Christ. The first of these difficulties is easily disposed of. The connexion, above all as traced in Scripture, is so intimate between sin and suffering, death (and disease is death beginning) is so directly the consequence of sin, all the weight of woe which rests upon the world is in one sense so distinctly penal, that the Messiah might be regarded equally as in his proper work, as fulfilling the prophecies which went before concerning Him, whether He were removing the sin, or removing the sickness, sorrow, pain, which are the results of the sin, the disorder of our moral being or of our physical.

The other question is one of a more real embarrassment. The words of St. Matthew, as of the prophet from whom he draws them, certainly imply, as we have seen, an assuming upon the part of the Lord of the sicknesses and infirmities from which He delivered others. But how could this be? In what true sense could our Lord be said to bear the sicknesses, or Himself to take the infirmities, which He healed? Did He not rather abolish, and remove them altogether? It is, no doubt, a perfectly scriptural thought, that Christ is the κálapμa, the þáрμakov, the piaculum, who shall draw to Himself and absorb all the evils of the world, in whom they shall all meet, that in Him they all may be done away; yet He did not become this through the healing of diseases, any more than through any other isolated acts of his earthly ministry. We can understand his being said in his death and passion to have come Himself under the burden of those sufferings and pains from which He released others; but how can this be affirmed of Him when engaged in works of beneficent activity? Then He was rather chasing away diseases and pains altogether, than Himself undertaking them.

An explanation has found favour with many, suggested by the fact that his labours this day did not end with the day, but reached far into the evening;-so that He removed, indeed, sicknesses from others, but with painfulness to

Himself, and with the weariness attendant upon toils unseasonably drawn out; and thus may not unfitly be said to have taken those sicknesses on Himself. Olshausen adopts, though in somewhat more spiritual a manner, this explanation. The obscurity of the passage, he says, only disappears when we learn to think more really of the healing activity of Christ, as an actual outstreaming and outbreathing of the fulness of his inner life. As therefore physical exertion physically wearied Him (John iv. 6), so did spiritual activity long drawn out spiritually exhaust Him; and this exhaustion, as all other forms of suffering, He underwent for our sakes. The statement is questionable in doctrine: moreover, I cannot believe that the Evangelist meant to lay any such stress upon the unusual or prolonged labours of this day, or would not as freely have cited these words in relating any other cures which the Lord performed. Not this day only, even had it been a day of especial weariness, but every day of his earthly life was a coming under, upon his part, those evils which He removed from others. For that which is the law of all true helping, namely, that the burden which you would lift, you must yourself stoop to and come under (Gal. vi. 2), the grief which you would console, you must yourself feel with,-a law which we witness to as often as we use the words 'sympathy' and 'compassion,'—was truest of all in Him upon whom the help of all was laid. Not in this single

1 So Woltzogen, whom, despite his Socinian tendencies, here Witsius (Meletem. Leidens. p. 402) quotes with approbation: Adeo ut locus hic prophetæ bis fuerit adimpletus; semel cum Christus corporis morbos abstulit ab hominibus non sine summâ molestiâ ac defatigatione, dum ad vesperam usque circa ægrorum curationem occupatus, quodammodo ipsas hominum ægritudines in se recipiebat. Alterâ vice, cum suis perpessionibus ac morte spiritualiter morbos nostrorum peccatorum a nobis sustulit. Cf. Grotius, in loc. Theophylact had led the way to this explanation, finding an emphasis in the fact that the sick were brought to Jesus in the evening, out of season (apà Kapór), though he does not bring that circumstance into connexion with these words of Isaiah.

2 Hilary (in loc.): Passione corporis sui infirmitates humanæ imbecillitatis absorbens. Schoettgen (Hor. Heb. in loc.) has a remarkable quotation to the same effect from the book Sohar.

aspect of his life, namely, that He was a healer of sicknesses, were these words of the prophet fulfilled, but rather in the life itself, which brought Him in contact with the thousand forms of want and woe, of discord in man's outward life, of discord in man's inner being. Every one of these, as a real consequence of sin, and at every moment contemplated by Him as such, pressed with a living pang into the holy soul of the Lord. St. Matthew quotes these words in reference to one day of our Lord's work upon earth; but we only enter into their full force when we recognize that, eminently true of that day,—and here we may fitly urge its long and exhausting toils,—they were also true of all other days, and of all other aspects of that ministry which He came into the world to fulfil. He bore these sicknesses, inasmuch as He bore that mortal suffering life, in which alone He could bring them to an end, and finally swallow up death, and all that led to death, in victory.

ST

14 THE RAISING OF THE WIDOW'S SON.

LUKE Vii. 11-16.

T. LUKE is the only Evangelist who tells us of more than one whom the Lord raised from the dead. St. Matthew and St. Mark tell us only of Jairus' daughter; St. John only of Lazarus. St. Luke, recording the first of these miracles in common with the two earlier Evangelists, has this one which is peculiarly his own. 'And it came to pass the day after that He went into a city called Nain.' That healing of the centurion's servant at a distance and with a word was no doubt a great miracle; but the day after' was to see a far mightier and more wonderful work even than this. Nain is not mentioned elsewhere in Scripture. It lay upon the southern border of Galilee, and on the road to Jerusalem, whither our Lord was probably now going to keep the second passover of his open ministry. Dean Stanley points out its exact position, and even the spot where this mighty work must have been wrought; On the northern slope of the rugged and barren ridge of Little Hermon, immediately west of Endor, which lies in a further recess of the same range, is the ruined village of Nain. No convent, no tradition marks the spot. But, under these circumstances, the name is sufficient to guarantee its authenticity. One entrance alone it could have had—that which opens on the rough hill-side in its downward slope to the plain. It must have been in this steep descent, as, according to Eastern custom, they "carried out the dead man," that "nigh to the gate"

1

of the village, the bier was stopped, and the long procession of mourners stayed, and "the young man delivered back" to his mother.' 'And many of his disciples went with Him, and much people. Now when He came nigh to the gate of the city, behold, there was a dead man carried out, the only son of his mother, and she was a widow, and much people of the city was with her.' It was thus ordained in the providence of God that the witnesses of this miracle should be many; the much people' that were with the Lord, in addition to the 'much people' which accompanied the funeral procession. The circumstance of his meeting this at the gate of the city,' while it belonged to the wonderworks of God's grace, being one of those coincidences which, seeming accidental, are yet deep laid in the councils of his grace, is at the same time a natural incident, and is accounted for by the fact that the Jews did not suffer to inter the dead among the living, but buried them without the walls of their cities. Even they who were touched with no such lively sense of human sorrows as was He who made all sorrows his own, might have been moved and doubtless were moved to compassion here. Indeed, it would be hard to render the picture of desolation more complete than in two strokes the Evangelist has done, whose whole narrative here, apart from its deeper interest, is a master-work for its perfect beauty. The bitterness of the mourning for an only son had passed into a proverb; thus compare Jer. vi. 26: Make thee mourning as for an only son, most bitter lamentation;' Zech. xii. 10: "They shall mourn for Him as one mourneth for his only son;' and Amos viii. 10: 'I will make it as the mourning of an only son.' And as

1 Εξεκομίζετο. The more technical word is ἐκφέρειν, and the carrying out, ἐκφορά.

2 Gregory of Nyssa, himself a great master, but in a more artificial and elaborate style, of narration, has called attention to this (De Hom. Opific. c. 25): Πολλὰ δι' ὀλίγων διηγεῖται ἡ ἱστορία· θρῆνος ἀντικρύς ἐστι τὸ διήγημα ὁρᾷς τὸ βάρος τῆς συμφορᾶς, πῶς ἐν ὀλίγῳ τὸ πάθος ὁ λόγος ἐξετραγώδησε.