his eye measures at once the necessities of the moment, and with no more than his presence causes the tide of victory to turn, and everything to right itself again, so was it now. The Lord arrests the advancing and victorious foe: he addresses himself to the Scribes, and saying, "What question ye with them?" takes the baffled and hard pressed disciples under his own protection, implying by his words, “If you have any question, henceforth it must be with me.” But they to whom these words were spoken were slow to accept the challenge; for it was one from among the multitude, the father of the suffering child, which was his only one, who took up the word, and, kneeling down before Jesus, declared all his own misery and his son's.

St. Mark paints the whole scene with the hand of a master, and his account of this miracle, compared with those of the other Evangelists, would be alone sufficient to vindicate for him an original character, and to refute the notion of some, that we have in him only an epitomizer, now of one, and now of the other*. All the symptoms, as put into the father's mouth, or described by the sacred historians, exactly agree with those of epilepsy;-not that we have here only an epileptic; but this was the ground on which the deeper spiritual evils of this child were superinduced. The fits were sudden and lasted remarkably long; the evil spirit “hardly departeth from him;"-" a dumb spirit," St. Mark calls it, a statement which does not contradict that of St. Luke, "he suddenly crieth out;" this dumbness was only in respect of articulate sounds; he could give no utterance to these. Nor was it a natural defect, as where the string of the tongue has remained unloosed, (Mark viii. 32,) or the needful organs for speech are wanting, nor a defect under which he had always laboured; but the consequence of this possession.

*Even Augustine falls in with this view (De Cons. Evang., 1. 1, c. 2): Divus Marcus eum [Matthæum] subsequutus tanquam pedissequus et breviator ejus videtur.

When the spirit took him in its might, then in these paroxysms of his disorder it tare him, till he foamed and gnashed with his teeth and altogether he pined away like one the very springs of whose life were dried upt. And while these accesses of his disorder might come upon him at any moment and in any place, they often exposed the unhappy sufferer to the worst accidents: "ofttimes he falleth into the fire, and oft into the water." In St. Mark the father attributes these fits to the direct agency of the evil spirit: “ ofttimes it hath cast him into the fire, and into the waters, to destroy him;" yet such calamities might equally be looked at as the natural consequences of his unhappy condition ‡.

Compare the remarkable account in LUCIAN'S Philopseudes, c. 16, where I cannot but think there is an ironical allusion to this and other cures of demoniacs by our Lord: Πάντες ἴσασιν τὸν Σύρον τὸν ἐκ τῆς Παλαιστίνης, τόν ἐπὶ τούτων σοφιστὴν, ὅσους παραλαβων καταπίπτοντας πρὸς τήν σελήνην καὶ τῷ ὀφθαλμω διαστρέφοντας καὶ ἀφροῦ πιμπλαμένους τὸ στόμα ὅμως ἀνίστησι καὶ ἀποπέμπει ἀρτίους ἐπὶ μισθῶ μεγάλῳ ἀπαλλάξας Twy devwv. There is much besides this quoted in the passage, of interest.

† Enpaivetal. If indeed this word has not reference to the stiffness and starkness, the unnatural rigescence of the limbs in the accesses of the disorder. Compare 2 Kin. xiii. 4, LXX. Such would not indeed be the first, but might well be the secondary meaning of the word, since that which is dried up loses its pliability, and the place which the word occupies makes it most probable that the father is describing not the general pining away of his son, but his symptoms when the paroxysm takes him. The σεληνιαζομένοι, (in other Greek σεληνιακοί, σεληνόβλητοι,) are mentioned once besides in the New Testament, (Matt. iv. 24,) where they are distinguished from the daμovióμevoi. The distinction, however, whatever it was, in the popular language would continually disappear, and the father here saying of his son, σeλnviažetai, does but express the fact, or rather the consequence, of his possession. Of course the word originally, like μavía, (from μvn) and lunaticus, arose from the wide-spread belief of the evil influence of the moon (Ps. cxxi. 6.) on the human frame. (See CREUZER'S Symbolik, v. 2, p. 571.)

These extracts will abundantly justify what was said above of the symptoms of this child's case being those of one taken with epilepsy. Cælius Aurelianus (Morb. Chron., 1. 1, c. 4): Alii [epileptici] publicis in locis cadendo fœdantur, adjunctis etiam externis periculis, loci causâ præcipites dati, aut in flumina vel mare cadentes. And Paulus Ægineta, the last of the great physicians of the old world, describing epilepsy, (1. 3, c. 13,) might almost seem to have borrowed his account from this history: Morbus comi

tialis

But when the father told the Lord of the ineffectual efforts which the disciples had made for his relief, “I spake to thy disciples that they should cast him out, and they could not," he with a sorrowful indignation exclaimed, "O faithless generation, how long shall I be with you? how long shall I suffer you?" And here we have two different applications of these words. Some, as for instance Origen, apply them to the disciples, and them alone; they suppose that our Lord speaks thus, grieved and indignant at the weakness of their faith, and that even so brief a separation from him had shorn them of their strength, and left them powerless against the kingdom of darkness; and the after discourse (Matt. xvii. 20) seems to make for such an application. Others, as Chrysostom, and generally the early interpreters, would pointedly exclude the disciples from the rebuke; and they give it all to the surrounding multitude, and certainly the term "generation" seems to point to them, though less personally, than as being specimens and representatives of the whole Jewish people, the father himself coming singularly forward as an example of the unbelieving temper of the whole generation to which he pertained, (Mark ix. 22,) and therefore being an especial sharer in the condemnation. St. Mark indeed it is primarily addressed to him: "He answereth him, and saith, O faithless generation;" yet the language shows that the rebuke is intended to pass on to many more. And indeed the most satisfactory explanation is that which reconciles both these views; the disciples are not exclusively aimed at, nor chiefly, but rather the multitude and the father: they, however, are included in the rebuke; their unfaithfulness and unbelief had brought them, for the time, back to the level

In

tialis est convulsio totius corporis cum principalium actionum læsione, fit hæc affectio maximè pueris, postea verò etiam in adolescentibus et in vigore consistentibus. Instante verò jam symptomate collaptio ipsis derepente contigit et convulsio, et quandoque nihil significans exclamatio (¿¿aípvns kpáŋet, Luke ix. 39). Præcipuum vero ipsorum signum est oris spuma (uera dopov, Luke ix. 39; cf. LUCIAN'S Philopseudes, c. 16).

with their nation, and they must share with them in a common reproach. "How long shall I be with you?" are words not so much of one longing to put off the coil of flesh*, as rather of a master, complaining of the slowness and dullness of his scholars. "Have I abode with you all this time, and have you profited so little by my teaching?" feeling, it may be, at the same time that till their task was learned, he could not leave them, he must abide with them still†. We may compare his words to Philip, "Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip?" (John xiv. 9.)

And now he says, "Bring him unto me." As the staff in Gehazi's hand could not arouse the dead child, but the prophet himself must come and take the work in hand, before ever a cure can be wrought, so must it be now. Yet the first bringing of the child to Jesus causes another of the fearful paroxysms of his disorder, so that "he fell on the ground and wallowed, foaming." The kingdom of Satan in small and in great is ever stirred into a fiercer activity by the coming near of the kingdom of Christ. Satan has great wrath, when his time is short. But as the Lord on occasion of another difficult cure (Mark v. 9) began a conversation with the sufferer himself, seeking thus to inspire him with confidence, to bring back something of calmness to his soul, so does he now with the representative of the sufferer, the father, it being impossible, from his actual condition, to do it with himself: "How long is it ago since this came unto him?" But the father, answering indeed the question, that it was "of a child," and

* Jerome (Comm. in Matth., in loc.). Non quod tædio superatus sit, et mansuetus ac mitis; . . sed quod in similitudinem medici si ægrotum videat contra sua præcepta se gerere dicat: Usquequo accedam ad domum tuam, quousque artis perdam injuriam; me aliud jubente et te aliud perpetrante?

+ Bengel: Festinabat ad Patrem: nec tamen abitum se facere posse sciebat, priusquam discipulos ad fidem perduxisset. Molesta erat tarditas

eorum.

Calvin: Quo propior affulget Christi gratia, et efficacius agit, eò impotentius furit Satan.

for the stirring of more pity, describing again the miserable perils in which these fits involved his child, yet ill content that any thing should come before the healing, if an healing were possible, having, too, present before his mind the recent failure which the disciples had made, added, "If thou, if thou more than these, canst do anything, hace compassion on us, and help us." He says "us," so entirely is his own life knit up with his child's life: as the Canaanitish woman, pleading for her daughter, had cried, "Have mercy on me." (Matt. xv. 22.) Yet at the same time he reveals by that "if" how he had come with no unquestioning faith in the power of the Lord to aid, but was rendering the difficult cure more difficult still by his own doubting and unbelief.

Our Lord's answer is not without its difficulty, especially as it appears in the original, but the sense of it is plainly the following; "That 'if' of thine, that uncertainty whether this can be done or not, is to be resolved by thee and not by me. There is a condition without which this thy child cannot be healed; but the fulfilling of the condition lies with no other than thyself. The absence of faith on thy part, and not any overmastering power in this malignant spirit, is that which straitens me; if this cure is hard, it is thou that renderest it so. Thou hast said, If I can do anything; but the question is, If thou canst believe; this is the hinge upon which all must turn❞—and then with a pause, and no merely suspended sense as in our translation*, follow those further words, “All things are possible to him that believeth." So that faith is here, as in all other cases, set as the condition of healing; on other occasions it is the faith of the person; but here, that being impossible, the father's is accepted instead; even as the Syro

* The words, I imagine, should be pointed thus: Tò, el dúvacɑi mioτεῦσαι πάντα δυνατὰ τῷ πιστεύοντι, and Bengel enters rightly into the construction of the first clause, explaining it thus: Hoc, si potes credere, res est; hoc agitur. Calvin: Tu me rogas ut subveniam quoad potero; atqui inexhaustum virtutis fontem in me reperies, si modo afferas satis amplam fidei mensuram.