words neither of Christ nor of one of his inspired servants, but only of a man not wholly enlightened yet, in whose mind truth and error were yet mingled together. That the words have not in themselves any authority is most true; yet they may well be allowed to stand, and in the intention in which the speaker used them. For the term “sinner” has a two-fold meaning in Scripture: sometimes it is applied to all men as they are fallen children of Adam, and each one with the burden of his own sin upon him. If, taking the word in this sense, it were said, “ God heareth not sinners,” this were indeed to say, God heareth not any man; or if by “sinners” were understood those who have been in time past more than ordinary transgressors, and it were said that they will not now be heard, though they truly turn, this were indeed an impeaching of the grace of God. But the Scripture knows another and emphatic use of the term "sinners,"-men in their sins, and not desiring to be delivered out of them; and in this sense, which is the sense of the speaker here, as of the better among the Pharisees, who a little earlier in the day had said, “How can a man that is a sinner do such miracles?” (ver. 16, cf. x. 21,) it is most true that God does not hear sinners; their prayer is an abomination, and even if they ask, they obtain not their petitions.* (Isai. i. 15; lix. 1, 2; Prov. i. 28; xv. 8; xxviii. 9; Ps. 1. 16; lxvi. 18; cix. 7; Job xxvii. 9; xxxv. 13; Jer. xiv. 12; Mic. iii. 4.)

But this was what least of all they could endure, that the whole relations between themselves and this man should thus be reversed,—that he should thus be their teacher; and while it was now plain that no

Quando lavit faciem cordis sui cocus iste? Quando eum Dominus foras missum à Judæis, intromisit ad se. Cf. Serm. 135, c. 5. Elsewhere (Con. Lit. Parmen., 1. 2, c. 8) he shows that his main desire is thus to rescue the passage from Donatist abuses. These last, true to their plan of making the sacraments and other blessings of the Church to rest on the subjective sanctity of those through whose hands they passed, and not on the sure promise of him from whose hands they came, quoted this passage in proof: "God heareth not sinners;” how then can they minister blessings to others? It would be enough to answer that it is not them whom God hears, but the Church which speaks through them. And because of this abusive application of the words, it needed not to make exception against the statement itself, as though it smacked of errors from which the man was not yet wholly delivered. But Calvin better; Falluntur qui cœcum ex vulgi opinione sic loquutum esse putant. Nam peccator hic quoque ut paulò antè impium et sceleratum significat. (ver. 24.) Est autem hæc perpetua Scripturæ doctrina, quod Deus non exaudiat nisi à quibus verè et sincero corde vocatur . . . Ideo non malè ratiocinatur cœcus, Christum à Deo profectum esse, quem suis votis ita propitium habet.

The words are so true that Jeremy Taylor has made them the text of three among his noblest sermons, entitled The return of Prayers; or, The conditions of a prevailing prayer.

thing could be done with him, that he could neither be seduced nor ter rified from his simple yet bold avowal of the truth, their hatred and scorn break forth without any restraint: "Thou wast altogether born in sin, and dost thou teach us?"-" altogether," not imperfect in body only, but, as they now perceive, maimed and deformed in soul also.* "Thou that comest forth from thy mother's womb with the note of thy wickedness upon thee, dost thou school us? dost thou presume to meddle and be a judge in such matters as these? And they cast him out,"—which does not merely mean, as some explain it, (Chrysostom, Maldonatus, Grotius, Tholuck,) rudely flung him forth from the hall of judgment, wherever that may have been; but, according to the decree which had gone before, they declared him to have come under those sharp spiritual censures which they had threatened against any that should join themselves unto the Lord. Only so the act would have the importance which (ver. 35) is attached to it. No doubt the sign and initial act of this excommunication was the thrusting him forth and separating him as unclean from their own company; and so that other explanation of the passage has its relative truth. Yet this was not all, or nearly all, which was involved in these words, "They cast him out." This violent putting of him out of the hall of audience, was only the beginning of the things which he should suffer for Christ's sake.

But in him were to be fulfilled in a very eminent sense those words, "Blessed are ye when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate you from their company, and shall reproach you and cast out your name as evil, for the Son of man's sake." (Luke vi. 22.) He is cast out from the meaner fellowship, to be received into the higher,—from that which was about to vanish away, to be received into a kingdom not to be moved, from the synagogue to the Church: the Jews cast him out, and Christ received him: "When my father and my mother forsake me, the Lord taketh me up." (Ps. xxvii. 12.) He has not been ashamed of Christ, and now Christ reveals himself unto him as he had not done before: no longer as the prophet from God, for to this only his faith had therto reached, but as the Son of God himself. Thus, "to him that

*Bengel: Exprobrant de cæcitate pristinâ. Calvin; Perinde illi insultant, acsi ab utero matris cum scelerum suorum notâ prodiisset. It is characteristic enough that they forget that the two charges, one that he had never been blind, and so was an impostor,—the other that he bore the mark of God's anger in a blindness which reached back to his birth,-will not agree together.

† Corn. à Lapide: Utrumque eos fecisse est credibile, scilicet cœcum ex domo, et hoc symbolo ex Ecclesiâ suâ, ejecisse. 'Exßáλhe will then have the technical mean ing which it afterwards retained in the Church. (See SUICER'S Thes., s. v.) See VITRINGA, De Synagoga, p. 743.

hath is given," and he ascends from faith to faith. "Jesus heard that they had cast him out," and, himself the Good Shepherd, went in search of this sheep in this favorable hour for bringing him home to the true fold;—" and when he had found him," encountered him, it may be, in the temple, (cf. John v. 14,) "he said unto him, Dost thou believe on the Son of God?" The man knows what the title means, that it is equivalent to Messiah, but he knows not any one who has a right to claim it for his own: such trust, however, has he in his Healer, that whomsoever he will point out to him as such, he will recognize. "He answered and said unto him, Who is he, Lord, that I might believe on him? And Jesus said unto him, Thou hast both seen him, and it is he that talketh with thee." These words, "Thou hast seen him," do not refer to some anterior seeing for it does not appear that the man after his eyes were opened at the pool, returned to the Lord, or that he had enjoyed any opportunity of seeing him since. This past then is in some sense a present: "Thou hast seen him already; this seeing is not something yet to do; ever since thou hast been speaking with me thine eyes have beheld him, for it is no other than he himself that talketh with thee."*

And now that to which all that went before was but an introduction, has arrived; "He said, Lord, I believe; and he worshipped him :" not that even now we need suppose that he knew all that was contained in that title, Son of God,—or that in this worshipping him we are to understand the very highest act of adoration as unto God. For the fact of "God manifest in the flesh," is far too great a one for any man to receive at once: the minds, even of apostles, could only dilate little by little to receive it. There were, however, in this man the preparations for that ultimate and crowning faith: the seeds which would unfold into it were safely laid in his heart; and he fell down at the feet of Jesus as of one more than man, with a deep religious reverence and fear and And thus the faith of this poor man was accomplished; step by step he had advanced, following faithfully the light which was given him; undeterred by opposition which would have been fatal to a weaker faith, and must have been so to his, unless the good seed had cast its roots in a soil of more than ordinary depth. But because it was such a soil, therefore, when persecution arose, as it soon did, for the Word's sake, he was not offended; (Matt. xiii. 21;) but endured, until at length the highest grace was vouchsafed to him, to know the only-begotten Son of God, however yet he may not have seen all the glorious treasures that were contained in the knowledge of him.

awe.

So wonderful was the whole event, so had it brought out the spiritual

* Corn. à Lapide: Et vidisti eum, nunc cùm se tibi ipse videndum offert.

blindness of those that ought to have been the seers of the nation, so had it ended in the illumination, spiritual as well as bodily, of one who seemed among the blind, that it called out from the Saviour's lips those remarkable words in which he moralized the whole: "For judgment I am come into this world, that they which see not might see, and that they which see might be made blind: I am come to reveal every man's innermost state; I, as the highest revelation of God, must bring out men's love and their hatred of what is divine as none other could: (John iii. 19-21 :) I am the touchstone; much that seemed true shall at my touch be proved false, to be merely dross; much that for its little sightliness was nothing accounted of, shall prove true metal: many, whom men esteemed to be seeing, such as the spiritual chiefs of this nation, shall be shown to be blind: many, whom men counted altogether unenlightened, shall, when my light touches them, be shown to have powers of spiritual vision undreamt of before." Christ was the King of truth,—and therefore, his open setting up of his banner in the world was at once and of necessity a ranging of men in their true ranks, as lovers of truth or lovers of a lie ;* and he is here saying of himself the same thing which Simeon had said of him before: "Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising again of many in Israel . . . . that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed." (Luke ii. 34, 35.) He is the stone on which men build, and against which men stumble,—and set for either purpose. (1 Pet. ii. 6–8; cf. 2 Cor. ii. 16.) These words call out a further contradiction on the part of the Pharisees, and out of this miracle unfolds itself that discourse which reaches down to ver. 21 of the ensuing chapter. They had shown what manner of shepherds of the sheep they were in their exclusion of this one from the fold: "with force and with cruelty have ye ruled them," (Ezek. xxxiv. 4:)† our Lord sets over against them himself, the good Shepherd and the true.

* Augustine (In Ev. Joh., Tract. 44): Dies ille diviserat inter lucem et tenebras This whole chapter of Ezekiel may be profitably read in the light of the con

nection between these 9th and 10th chapters of St. John.

XIX.

THE RESTORING OF THE MAN WITH A WITHERED HAND.

MATT. xii. 9-13; MARK iii. 1-5; LUKE vi. 6-11.

THIS is not the first of our Lord's sabbathic cures,* which stirs the illwill of his adversaries, or is used by them as a pretext for accusing him; for we saw the same to occur in the case of the miracle immediately preceding; yet I have reserved for this the considering once for all the position which our Lord himself took in respect of the Jewish Sabbath, and the light in which he regarded it. The present is the most favorable occasion which will occur, since here, and in the discourse which immediately precedes this miracle, and which stands, if not quite in such close historic connection as might at first sight appear on reading it in the Gospel of St. Matthew, yet in closest inner relation to it, our Lord himself enters upon the subject, and delivers the weightiest words which upon this matter fell from his lips. To go back then to that preceding discourse, and the circumstances which gave rise to it; the Pharisees found fault with the disciples for plucking ears of corn and eating them upon the Sabbath; they accused them to their Master as transgressors of the law: "Behold, why do they on the Sabbath day that which is not lawful?" It was not the thing itself, as though it had

* The cures on the Sabbath actually recorded are seven in number, and are the following:-that of the demoniac in the synagogue of Capernaum, (Mark i. 21;) that of Simon's wife's mother, (Mark i. 29 ;) of the impotent man of Bethesda, (John v. 9 ;) of this man with a withered hand; of the man born blind, (John ix. 14;) of the woman with a spirit of infirmity, (Luke xiii. 14;) of the man who had a dropsy, (Luke xiv. 1.) We have a general intimation of many more, as at Mark i. 34, and have already observed that the "one work" to which our Lord alludes, at John vii. 21-23, is perhaps not any of the miracles which he has recorded at length, but one to which we have no further allusion than that contained in these verses.