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, not a defect under which he had always labored; but the consequence of this possession. 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 up. 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,

*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. + 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 παραλαβὼν καταπίπτοντας πρὸς τήν σελήνην καὶ τὰ ὀφθαλμὼ διαστρέφοντας καὶ ἀφροῦ πιμπλαμένους τὸ στόμα ὅμως ἀνίστησι καὶ ἀποπέμπει ἀρτίους ἐπὶ μισθῶ μεγάλῳ áñaλhúğaç Tüv deivav. There is much beside this quoted in the passage, of interest.

Egpaíveral 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 dayoviÇóμevo. The distinction, however, whatever it was, in the popular language would continually disappear, and the father here saying of his son, oeλŋviášerai, does but express the fact, or rather the consequence, of his possession. Of course the word originally, like μavía (from μývŋ) aud 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.)

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.*

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. In 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

* 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., l. 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 comitialis 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 (¿§aíóvns kpúčet, Luke ix. 39). Præcipuum vero ipsorum signum est oris spuma (uerà dopov, Luke ix. 39; cf. LUCIAN'S Philopseudes, c. 16.)

time, back to the level 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 dulness 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.t 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 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 a 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 any thing, have 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.

* 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.

me;

Our Lord's answer is not without its difficulty, especially as it ap pears 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 if this cure is hard, it is thou that renderest it so. Thou hast said, If I can do any thing; 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 Syrophenician mother's in the room of her daughter's. (Matt. xv. 22.) Thus the Lord appears, in Olshausen's words, in some sort a μaisurns Tidrews, helping the birth of faith in that empty soul. And now, though with pain and with sore travail, it has come to the birth, so that the father exclaims, "Lord, 1 believe," and then the little spark of faith which is enkindled in his soul revealing to him the abysmal deeps of unbelief which are there, he adds this further, "Help thou mine unbelief." For thus it is ever: only in the light of the actual presence of grace in the soul does any man perceive the strength and prevalence of the opposing corruption. Before he had no measure by which to measure his deficiency. Only he who believes, guesses aught of the unbelief of his heart.

But now, when this condition of healing is no longer wanting on his part, the Lord, meeting and rewarding even the weak beginnings of his faith, accomplishes the cure. We may observe, in Christ's address to the foul spirit, the majestic "I charge thee," no longer one whom thou mayest dare to disobey, against whom thou mayest venture to struggle, but I, the Prince of the kingdom of light, "charge thee, come out of him." Nor is this all: he shall "enter no more into him." Christ bars his return; he shall not take advantage of his long possession, presently to come back (Matt. xii. 45) and re-assert his dominion; the cure shall be perfect and lasting. Most unwillingly the evil spirit departs, seeking to

* The words, I imagine, should be pointed thus: rò, el dúvaoai mioTevoať múvra 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.

† AUGUSTINE, Serm. 43, c. 6, 7.

destroy that which he can no longer retain; as Fuller, with wit which is in season and out of season, expresses it, "like an outgoing tenant that cares not what mischief he does."* So fearful was this last paroxysm, so entirely had it exhausted all the powers of the child, "that he was as one dead; and many said, He is dead; but Jesus took him by the hand," and from that touch of the Lord of life there came into him life anew even as we often elsewhere find a reviving power to be by the same channel conveyed. (Dan. x. 8, 9; Rev. i. 17; Matt. xvii. 6-8.)

Afterwards the disciples asked privately how it came to pass that they were baffled in the attempts which they had made to accomplish the cure, since they were not exceeding their commission, (Matt. x. 8,) and had on former occasions found the devils subject to them; and the Lord tells them, because of their unbelief, because of their lack of that to which, and to which only, all things are possible. They had made but a languid use of the means for stirring up and strengthening faith; while yet, though their locks were shorn, they would go forth, as before against their enemies, being certain to be foiled whensoever they encountered, as they did here, an enemy of peculiar malignity; for the phrase "this kind" marks that there are orders of evil spirits, that as there is a hierarchy of heaven, so is there an inverted hierarchy of hell. The same is intimated in the mention of the unclean spirit going and taking "seven other spirits, more wicked than himself," (Matt. xii. 45;) and at Ephes. vi. 12, there is probably a climax, St. Paul mounting up from one degree of spiritual power and malignity to another. "This kind," he says, "goeth not out but by prayer and fasting." The faith which shall be effectual against this must be a faith exercised in prayer, that has not relaxed itself by an habitual compliance with the demands of the lower nature, but often girt itself up to an austerer rule, to rigor and self-denial.

But as the secret of all weakness is in unbelief, so of all strength is faith; and this our Lord teaches them when he adds, “For verily I say unto you, If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place, and it shall remove; and

Gregory the Great (Moral., 1. 32, c. 19): Ecce eum non discerpserat cùm tenebat, exiens discerpsit: quia nimirum tunc pejus cogitationes mentis dilaniat, cùm jam egressui divinâ virtute compulsus appropinquat. Et quem mutus possederat, cum clamoribus deserebat: quia plerumque cùm possidet, minora tentamenta irrogat: cùm verò de corde pellitur, acriori infestatione perturbat. Cf. Hom. 12 in Ezek., and H. de Sto. Victore; Dum puer ad Dominum accedit, eliditur: quia conversi ad Dominum plerumque a dæmonio gravius pulsantur, ut vel ad vitia reducantur, vel de suâ expulsione se vindicet Diabolus.