artificial, one natural, from which the many persons are fed; as here bread and fish, so there bread and fresh ears of corn. As the disciples are incredulous here, so there the servitor asks, Should I set this before a hundred men?' As here twelve baskets of fragments remain, so there they did eat, and left thereof.' Yet were they only the weaker rudiments of this miracle; a circumstance which the difference between the servants and the Lord sufficiently explains. The prophets having grace only in measure, so in measure they wrought their miracles; but the Son, working with infinite power, and with power not lent Him, but his own, did all with much. superabundance. Analogies to this miracle, but of a remoter kind, may be found in the multiplying of the widow's cruse of oil and barrel of meal by Elijah (1 Kin. xvii. 16), and in that other miracle of the oil, which, according to the prophet's word, continued to flow so long as there were vessels to receive it (2 Kin. iv. 1−7).1

comparatâ multitudine et pabuli mediocritate, respondisset, Quid ergo hoc dem in conspectu centum hominum? Da, inquit, et manducabant. ... O Christum et in novis veterem! Hæc itaque quæ viderat, Petrus, et cum pristinis comparat, et non tantum retro facta, sed et in futurum jam tunc prophetantia recognoverat, interroganti Domino, quisnam illis videretur, cum pro omnibus responderet, Tu es Christus, non potest non eum sensisse Christum, nisi quem noverat in scripturis, quem jam recensebat in factis.

1 I have promised a specimen or two of the rationalist explanations of the miracles. It were thrice to slay the slain to enter at the present time on a serious refutation of them; new forms of opposition to the truth have risen up, but this has gone by; yet as curiosities of interpretation, they may deserve a passing notice. This then is the scheme of Paulus for a natural explanation of the present miracle. He assumes that, though many of the multitude had nothing to eat, there were others who had some stock and store by them; which was the more probable on the present occasion, as we know that the Jews, when travelling to any distance, used to carry their provisions with them,— and of this multitude many were thus coming from far to the passover at Jerusalem. These stores they had hitherto withheld from the common needs; but now, put to shame by the free liberality of Jesus, they brought forth and distributed, He having first led the way, and freely imparted the little stock at his own command. Many difficulties certainly seem to stand in the way of this,—that is, of the Evangelists having actually meant to relate this; for Paulus does not say that they made a

mistake, and exalted an ordinary event into a miracle, but that this is what they actually intended to relate. It is, for example, plainly a difficulty that, even supposing the people to have followed 'the example of laudable moderation' which Jesus showed them, there should have remained twelve baskets of fragments from his five loaves. But to this Paulus replies that they indeed affirm nothing of the kind; that St. John, so far from asserting this (ver. 13), is rather accounting for the fact that there should be any residue whatsoever, explaining why the Lord should have had need (ver. 12) to bid gather up a remnant at all, from the circumstance that the Apostles had set before the people so large a supply that there was more than enough for all;-and it is exactly, he says, this which ver. 13 affirms, which verse he thus explains: 'For they got together (ovrnyayov ovv) and had filled (¿yrar, an aor. I for plusq. perf.) twelve baskets with fragments (i. e. with bread broken and prepared for eating) of the five loaves, which were more than enough (à imepigσevσe) for the eaters; '-so that St. John is speaking, not of remnants after the meal, but of bread broken before the meal. That this should be called presently after a onμsiov (ver. 14) does but mean a sign of his humanity and wisdom, by which He made a little to go so far! But this may suffice.

17. THE WALKING ON THE SEA.

MATT. XIV. 22-33; MARK vi. 45-52; JOHN vi. 14–21.

HE three Evangelists who narrate this miracle alike

THE

place it in immediate sequence to the feeding of the five thousand, and on the evening of the same day. The two former relate, that when all were fed, and the Lord was now. about to dismiss the multitude, 'straightway He constrained his disciples to get into the ship.' Why He should have found it necessary to constrain' them, they do not tell us. Some vaguely suggest a general unwillingness on the part of the disciples to be separated, even for a season, from their beloved Lord.1 But the true key to the phrase is obtained, when we compare the parallel record of St. John. There we learn that the multitude desired to take Jesus by force and make Him a king; and that He only avoided this, by departing into a mountain Himself alone. The disciples could not have helped being aware of the shape which the popular enthusiasm was taking. This was exactly to their mind; this was precisely what they had long hoped would arrive, so that they must have been most reluctant to quit their Master at the moment of his approaching exaltation. So, however, it must be, and while He dismisses the people, they must go to the other side before unto Bethsaida.' There is no contradiction here between St. Mark's Bethsaida,' and

1 As Jerome; and Chrysostom: Τὸ ἠνάγκασεν δὲ εἶπεν, τὴν πολλὴν προσεδρίαν δεικνὺς τῶν μαθητῶν.

St. John's statement that they went over the sea towards Capernaum;' since this Bethsaida, not identical with that. just before mentioned by St. Luke (ix. 10), and for distinction called Bethsaida Julias, but the city of Philip and Andrew and Peter (John i. 44), lay on the western side of the lake, in the same direction as, and near to, Capernaum; is indeed generally supposed to have been a sort of fishing suburb of that town. St. Matthew, and St. Mark with him, makes two evenings to this day,-one which had already commenced before the preparations for the feeding of the multitude had begun (ver. 15), the other now when the disciples had entered into the ship, and set forth on their voyage (ver. 23). And this was an ordinary way of speaking among the Jews, the first evening being very much our afternoon (see Luke ix. 12, where the evening' of Matthew and Mark is described as the season when the day began to wear away'); the second evening' being the twilight, or from six o'clock to twilight; on which absolute darkness followed. It was the first evening, or afternoon, when the preparations for feeding the five thousand commenced; the second, when the disciples took ship.

And when He had sent the multitudes away, He went up into a mountain apart to pray; and when even was come, He was there alone.' From thence, with the watchful eye of love, He saw them toiling in rowing' (cf. Exod. iii. 7; Ps. lvi. 8); for in their Lord's absence they were able to make no effectual progress: the wind was contrary,' and the sea rough their sails, of course, could profit them nothing. It was now the fourth watch of the night,' near morning therefore, and notwithstanding all their efforts they had not accomplished more than five and twenty or thirty furlongs,' scarcely, that is, more than half of their way, the lake being forty or forty-five furlongs in breadth. Probably they were 1 Οψία δευτέρα.

2 Thomson (The Land and the Book, pt. ii. c. 25): My experience in this region enables me to sympathize with the disciples in their long night's contest with the wind. I spent a night in that Wady Shukalyif,

ever finding themselves more unable to proceed, the danger probably was ever increasing, when suddenly they see their Lord walking on the sea," and already close to their bark. It was his purpose in all the events of this night, as Chrysostom well brings out, to train his disciples to higher things than hitherto they had learned. That first storm (Matt. viii. 24) was by day, this was by night. Then He was present in the ship with them; if it came to the worst, they knew that they might rouse Him; while the mere fact of his presence must have given them the sense of a comparative security.

some three miles up it, to the left of us. The sun had scarcely set when the wind began to rush down toward the lake, and it continued all night long with constantly increasing violence, so that when we reached the shore next morning the face of the lake was like a huge boiling caldron. The wind howled down every wady from the north-east and east with such fury that no efforts of rowers could have brought a boat to shore at any point along that coast. In a wind like that, the disciples must have been driven quite across to Gennesaret, as we know they were.'

1 Many have supposed that Lucian (Ver. Hist. ii. 4), in his account of the cork-footed race (peλóπodes), whom in his voyage he past i rov πeλáуovç dialéovras, intended a scoff against this miracle. I doubt whether so expert a scoffer, if he had meant this, would not have done it better; still the hint which he gives (1, 2), that something lies under these absurd and extravagant travellers' tales which he has strung together, that they contain every one allusions to the fables and portents of poets and historians and philosophers, makes it not altogether improbable; and in the Philopseudes, where there seem to me more distinct side-glances at the miracles of the Gospel,-as for instance, a miraculously-healed man taking up his bed (11), the expulsion of the evil spirit from a demoniac (16), reminding one singularly of that recorded Mark ix. 14-29; this also of walking on the water recurs (13), among the incredible things proposed for the wise man's belief. The Golden City of the Blest, with its diamond walls, its floors of ivory, its vines bearing fruit every month (Ver. Hist. ii. 11-13), may very well be written in rivalry and in ridicule of the description of the New Jerusalem, Rev. xxi. 19; xxii. 2; as the story of the great multitude of men comfortably housed for some years in the belly of a whale (Ib. i. 30-42) may be intended to be an outdoing of Jonah's three days' abode in a like place. This we know was an especial object of the flouts of the heathen; see Augustine, Ep. cii. qu. 6; and Josephus (Antt. ix. 10, § 2), who aiming to make his works acceptable to the educated heathen, gets over it with a Móyog'as some say.' On the point of view from which Lucian contemplated Christianity see Krebs, De Malitioso Luciani Consilio &c. in his Opusc. Acad. p. 308; Tzschirner, Fall des Heidenthums, p. 320; Theol. Studien u. Kritiken, 1851, pp. 826-902.