these signs of mourning, these evidences that all was finished, might easily have overturned altogether. They are a saying over again, “ Be not afraid, only believe." He, the Lord of life, takes away that word of fear, "She is dead," and puts in its room that milder word which gives promise of an awakening, "She sleepeth." And then in regard of the multitude, according to that holy humility which makes him ever withdraw his miracles as much as possible from observation, he will by this word of a double signification cast a veil over that which he is about to accomplish.

And now, having thus spoken, he expelled from the house the crowd of turbulent mourners, and this for two reasons; and first, their presence was evidently inappropriate and superfluous there; they were mourners for the dead, and she was not dead; or, at least, her death was so soon to give place to returning life, that it did not deserve the name; it was but as a sleep and an awakening, though they, indeed, who heard this assertion of the Lord, so little understood it, that they met it with laughter and with scorn, "knowing that she was dead," that they were mourners for the dead. This would have been reason enough for silencing and putting out those mourners. But in addition to this, the boisterous and turbulent grief of some, the hired lamentations, it may be, of others,* gave no promise of the true tone and temper, which became the witnesses of so holy and awful a mystery, a mystery from which even apostles themselves were excluded-not to speak of the profane and scornful spirit with which they had received the Lord's assurance, that the child should presently awake. The scorners were not to witness the holy act; -the pearls were for others than for them.†

The house was now solitary and still. Two souls, believing and hoping, stand like funeral tapers beside the couch of the dead maiden -the father and the mother. His Church the Lord sees represented in his three most trusted apostles. And now the solemn awakening finds place. He took the child, for such she was, being but twelve years of age, (Mark v. 42,) "by the hand, and called, saying, Maid, arise." Saint Mark gives us the very words which the Lord spake in the very language wherein he uttered them, "Talitha Cumi," no doubt as having something especially solemn in them, as he does the "Ephphatha" on another occasion, (vii. 34.) And at that word, and at the touch of that hand, "her spirit came again, and she arose straightway (Luke viii. 55)

*The presence of the hired mourners at a funeral, in general women, (Opnvwdoí, præficæ, cornicines, tubicines,) was a Greek and Roman, as well as a Jewish, custom, (See BECKER'S Charikles, v. 2, p. 180.)

We may compare 2 Kin. iv. 33, where every one is in like manner excluded. The words of St. Luke, kaì éñéorpeye τò πvet̃μa avts, are exactly the same as those 1 Kin. xvii. 22, LXX.

and walked." (Mark v. 42.) And then at once to strengthen that life which was come back to her, and to prove that she was indeed no ghost, but had returned to the realities of a mortal existence, (Luke xxiv. 41; John xxi. 5; Acts x. 41,) "he commanded to give her meat," which precaution was the more necessary, as the parents in that ecstatic moment night easily have forgotten it.

These miracles of raising from the dead, whereof we have been now considering the first, have always been regarded as the mightiest outcom. ings of the power of Christ; and with justice. They are those, also, at which unbelief is readiest to stumble, standing as they do in a yet more striking contrast than any of the other, to all that experience has known. The line between health and sickness is not definitely fixed; the two conditions melt one into the other, and the transition from this to that is frequent. In like manner storms alternate with calms; the fiercest tempest allays itself at last, and Christ's word did but anticipate and effect in a moment, what the very course of nature must have effected in the end. Even the transmutation from water to wine, and the multiplication of the bread, are not without their analogies, however remote; and thus too is it with most of the other miracles. But between being and the negation of being the opposition is not relative but absolute: between death and life a gulf lies, which nothing that nature lends, helps us even in imagination to bridge over. These considerations sufficiently explain how it should come to pass that these raisings from the dead are signs more spoken against than any other among the mighty works which the Lord accomplished.

The present will be an apt moment for saying something concerning them and the relations of difficulty in which they stand, if not to the other miracles, yet to one another. For they are not exactly the same miracle repeated three times over, but may be contemplated as in an ever ascending scale of difficulty, each a greater outcoming of the power of Christ than the preceding. For as the body of one freshly dead, from which life is but just departed, is very different from a mummy or a skeleton, so is it, though not in so great a degree, different from a corpse, whence for some days the breath of life has fled. There is, so to speak, a fresh trodden way between the body, and the soul which just has forsaken and, according to that Jewish legend which may rest on a very deep truth, lingers for a while and hovers near the tabernacle where it has dwelt so long, and to which it knows itself bound by liuks, which even now have not been divided for ever. Even science itself has arrived at the conjecture, that the last echoes of life ring in the body much longer than is commonly supposed; that for a while it is full of

the reminiscences of life. Out of this we may explain how it so fre quently comes to pass, that all which marked the death-struggle passes presently away, and the true image of the departed, the image it may be of years long before, reappears in perfect calmness and in almost ideal beauty. Which things being so, we shall at once recognize in the quickening of him that had been four days dead, a yet mightier wonder than in the raising of the young man who was borne out to his burial; since that burial, according to Jewish custom, would have followed death by an interval, at most, of a single day; and again in that miracle a mightier outcoming of Christ's power than in the present, wherein life's flame, like some newly-extinguished taper, was still more easily reenkindled again, being brought in contact with him in whom was the fountain-flame of all life. Mightier also than any of these wonders, will be the wonder of that hour, when all the dead of old, that have lain, some of them for so many thousand years, in the dust of death shall be summoned from and shall leave their graves at the same quickening voice.

VII.

THE WOMAN WITH AN ISSUE OF BLOOD

MATT. ix. 20-22; MARK v. 25-34; LUKE viii. 48-48.

In all three accounts which we have of this miracle, it is intertwined with that other of the raising of Jairus's daughter. As the Prince of life was on his road to the accomplishing that other, he accomplished this, as by the way. It is to St. Mark and Luke that we owe the more detailed accounts, which bring out its distinctive features. St. Matthew relates it more briefly: so that, if we had not the parallel narrations, we should be in danger of missing much of the instruction which is here contained for us.

As the crowd followed Jesus, curious to witness what the issue would be, and whether he would indeed raise the dead or dying daughter of Jairus, which by his consenting to accompany him home he seemed to have undertaken to do,-as this crowd pressed upon him, there came one, who, not out of curiosity, nor at all as that unmannered multitude, touched him from behind. This was a woman* that had labored long,

*A sermon, wrongly attributed to St. Ambrose, makes this woman to have been Martha, the sister of Lazarus. Another legend, that of the gospel of Nicodemus, (see THILO's Cod. Apocryph., v. 1, p. 562,) makes her to have been Veronica. There is a strange story, full of inexplicable difficulties, told by Eusebius, (Hist. Eccl., 1. 7, c. 18,) of a statue, or rather two statues, in brass, one of Christ, another of this woman kneeling to him, which existed in his time at Cæsarea Paneas, having been raised by her in thankful commemoration of her healing. See the 10th excursus in the Annotations (Oxford, 1842) to Dr. Burton's Eusebius. The belief that these statues did refer to this event was so widely spread as to cause Julian, in his hatred against all memorials of Christianity, or according to others, Maximinus, to destroy it. There can be no doubt that a group, capable of being made to signify this event, was there, for Eusebius speaks as having himself seen it, but the correctness of the application is far more questionable. Justin Martyr's mistaking of a statue erected at Rome to a Sabine deity, (Semoni Sanco,) for one erected in honor of Simon Magus, shows how

for no less than twelve years, under a disease from which she found no healing from the physicians, but rather she had suffered many aggravations of her disease, from the painfulness of their attempted remedies,* the costliness of which, with the expenses that had attended her long sickness, had brought her to poverty. "All that she had" had been ineffectually wasted in seeking for restoration, and withal she "was nothing bettered, but rather grew worse." The faith that brought her to touch the hem of the Lord's garment was a most real faith, (see ver. 22, "Thy faith hath saved thee,") yet was it not altogether unmingled with error in regard to the manner in which the healing power of Christ presented itself to her mind as working. It would appear as though she did not conceive of the Lord as healing by the power of his holy will, but rather imagined a certain magical influence and virtue diffused through his person and round about him, with which if she could put herself in relation, she would obtain that which she desired: " If I may touch but his clothes, I shall be whole." And it is probable that she touched the hem of his garment, not merely as the extremest part, and therefore that which she, timidly drawing near, could most easily reach, but attributing to it a peculiar virtue. For this hem of blue fringe on the borders of the garment was put there by divine command, and was to remind the Jews that they were God's people. (Num. xv. 37-40; Deut. xxii. 12.) It had thus acquired so peculiar a significance, that those who wished to be esteemed eminently religious were wont to make broad or to "enlarge the borders of their garments." (Matt. xxiii. 5.) But her faith, though thus imperfect in its form, and though it did not bear her like a triumphant flood-tide, over the peculiar difficulties which beset her, a woman coming to make known what manner of need was hers, was yet most true in its essence. That faith, therefore, was not disappointed, but was the channel to her of the blessing which she sought; no sooner had she touched the hem of his robe than "she felt in her body that she was healed of that plague."

little critical the early Christians sometimes were in matters of this kind. (See DEYLING'S Obss. Sac., v. 1, p. 279.)

* See LIGHTFOOT's Hor. Heb., (in Marc. v. 26,) for an extraordinary list of those in use for this disorder.

In the apocryphal report of Pilate to Tiberius, he, alluding to this miracle, forcibly paints the extreme emaciation of this woman from her complaint, ¿ç πãσaν, τὴν τῶν ὀστεών ἁρμονίαν φαίνεσθαι, καὶ ὑέλου δίκην διαυγάζειν. (TuLo's Cod. Apo cryphus, v. 1, p. 808.)

There was something in her, as Grotius well remarks, of the notion of the philosophers, Deum agere omnia φύσει οὐ βουλήσει.

§ ̓Απὸ τῆς μάστιγος, scil. Θεοῦ, since disease must ever be regarded as the scourge