too, and no room have been left for this miracle, faith, the necessary condition, being wanting; if a gracious Lord had not seen the danger, and prevented his rising unbelief. As soon as Jesus heard the word that was spoken, He saith to the ruler of the synagogue, Be not afraid, only believe.' There is something very gracious in that as soon.' The Lord spake upon the instant, leaving no room for a 'thought of unbelief to insinuate itself into the father's mind, much less to utter itself from his lips, but preoccupying him at once with words of encouragement and hope.'

And now He takes with Him three of his Apostles, Peter and James and John, the same three who were allowed, on more than one later occasion, to be witnesses of things withdrawn from the others. We read here for the first time of such an election within the election; and the fact of such now finding place would mark, especially when we remember the solemn significance of the other seasons of a like selection (Matt. xvii. 1, 2; xxvi. 37), that this was a new era in the life of the Lord. That which He was about to do was so great and holy that those three only, the flower and the crown of the apostolic band, were its fitting witnesses. The parents were present on grounds altogether different. With those, and these, and none other, He cometh to the house of the ruler of the synagogue, and seeth the tumult, and them that wept and wailed greatly' (Mark); the minstrels and the people making a noise,' as the earlier Evangelist has it. There, as everywhere else, He appears calming and pacifying: 'He saith unto them, Why make ye this ado, and weep? the damsel is not dead, but sleepeth. And they laughed Him to scorn.'

Some, and those not unbelievers, nor yet timid half believers, who have come to regard miracles as so much perilous

1 Titus Bostrensis (in Cramer, Cat. in Luc.): "Iva yàọ μǹ tĩny kai avròs, Επίσχες, οὐ χρείαν σου ἔχω, Κύριε, ἤδη γέγονε τὸ πέρας, ἀπέθανεν, ἣν προσεδοκῶμεν ὑγιαίνειν· ἄπιστος γὰρ ἦν, Ιουδαϊκὸν ἔχων φρόνημα, φθάνει ὁ «Κύριος καὶ φησι, Μὴ φοβοῦ, παῦσον τῆς ἀπιστίας τὰ ῥήματα.

2 'EKλEKTWV EKλEKTÓTEρor, as Clement of Alexandria calls them.

ware, from which it is always an advantage when the Gospels can be a little lightened,-Olshausen, for instance,' who manifests no wish to explain away the wonderful works of our Lord, have yet considered his words, common to all reports. of this miracle, 'The maid is not dead, but sleepeth,' to be so explicit, that in obedience, as they believe, to them, they refuse to number this among the actual raisings from the dead. They account it only a raising from a death-like swoon; though possibly a swoon from which the maiden would never have been recalled but for that life-giving touch and voice. Had this, however, been the case, Christ's word of encouragement to the father, when the tidings came that the spirit of his child was actually fled, would have certainly been different from that which actually it was. He might have bidden the father to dismiss his fear, for He, who knew all, knew that there was yet life in the child. But that 'Be not afraid, only believe,' points another way; it is an evident summoning him to a trust in the almightiness of Him, to whose help he had appealed. Then too Christ uses exactly the same language concerning Lazarus, 'Our friend Lazarus sleepeth' (John xi. 11), which He uses about this maiden; and we know that He spoke there not of a death-like swoon, but of death. When to this obvious objection Olshausen replies, that Christ explains there distinctly that He meant the sleep of death, adding presently, Lazarus is dead,' it is enough to answer that He only does so after his disciples have misapprehended his words: He would have left those words as He had spoken them, but for their error in supposing that He had spoken of natural sleep; it was only then that He exchanged Our friend Lazarus sleepeth' for 'Lazarus is dead.' But as Lazarus did but sleep, because Jesus was about

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1 Origen (Con. Cels. ii. 48) has, I think, the same view of this miracle. He is observing on the absence of all prodigality in the miracles, and notes that we have but three raisings from the dead in all: mentioning this first of Jairus' daughter, he adds, περὶ ἧς οὐκ οἶδ' ὅπως εἶπεν, Οὐκ ἀπέθανεν, ἀλλὰ καθεύδει λέγων τι περὶ αὐτῆς ὅ οὐ πᾶσι τοῖς ἀποθανοῦσι προσῆν, but he does not express himself very plainly.

to 'awake him out of sleep,' so was this maiden only sleeping, because her awakening in like manner was so near.1 Beside this, to speak of death as a sleep, is an image common to all languages and nations. Thereby the reality of the death is not denied, but only the fact implicitly assumed, that death will be followed by a resurrection, as sleep is by an awakening. Nor is it hard to perceive why the Lord should have used this language here. First, for the father's sake. The words are for the establishing of his trembling faith, which at the spectacle of all these signs of mourning, of these evidences that all was finished, might easily have given way 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 substitutes that milder word which contains the pledge of an awakening, 'She sleepeth.' At the same time in 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 for the multitude 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. Their presence, in the first place, was inappropriate and superfluous there; they were mourners for the dead, and she was not dead; or, at all events, death in her 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. Here was reason enough. But more than this, the boisterous and tumultuous grief of some, with the hired lamentations of others, gave no promise of the tone and temper of spirit, which became the witnesses of so holy and awful a mystery,

1 Fritzsche: Puellam ne pro mortuâ habetote, sed dormire existimatote, quippe in vitam mox redituram. Bengel: Puella, ob resuscitationem mox futuram, et celeriter et certo et facile, non erat annumeranda mortuis olim resurrecturis, sed dormientibus.

2 The presence of the hired mourners at a funeral, in general women (Opnrooi, præficæ, cornicines, tubicines), was a Greek and Roman, as well as a Jewish, custom (see Becker, Charicles, vol. ii. p. 180).

a mystery from which even Apostles themselves were excluded-to say nothing of the profane and scornful spirit with which they had received the Lord's assurance, that the child should presently revive. Such scorners shall not witness the holy act: the pearls should not be cast before them (cf. 2 Kin. iv. 33).

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. The Church is represented in the three chief of its Apostles. And now the solemn awakening finds place, and this without an effort on his part, who is absolute Lord of quick and dead. 'He took the damsel'--she was no more than a child, being of the age of twelve years' (Mark v. 42)—‘by the hand, and called, saying, Maid, arise.' St. Mark preserves for us, probably from the lips of Peter, the very words which the Lord spake in the very language wherein He uttered them, 'Talitha Cumi,' as he does the Ephphatha' on another occasion (vii. 341). And at that word, and at the touch of that hand, her spirit came again, and she arose straightway (Luke viii. 55), and walked' (Mark v. 42). Hereupon, 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 (cf. Luke xxiv. 41; John xxi. 5; Acts x. 41),

He commanded to give her meat;' a precaution the more necessary, as the parents in that ecstatic moment might easily have forgotten it.

1 The mention of these words may be taken as evidence that in the intercourse of ordinary life our Lord employed the popular Aramaic. This does not, of course, decide anything concerning the language which He used, addressing mixed assemblages of Jews and heathen, learned and unlearned. On the extent to which Greek had at this time found its way into Palestine, and was familiar to all classes there, there is a masterly discussion in Hug's Introduction to the New Testament, which has put the matter quite in a new light, and added greatly to the probabilities that He often in his discourses employed that language. His conversation with Pilate could scarcely have been carried on in any other. 2 The words of St. Luke, rai intorρeye rò πvečμa aurns, are exactly the same as those 1 Kin. xvii. 22, LXX.

These miracles of raising from the dead, whereof this is the first, have always been regarded as the mightiest outcomings of the power of Christ; and with justice. They are those, also, at which unbelief is readiest to stumble, standing as they do in more direct contrast than any other, to all that our 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 tumult of the elements allays itself at last; and Christ's word which stilled the tempest, did but anticipate and effect in a moment, what the very conditions 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 in nature, 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 no fact furnished by our experience can help us even in imagination to bridge over. It is nothing wonderful, therefore, that miracles of this class are signs more spoken against than any other among all the mighty works of the Lord.

The present will be a fitting moment to say something on the relations of difficulty in which the three miracles of this transcendant character stand 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 more marvellous outcoming of the power of Christ than the preceding. For as the body of one freshly dead, from which life has but just departed, is very different from a mummy or a skeleton, or from the dry bones which the prophet saw in the valley of death, so is it, though not in the same degree, different from a corpse, whence for some days the breath of life has fled. There is, so to speak, a freshtrodden way between the body, and the soul which just has forsaken it; this last lingering for a season near the taber