wronged, no chance of saying *I am sorry---what shall I do for you?*, seems to me frightful. No God to help one be good now, none who cares whether one is good; or a God who gives his creature no time to grow good, even as he is growing better, but blots him out like a rain-drop! Great God, forbid---if thou art. If thou art not, then this, like all prayers, goes echoing through the soulless vaults of a waste universe. Then death begets souls and creates love, and life is nowhere save in the imaginations of the children of the grave. Whence came those imaginations? Death, thou art not my father! Grave, thou art not my mother! I come of another kind, nor shall ye usurp dominion over me."

What better sign of immortality than the raising of the dead could God give? Yet he cannot always be raising the dead before our eyes, or the holiness of death's ends would fail; we need death, only it shall be undone once and again for a time, that we may know it is not what it seems. But even the report through the ages that the dead came back as their friends had known them, the old love unlost in the grave, the same face to smile and bless, is precious. That they remain the same in all that made them lovely is the one priceless fact, if we may hope in it as fact; that we shall behold and clasp and love them again follows of necessity. We cannot be sure of the report, yet it gives a hope even to him who, like Martha, honestly refrains from saying *I believe* of all that is reported. I think he will one day believe more than he knows how to desire, for faith in Jesus will make up for lack of sight of the miracle.

Does God, then, make death look what it is not? Why not let it appear what it is, and spare us false judgments of it?

It is our low faithlessness that makes us misjudge death, and only faith could make us judge it aright; that we misjudge it while faithless is well, for as it appears it is a type of what we are without God. But there is no falsehood in it: the dust must go back to the dust. He who believes in the body more than the soul clings to this aspect; he who believes in thought, mind, love and truth can see the other side, and rejoice over the bursting shell that lets the young oak creep from its kernel-prison. The lower is true, but the higher overcomes and absorbs it: "When that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away." When the spirit of death is seen, the body of death vanishes. Death is God's angel of birth. We fear him; the dying stretch out loving hands of hope toward him. I do not believe death is to the dying what it looks to beholders; I think it is more like what the spirit may remember of its own birth into this lower world. How will he love his mother then, and all humanity in her, and God who gave her, and God who gives her back!

The future lies dark before us, with an infinite hope in the darkness. To be at peace about it on any ground but the love of God would be an absolute loss. Better fear and hope and prayer than knowledge and peace without the prayer.

To sum up: An express revelation in words would probably be little intelligible. In Christ we have an ever-growing revelation. He is the resurrection and the life. As we know him we know our future. In our ignorance lies a force of need, compelling us toward God.

In our ignorance likewise lies the room for the development of the simple will, as well as the necessity for arousing it. Hence this ignorance is but the shell of faith.

In this, as in all his miracles, our Lord *shows* in one instance what his Father is ever doing without showing it. Even the report of this is the best news we can have from the *other* world---as we call it.

## IX. THE GOVERNMENT OF NATURE

The miracles I include in this class are the following:---

1\. Water turned into wine (already treated; St John). 2. The draught of fishes (St Luke). 3. The draught of fishes (St John). 4. The four thousand fed (St Matthew, St Mark). 5. The five thousand fed (all four Evangelists). 6. The walking on the sea (St Matthew, St Mark, St John). 7. The stilling of the storm (St Matthew, St Mark, St Luke). 8. The fish bringing the piece of money (St Matthew alone).

These miracles, like those already considered, aim at the help or deliverance of man. They differ in working indirectly, through a change in external things, and not at once on their human objects.

Besides touching what we call nature, they form a class on another ground. The miracles of disease set right what has gone wrong, restoring humanity's original condition. It is a law of nature that sin brings suffering, but even its cure helps restore that righteousness which is highest nature---for curing suffering is not the same as there being none. The miracles now in view interfere with what we may call the righteous laws of nature. Water should wet the foot and swallow whoever treads it. Bread should come last from the oven and first from the field. Fishes should be now here, now there, by laws ill understood---or by a piscine choice unknown to us. Wine should ripen in the grape and the bottle. In all these cases it is otherwise. Yet even here I think an original law is foreshown: the supremacy of righteous man. While a man cannot order his house as he would, something is wrong in him. A true man should rule winds and waters and loaves and fishes, for he comes of the Father who made the house for him. Had Jesus not been capable of these things, either he was not a perfect man or the perfect God was not in harmony with the perfect man. Man is not master in his house because he is not master in himself, not obedient to the law by which he exists. Harmony, that is law, alone is power; discord is weakness. God alone is perfect, living, self-existent law.

I will try, in a few words, to give the ground on which I find it possible to accept these miracles. I cannot lay it down for any other man. I do not wonder at most of those to whom the miracles are a stumbling-block; I do a little wonder at those who can believe in Christ and yet find them one.

How God creates, no man can tell. But as man is made in God's image, dim analogies may arise from the depth of his nature that resemble God's working. As we are God's offspring, the children of his will, we live in God's mind as thoughts move in a man's. When God thinks anything, that thing *is*; his thought of it is its life. Can it be very hard to believe that he should alter by a thought any form or appearance of things about us?

"It is inconsistent to work otherwise than by law."

True; but we know so little of this law that we cannot say what is essential in it and what is only the irregular consequence of the unnatural condition of those for whom it was made, who have not yet willed God's harmony. What looks like an infringement may be a higher law rightly dominating another. It is the law that a stone falls; yet if a man's hand beneath it is strong enough, the stone does not fall. The law has been lawfully prevented from working its full end. God might likewise stop one law by another, and such intervention, not understood by us, would be what we call a miracle. The question is whether we can believe the usual laws might be set aside by laws of higher principle and wider operation. I answer: give me good reason, and I can. If a man says my good reason is not his, we are both accountable to that being, if such there be, who lit in us the candle of judgment, and there is a final way of right to which every willing heart is led and which no one finds who does not seek it. All I want to show is a conceivable region in which a miracle might occur without violence to the order of things. Our power of belief depends greatly on our power of imagining such a region. Let us beware lest what we call faith be only the assent of a mind that has cared so little about its objects that it has never seen the difficulties; such believers are the worst antagonists of true faith---the children of the old Pharisees.

If anyone says we ought to receive nothing of which we have no experience, I answer that there is in me a necessity, a desire, before which all my experience shrivels into a mockery; its complement must lie beyond. We should accept nothing for which we cannot see the probability of some sufficient reason, but for me this reason is not limited to experience. To suppose it were would turn the hope of a life that might be an ever-burning sacrifice of thanksgiving into a poor struggle with events and chances, and doom the Psyche to perpetual imprisonment in the worm. I desire the higher. The one would make me despise my fellows and recoil from a self I cannot annihilate; the other fills me with humility, hope and love. Is preferring the one foolish, even to the meanest judgment?

A higher harmony with law may one day enable us to do things that now *appear* an interruption of law. I believe it is by virtue of his absolute harmony, his perfect righteousness, that God can create at all. If man were righteous too, he would inherit from his Father something answering in his degree to the creative power in Him, and the world he inhabits, which is but an extension of his body, would be subject to him beyond his wildest dreams of dominion---the perfect dominion of holy law, flowing to and from him through perfect obedience. I suspect our Lord in all his dominion over nature set forth only the complete man, as God means him one day to be. Why should he not know where the fishes were, or make them come at his will? If we admit the doctrine of the Incarnation---the only fundamental idea on which I can speculate in harmony with facts, which alone opens regions where contradictions are soluble---or even only that Jesus was good beyond any goodness we know, why should the whole region of inferior things not be more subject to him than to us? And if more, why not altogether? I believe some of these miracles were the natural result of a physical nature made perfect by the indwelling of a perfect soul, whose unity with the Life of all things was absolute---whose sonship was perfect.

If God visited his people in human form, he would naturally show himself Lord over their circumstances; he will not lord it over their minds, which is abhorrent to him, for they must themselves see and rejoice in acknowledging the lordship that makes them free. Some say it is higher to believe he led the revealing life without wonders; for himself, he did: he needed no miracle, seeing the root of the matter---the care of God. But he comes to reveal the Father, and showed this root in a few rare, hastened flowers to eyes that could not see to the root. For himself, perfect submission to lower law; for them, revelation of the Father by higher laws working in the upper regions bordering on ours, joined to ours by gently ascending stairs, many steps of which he could blend in one descent. He revealed the Father as *under* no law but as law itself, the cause of the laws we know and of all harmony, because himself *the* harmony. Men had to be delivered not only from fear of suffering and death but from the fear, a kind of worship, of nature, and shown that Nature is subject to the Father and the one he sent. They had to see through the little works of the Son the great works of the Father, and that it was God who did such things whenever they were done: he causes the corn to grow and gives every fish a man eats. Even terrible things are God's, and the Lord will still the storm for their faith in Him as a man tames a wild beast. For himself, his faith is enough; he sleeps on his pillow and never dreams of perishing.

On the individual miracles of this class I have not much to say. The first of them was wrought in the animal kingdom.

He was teaching on the lake shore, crowded by the people. To speak more freely he stepped into an empty boat, asked its owner Simon, washing his nets nearby, to push off a little, and taught from the boat. Then he told Simon to launch out and let down his nets. Simon had little hope, for there had been no fish all night, but he obeyed, and caught so many that the net broke; they called another boat, and both began to sink. But the marvel worked on Simon as every wonder tends to work on an honest man: it brought his sinfulness before him, and he fell at Jesus' knees in self-abasement. Whether he thought of particular sins we cannot tell, but he knew he was not what he ought to be. I do not believe he truly wished to be rid of the holy presence, except as a passing result of distress; like the centurion, he felt unworthy to have the Lord in his boat, and perhaps feared the Lord took him for a good man, a mistake his honesty could not endure:

"Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord."

The Lord accepted the spirit, therefore *not* the word, of his prayer: "Do not be afraid; from now on you will catch men."

His sense of sinfulness, far from driving the Lord from him, should draw other men to him. As soon as that cry broke from his lips he had become fit to be a fisher of men, having begun to abjure what separates man from man.

After his resurrection, St John tells us, the Lord appeared on the lake shore to disciples who had again toiled all night in vain, told them again how to cast their net, and they could not draw it for the fishes.

"It is the Lord," said St John, purer-hearted, perhaps therefore keener-eyed, than the rest. Since the same thing had happened before, Simon had become the fisher of men, but had sinned grievously against his Lord. He knew that Lord so much better now, however, that on hearing it was he, instead of crying *Depart from me*, he cast himself into the sea to go to him.

I take next the feeding of the four thousand with the seven loaves and the few little fishes, and of the five thousand with the five loaves and the two fishes.

Concerning these miracles I think I have already said almost all I have to say. If he was the Son of God, the bread might as well grow in his hands as the corn in the fields. It is only a doing in condensed form---and so more easily associated with its real source---of what God is for ever doing more widely, more slowly, and with more detail of wonder and loveliness. Whence more fittingly might food come than from the hands of such an elder brother? There will always be men who cannot believe it---happy are they who demand a good reason and yet can believe a wonder! Joined to foolish or poor words I should not believe it; joined to such words as his, I receive it easily and with rejoicing. In the feeding of the five thousand, the other evangelists relate only the deed done for the multitude's necessities, but St John records also the use our Lord made of it. It came from his essential relation to humanity, of which he was ever the sustaining food, and to which he was about to give himself, as shadowed first in speech and afterwards in the eucharist. The miracle was a type of his life as the life of the world. The bread we eat is only its outer husk; the true bread is the Lord himself, to have whom in us is eternal life: "Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood ye have no life in you." He knew the grand figure would tell the loving heart more than any definition, yet fall far short of the holy fact; and lest they take it wrongly, he says afterwards that his body should return to God and that what he said of eating it had a spiritual sense: "It is the spirit that giveth life; the flesh profiteth nothing." In words he contradicts what he said before, so they might see it meant more than words could say: not their bodies on his body, but their souls must live on his soul, by a union of which eating his flesh and drinking his blood was a poor, faint figure. In this miracle, for souls as for bodies, he did and revealed the work of the Father. Whoever has understood Christ's words in connection with it can never be content that they be less than true of his Father in heaven. A perfect Father must bestow his very being as the daily food of his creatures; and he who loves the glory of God will be jealous of any word that enhances his greatness by calling him incapable of suffering. God has taken, and will ever take, his largest share of that suffering in and through which the whole creation groans for the sonship.

Follows the story of his walking on the sea to help his disciples. After the former miracle the multitude would have taken him by force and made him king; any honour they would give him except obedience for the truth's sake, which was all he cared for. He went alone into a mountain to pray. Likely he was weary in body and worn in spirit for lack of the finer sympathy his earthly disciples could not give. He had to bear the world-pressure of surrounding humanity in all its ungodlike phases, so even he found it needful to retire to solitary places, where his senses were free and his soul could better commune with the Father. The mountain-top was his chamber, the solitude its closed door, the evening sky its open window. There he gathered strength from the Father's will for the rest of the world's redemption. How little could the men below understand such communion! Yet every one of them must go hungering in vain until the door of that communion was opened for him. They would have made him a king; he would make them poor in spirit, mighty in aspiration, all kings and priests unto God.

But in the midst of his prayer he saw his disciples thwarted by a wind stronger than all their rowing; he came down the hill and walked out on the water to help them.

If ignorant yet devout speculation may be borne with, I venture to say that whatever change was needed before the body of the Son of Man could, like the Spirit of old, move upon the face of the waters passed not upon the water but, by his own will, upon his own body. I shall say more in a later chapter; now I add only that we know next to nothing of the relation between a right soul and a healthy body. By an absolutely healthy body I mean not merely perfect animal functions but one wholly under the indwelling spirit and responsive at once to all the laws of its supremacy. As we are, the diseased body tyrannizes over the almost helpless mind; the healthy body would be absolutely obedient.

What power over his own dwelling a Saviour might have, coming fresh from the closest speech with him who made that body for holy subjection, who can tell! If I hear of any reasonable wonder resulting, I shall not find it hard to believe, and shall wait until I, made pure, inhabit an obedient house, to understand the plain thing that is now a mystery. Meanwhile I honour the laws honest men have found, as do those who think me foolish to speculate here; but where does the constructive faculty belong if not to the unknown the heart yearns to know? That cannot be the unknowable. It is endless comfort to think of something that *might* be true; and whatever seems true to a human heart I expect to find true in its essence, in greater forms and without the degrading accidents that so often accompany it in the brain of the purest thinker. There is a wide *may be* around us, and every true speculation widens the probability of changing the may *be* into the *is*. The laws known and the laws to be known are all lights from the Father of lights, and whoever reverently searches for them will not long mistake a flash in his own brain for the candle of the Lord. If he mistakes, he is little the worse so long as he is humble; if he is right, he may gain some honour from those who, verifying an idea by experiment, do not forget that without foregone speculation the idea would never have appeared to guide them.

Nor would it be impossible to imagine how St Peter might come within the sphere of the holy influence and for a moment walk on the water too. Faith will yet prove as mighty a power as certain words of the Lord represent it---words now a stumbling-block even to devout Christians, who accept them only by explanations unworthy of his utterance. By *a power* I mean not power in itself but the conduit connecting the helpless with the helpful, through which the power of the creating God may flow to the created necessity.

When the Lord got into the boat the wind ceased, "and immediately," says St John, "the ship was at the land whither they went." Whether the wind ceased by ordinary laws or by some higher law first setting them in operation, no one who has followed my remarks will wonder that I do not care to inquire: they are all of one. Nor will they wonder if I think we may have here one instance of space itself being subject to the obedient God, and that the wearied disciples might well find themselves at their haven as soon as they received him into the boat. Either God is all in all, or he is nothing. Either Jesus is the Son of the Father, or he did no miracle. Either the miracles are fact, or I lose---not my faith in this man---but certain outward signs of truths which these signs have helped me to see.

The miracle of the stilling of the storm follows naturally. Why should not he who taught that God numbers the very hairs of our heads do what his Father constantly does---still storms, bring peace out of uproar? If the storm was stilled, it was by natural causes, such as could still a storm; that anything should be done by unnatural causes, not of the nature of the things concerned, is absurd. The sole question is whether Nature works alone, as some speculators think, or whether there is a soul in her, an intent---whether these things result from thought, or spring from a dead heart, unconscious yet producing conscious beings who, born of unthinking matter, invent the notion of an all-lovely, self-denying being whose thought gives form to matter, life to nature and thought to man, and who bears for their sakes the troubles their waywardness has brought, that they may see the Holy face to face and think his thoughts and will his wisdom!

A man feels it a mockery that things should go by a law that does not recognize the loftiest in him; there is little more satisfaction in it than if all were the chance result of conflicting forces. Wherever individual necessity, choice and prayer come in, there must be the present God, ready to fit circumstances to the varying need of the thinking, willing beings he has created. That God might make a world run on in physical perfection for ever I could easily believe; but where is the gain, or the fitness, if he would train thinking beings to his own freedom? For these he must be ever present, with room to order things for their growth and discipline. The present living idea informing the cosmos is nobler than all forsaken perfection, as a living man is nobler than an automaton.

If one says, "The laws of God ought to admit of no change," I answer: the same working of unalterable laws might under new circumstances *look* a breach of them. That God will never alter his laws, which are the outcome of his truth and fact, I fully uphold; but that he might not act in ways we cannot recognize as consistent with them, I have yet to see reason to believe. Why should his perfect will be limited by our understanding of it? That he should require us to believe of him what we think wrong, I do not believe; that he should present to our vision what is inconsistent with our half-digested, ever-changing theories, I can well believe---if only to keep us from petrifying an imperfect notion and calling it an *Idea*. What I would believe is that a present God directs those laws, as a man works out his will amid and by means of them. Shall God create what shall fetter and enslave himself? His laws, as we know them, are the active mode in which he embodies certain truths, and that mode is the outcome of his own nature; so they must be capable of falling in with, if not of effecting, any expression of his will.

One miracle of this class remains, to some minds more difficult than all the rest. They say the story of the fish with a piece of money in its mouth is more like an eastern tale than a sober narrative of the quiet-toned gospel. I acknowledge a likeness: why might there not be some likeness between what God does and what man invents? But there is one difference: no colour in the style. No great roc, no valley of diamonds, no earthly grandeur is hinted at in the poor bare tale. Peter dealt with fishes every day; an ordinary fish taken with the hook was here the servant of the Lord---and why should the poor fish not have its share in the Master's service, showing for itself and its kind that they, with the waters they dwell in and the wind that lifts the waves, were utterly his? What the scaly minister brought was no ring or rich jewel but a simple piece of money, just enough, I presume, to meet the demand of those whom, though they had no legal claim, our Lord would not offend by refusing; for he never cared to stand on his rights or treat as a principle what could be waived without loss of righteousness. I take for granted there was no other way at hand for those poor men to supply the sum.

## X. MIRACLES OF DESTRUCTION

If our Lord's miracles epitomize his Father's works, there must be room in them for what we call destruction.

In the grand process of existence, destruction is one phase of creation: the inferior must give way to the superior, as the husk must decay that the seed may germinate. As all creation moves toward the sonship, death does its sacred work in the lower regions, that life may rise triumphant toward the Father's will.

So I see no good reason why the almost solitary act of destruction in the story should seem unlike the Master. True, he did not come to show such power, but why should it not have its place when occasion appeared? Why might he not do once, consistently with his helping and healing, what his Father does every day? I mean the withering of the fig-tree. In summer's freshest greenery you may see the wan branches of a lightning-struck tree. The Maker's destruction is like a poet drawing his pen through a word that mars his meaning: the indrawn sigh of the creating Breath.

Our Lord had already spoken the parable of the fruitless fig-tree; this miracle was the acted parable. All shapes of argument must be used to rouse the slumbering will of men. Even obedience from the lowest fear is a first step toward a condition infinitely higher than that of the most perfect nature created incapable of sin.

The right reading of the circumstances is necessary to the miracle's truth. I give the following, not knowing to whom I owe it.

The time for gathering figs was near but had not come, so a fruitful tree might have a few ripe figs and more that were eatable. The Lord, hungry on the road from Bethany to Jerusalem, saw a tree with all the promise of perfect foliage and went to it "if haply he might find anything thereon." There were leaves only, no fruit in any stage; the tree was a pretence. Here, in their path, was a chance to enforce by a visible sign one of the most important truths he had tried to teach. He condemned the tree to become in appearance what it was in fact, a useless thing; next morning it had withered from the roots. He did not press the lesson in words, but left it to work when the fate of fruitless Jerusalem should also have become fact.

For the moment the wonder of it filled them too much for them to read its lesson. Perhaps that is why our Lord makes little of the marvel and much of the power of faith: he assures them their prayers will be answered, but adds, as St Mark tells it, that forgiving others is the one condition of their own acceptance---a fitting lesson to hang on that withered tree.

After all, the thing destroyed was only a tree. Toward humanity there is only one distant approach to anything similar---and how distant! The pseudo-evangels have several tales of vengeance; these books have none. St John alone records it: when the "band of men and officers from the chief priests and Pharisees" came to take him, and "Jesus went forth and said unto them, Whom seek ye?", and he answered theirs with "I am he," "they went backward and fell to the ground."

I note a few facts about this incident, with the questions they suggest. The synoptic Gospels record the Judas-kiss; St John does not. St John alone records the going backward and falling to the ground, prefacing it with "And Judas also, which betrayed him, stood with them."

Did not the presence of Judas, perhaps his kiss, have something to do with the men's discomfiture? If so, as seems to me probable and, on mystical and artistic grounds, fitting, why does St John alone omit the kiss and alone record the recoil? I think because those who saw, saw each a part and record only what they saw or had testimony of. Had St John seen the kiss, he who so well saw its mystical fitness could hardly have omitted it, since he makes so much of Judas's presence. Had he been an inventor he would have invented just this; yet his record is barest at the one incident that would best have helped his idea.

But why this repellent, half-destructive exercise of force, reminding us of Milton's words---

| Yet half his strength he put not forth,
| But checked His thunder in mid volley?

It may have had to do with the repentance of Judas that followed, or with the future history of the Jewish men of that band. But I suspect its more immediate aim was the safety of his disciples. When the men had risen and advanced again, he repeated the question, "Whom seek ye?" "Jesus of Nazareth," they replied. "I am he," said the Lord, but added, now that they had felt his power, "If therefore ye seek me, let these go their way." They did not even try to lay hands on the disciples. He had astonished and terrified his captors to gain his sole request: that his friends go unhurt. There was work for them in the world, and they were not yet able to endure for his sake. At all events this gentlest form of destruction was for neither vengeance nor self-preservation; I suspect it was another shape of the virtue that went forth to heal. A few men fell to the ground that his disciples might have time to grow apostles and redeem the world with the news of him and his Father. For humanity the fig-tree withered; for the world's resurrection his captors fell: small hurt and mighty healing.

Daring to read the Father's work from the Son's, I would humbly believe that all destruction is for creation, and that even here only death is absolutely destroyed: that which blocks the outgoing of the Father's will, which completes its creation only when men are made holy.

God does destroy, but not life. Its outer forms yield that it may grow and pass into higher embodiments where it can grow more. Only what has the law of death in itself will be destroyed: sin. Sin is death, and death must be swallowed up of hell. Life, that is God, is the heart of things, and destruction must be destroyed. For this victory endless *forms* of life must yield; even the *form* of the Son of God's own life must yield upon the cross, that the life might rise a life-giving spirit and his words be fulfilled: "If I depart not, the Comforter will not come unto you." Spirit must rise victorious over form, and the form must die lest it harden to stone around the growing life. No form can be great enough to contain the truth that is its soul, for all truth is infinite, being a thought of God. Only through the flowing away of form, which is death, and the gathering of new form behind, which is birth or embodiment, is any true revelation possible. Therefore destruction itself is holy. It is as if the Eternal said, "I will show myself; but think not to hold me in any form in which I come. The form is not I." The still small voice says the Lord is not in the earthquake, wind or fire but in the lowly heart that finds him everywhere. The material can cope with the eternal only by everlasting evanescence.

## XI. THE RESURRECTION

It matters little whether the Lord's resurrection was wrought by him or in him by the Father, since he says his works were given him by the Father and Jesus apart from the Father is inconceivable. It is natural that he who could call from the grave a body dead four days should have power to take again the body he himself laid down. I hold distinctly that he took again the same body in which he had walked the earth, suffered and died---not merely the same form---and appeared in it to his disciples to give them the final consolation of a visible presence before departing for a higher presence in the spirit of truth, no longer limited even by the highest forms of truth.

It is not surprising that records of such a marvel, resting on the testimony of men and women first bewildered with grief and then almost distracted by a gladness too great for the calm perfect observation needs, do not agree in every detail. All knew the Lord had indeed risen; what matter whether some saw one angel in the tomb or two? The first to come saw one angel outside and another inside; another later saw two inside; one record naturally says of them all that they saw two. I do not care to reconcile the reports, whose trifling disagreement is to me valuable for its truth to human nature, but suggest this arrangement to anyone anxious to understand them. Finding the tomb empty, Mary Magdalene, not seeing or heeding the angel, left her companions and ran to the chief of the disciples to share the agony of this final loss, and returned with Peter and John to the grave, from which her companions, having seen and spoken with the angels outside and inside, had gone to find their friends. Peter and John, seeing only the folded garments of desertion, went home; but Mary lingered weeping by the place that was not now even the grave of the beloved, so utterly had he and the signs of him vanished. As she wept she stooped into the sepulchre, and there sat the angels in holy contemplation, one at the head and one at the feet where Jesus had lain; Peter and John had not seen them; to Mary they were manifest.

"Woman, why are you weeping?" said the angels. "Because they have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him," answered Mary, and turning away, tear-blinded, she saw, as she thought, the gardener.

"Woman, why are you weeping?" repeats the gardener. "Whom do you seek?"

Hopelessness had dulled every sense: not even a start at the sound of his voice!

"Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him."

"Mary!" "Master!"

"Do not touch me; for I have not yet ascended to my Father; but go to my brothers and say to them, I ascend to my Father and your Father, and to my God and your God."

She was first to see him; arrested by her misery, he seems to have delayed his ascent and appeared sooner than intended. She was about to grasp him with the eager hands of reverent love: why did he refuse the touch?

We know so little of the new conditions of his bodily nature that all is conjecture; there may even have been physical reasons she should not yet touch him, but my impression is that, the hard work done and the form in which he had wrought and suffered resumed, he must have the Father's embrace first, as after a long absence a man seeks first the arms of his dearest friend. Though he was never absent from God in heart, the body, with all its partition-walls, is God's too, the work of his hands, and some way there must be for even *it* to come into willed relation with him. So I think Jesus, his work done, would desire first of all to return in the body to him who *sent* him by giving him a body, and so, though he might delay at the sound of her grief, would rather *she* not touch him first. If anyone thinks this too human a notion of the Saviour, I suspect a great part of our irreligion springs from disbelief in the humanity of God, in which lie endless undiscovered treasures of grace. After he had once ascended to the Father, he appeared to his disciples again and again, their hands handled the word of life, and he ate in their presence. He had been to his Father and returned so that they might know him lifted above the grave, an elder brother free of humanity's oppressions but full of its tenderness, captain of their salvation; death could no longer touch his body, and from that vantage-ground he could reach down salvation to each and all.

Note that this glorified body appeared and disappeared at its owner's will, and it seems other matter yielded to it and space itself was in some degree subject to it. If a man says he cannot believe it, I can; if he asks how it *could* be, I can only point to the region where it may be possible: the borderland where thought and matter meet, where all marvels and miracles are generated. The wisdom of this world can believe matter generates mind; what seems to me the wisdom from above can believe mind generates matter, matter being only manifest mind. Then matter may well be subject to mind, and much more, if Jesus is the Son of God, must his own body be subject to his will. I doubt whether any man's condition is perfect before the body he inhabits is wholly obedient to his will---before, through his absolute obedience to the Father, the realm of his own rule is perfectly put under him.

It may be objected that this is credible of a glorified body, but hard to believe of the body that suffered and died on the cross becoming thus plastic to the indwelling spirit. But I do not see why what was born of the Father's spirit should not be so interpenetrated and possessed by the Son's spirit that, losing none of its former faculties, it gains many added gifts of obedience, among them those indicated in this narrative.

Why was this miracle needful? Perhaps, for one thing, that men should not limit him, or themselves in him, to the known forms of humanity; and for another, that they might have the best hope of a life beyond the grave, their instinctive desires thus infinitely developed and assured. I suspect, however, that it followed simply as the natural consequence of all that preceded.

If Christ is risen, the grave of humanity itself is empty. We have risen with him, and death has no dominion over us. Of every dead man and woman it may be said: not here, but risen and gone before us. Ever since the Lord lay down in the tomb and it proved only a couch from which he rose refreshed, we may say of every brother: he is not dead but sleeps, and shall arise from his sleep.

The way to the tomb may be hard, as it was for him, but onlookers see the hardness and not the help, the suffering and not the sustaining. That is known only to the dying and God; they can tell us little of it, and nothing of the glad safety beyond.

I have scarcely to do here with theories of the conditions of our resurrection; it is no concern of mine whether the matter of our bodies shall be raised from the earth. It is enough that we shall have forms capable of revealing ourselves and bringing us into contact with God's other works---forms in which the idea, so blurred and broken in these, will be carried out: so like that friends will not doubt the identity for a moment, so unlike that tears of recognition will be all for joy in the gain and gratitude for the loss. Not to believe in mutual recognition beyond seems to me a far more reprehensible unbelief than unbelief in the resurrection itself. I can understand a man's not believing in any life after death; I confess that though probabilities are for it, *appearances* are against it. But that anyone should believe in the resurrection of the very same body of Jesus, who took pains that his friends recognize him in it, as the one ground of hope for their own rising, and yet not believe that friend will embrace friend in the mansions prepared for them, astounds me. Such a shadowy resumption of life is unworthy of the name of resurrection; the grave would then be victorious not only over the body and all that made life precious but over the soul, blind and deaf to what, through loveliest memories, would have added a new song to the Father's praises and a new glow to a love that needed only that to be perfect. I am ashamed even to combat such an essential falsehood; only because a weak soul here and there is paralysed by it, and sympathy must not be swallowed up even by righteous disdain, is more than contemptuous denial needed.

What seemed to the disciples the final acme of disappointment and grief, the vanishing of his body, was really the first sign of the dawn of an illimitable joy. He was not there because he had risen.

## XII. THE TRANSFIGURATION

I close this series with thoughts on the Transfiguration, believing the story a window through which we glimpse, for a moment, the region whence all miracles come---a glimpse vague and dark for all its light, for God himself is "by abundant clarity invisible." Here a marvellous change passes upon the very form from which the miracles flowed, as if the pent-up grace wrought mightily on the earthen vessel that held it.

Our Lord often sought a hill at evening, often having no other chamber for undisturbed communion with his Father. This, I think, was such an occasion. He took with him the favoured three, whom he also took apart in Gethsemane, to withdraw even from them a little that he might be alone with the Father yet know his brothers were near---the ocean of human need drawn upward in an apex of perfect prayer toward the Father's throne.

I think this, his one material show except the entry into Jerusalem on the ass, took place at night. Then the carpenter's son was crowned, not on the head only with a crown from without, but in his whole person with a crown of light born in him. St Luke says he went up to pray while Peter and his companions were "*heavy with sleep*," and places "on the next day, when they were come down from the mountain" the miracle that St Matthew and St Mark put *immediately* on the descent; so the night was likely spent on the mountain.

St Luke says his countenance was altered and his raiment white and glistering; St Matthew, that his face shone like the sun and his raiment was white as the light; St Mark, that his raiment shone, whiter than any fuller on earth could make it. St Luke alone says the change came while he prayed: he became outwardly glorious from inward communion with his Father. The more immediate subject of his prayer, I think, is indicated by St Luke's note that his heavenly visitors spoke "of his decease which he should accomplish at Jerusalem." Add that his talk with the disciples coming down pointed the same way, and that report of the vision was to be withheld until he had risen from the dead, and it appears likely that the master, oppressed by what now drew near, sought his Father's comfort and sympathy, praying in prospect of his decease. In throwing off the weight of this awful shadow by prayer he did not merely grow calm and resigned; his faith broke forth so triumphant over fear that it shone from him in physical light. Every cloud of sorrow or dread touched by such illumination is itself changed to glory. It was a foretaste of his resurrection, a putting on of his glorified body for a moment while he was yet in the old body and the awful shadow between. The apostle may refer to something like this in other men when he says, "We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed." That coming death was to be only the overshadowing cloud from which the glory should break anew and for ever. The transfiguration was the divine defiance of the coming darkness.

Let us speculate on the relation of the spiritual and physical manifested here. Moses' face likewise shone marvellously, and what wonder? What should make a man's face shine if not the presence of the Holy, communion with the Father of his spirit? In the transfiguration I see the perfect outcome of those natural results of which Moses showed the first signs: the full daylight of which his shining face was the dawn. So, like the other miracles, I regard it as a rare manifestation of the perfect working of nature. Who does not know that in moments of lofty emotion, when self is forgotten, the eyes shine and the face is so transfigured that we doubt whether it is not in a degree luminous? If so, what glory must await every lowliest believer, since the communion of our elder brother with his Father and ours, for whose perfecting in us he came, made not only his face shine but even his dull garments white as snow, through the light issuing from his whole person! May I not add that the shining garments are a type of the glorification of everything human when brought into its true relations by and with the present God?

I turn to the resurrection, so closely associated with all this. I think the virtue of divine presence that broke in light from Jesus' body is the same by which his risen body, half molten in power, was made plastic to the indwelling spirit. What if this light were the healing agent of men's bodies, as the deeper light from which it sprang is the healing agent of themselves? Are not the most powerful rays of light invisible to our vision?

Some will object that this is too material a view. I answer that the question is whether I use the material to interpret the spiritual, as I think I do, or to account for it, as I do not. In my theory the spiritual *both* explains and accounts for the material.

If our notions of *material light* make it the only fitting image of the invisible Truth, the being of God, there must be some closest tie between them---not connection only but unity. Otherwise we would need a god of the Natural and another of the Supernatural, brothers supplementing each other. The essential truth of God must create its own visual image in the sun that lights the world; and when man, God's image, is filled with the presence of the eternal, he too, his divine nature for the moment ripened to glory, radiates light from his person. Where, when or how inner spiritual light passes into or generates outward physical light, who can tell? This borderland, this touching of mind and matter, is the region of miracles---of material creation, I might have said, which is *the* great, the *only* miracle. But if matter is the outcome of spirit, and body and soul are one man, then if the soul is radiant with truth, what can the body do but shine?

I conjecture, then, that truth, which is light in the soul, might not only cast out disease, which is darkness in the body, but change that body, without death, into the likeness of Jesus' body. Except by violence I do not think his body could have died. No physiologist can tell why man should die. I think a perfect soul could keep its body alive; an imperfect one cannot fill it with light in every part. The transfiguration was the visible outbreak of a life so strong as to be life-giving and life-restoring, able to melt the flesh away and ever renew it. Such a body might well walk on the stormiest waters.

But I find myself in regions where I dare tread no further for the darkness of ignorance. I see many glimmers, but too formless and uncertain.

We are not told when or how the light died away. My own fancy is that it went on shining, paling, all night on the lonely mount, and vanished in the dawn. When he came down, the virtue in him went forth no more as light to the eyes but as healing to the epileptic boy's poor torn frame. So he vanished at last from his friends' eyes, only to draw nearer, with a more intense and healing presence, to their hearts and minds.

Even so come, Lord Jesus.