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 (Ezek. xxxvii.), 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 fresh-trodden way between the body, and the soul which just has forsaken it; this last lingering for a season near the tabernacle where it has dwelt so long, as knowing that the links that united them have not even now been divided for ever. Even science itself has arrived at the conjecture, that the last echoes of life ring in the body much longer than is commonly supposed; that for a while it is full of the reminiscences of life. Out of this we may explain how it so frequently comes to pass, that all which marked the death-struggle passes presently away, and the true image of the departed, the image it may be of years long before, reappears in perfect calmness and in almost ideal beauty. All this being so, we shall at once recognize in the quickening of him that had been four days dead (John xi. 17), a yet mightier wonder than in the raising of the young man who was borne out to his burial (Luke vii. 12); whose burial, according to Jewish custom, will have followed death by an interval, at most, of a single day; and again in that miracle a mightier outcoming of Christ's power

than in the present, wherein life's flame, like some newlyextinguished taper, was still more easily re-kindled, when thus brought in contact with Him who is the fountainflame of all life. Immeasurably more stupendous than all these, will be the wonder of that hour, when all the dead of old, who will have lain, some of them for many thousand years, in the dust of death, shall be summoned from and shall leave their graves at the same quickening voice (John v. 28, 29).

7. THE HEALING OF THE WOMAN WITH AN ISSUE OF BLOOD.

MATT. ix. 20-22; MARK V. 25-34; Luke viii. 43-48.

N all three accounts which we have of this miracle, it is

IN al

mixed up with that other of the raising of Jairus' daughter, and cuts that narrative in two. Such overflowing grace is in Him, the Prince of life, that as He is hastening to accomplish one work of power, He accomplishes another, as by the way. His obiter,' in Fuller's words, 'is more to the purpose than our iter;' his Tápeрyov, one might add, than our epyov. To the second and third Evangelists we owe the most distinctive features of this miracle. St. Matthew relates it so briefly, and passes over circumstances so material, that, had we not the parallel records, we should miss much of the instruction which it contains. But doubtless it was intended, if not by their human penmen, yet by their Divine author, that the several Gospels should thus mutually complete one another.

The Lord had consented to follow Jairus to his house, ' and much people thronged Him and pressed Him,' curious, no doubt, to witness what the issue would be, and whether He could indeed raise the dying or dead child; for to no less a work, thus going, He seemed in a manner pledged. But if thus with most, it was not so with all. Mingled with and confounded in that crowd eager to behold some new thing, was 'a certain woman,' which had an issue of

1 A serinon, wrongly attributed to St. Ambrose, makes this woman to have been Martha, the sister of Lazarus; the Gospel of Nicodemus (Thilo, Col. Apocryph. vol. i. p. 562), Veronica. There is a strange story full

blood twelve years, and had suffered many things of many physicians, and had spent all that she had, and was nothing bettered, but rather grew worse." This woman, afflicted so long, who had suffered much from her disease, perhaps more from her physicians, all whose means had been consumed in costly remedies and in the vain quest of some cure, when she had heard of Jesus, came in the press behind, and touched his garment; for she said, If I may touch but his clothes, I shall be whole.' Her faith, who so argued, was most real; we have the Lord's own testimony to this (thy faith hath saved thee'); while yet her conception of the manner of the working of Christ's healing power was a material conception and not unmingled with error. He healed, as she must have supposed, by no power of his holy will, but rather by a certain magical influence and virtue which dwelt in Him, and which He diffused round about Him. If she could put herself in relation with this, she would obtain all that she desired.

It is possible too

of inexplicable difficulties, told by Eusebius (Hist. Eccl. vii. 18), of a statue, or rather two statues, in brass, one of Christ, another of this woman kneeling to Him, which existed in his time at Cæsarea Paneas, and which, according to tradition, had been raised by her in thankful commemoration of her healing: see the 10th excursus in the Annotations (Oxford, 1842) to Dr. Burton's Eusebius. The belief that these statues did refer to this event was so widely spread as to cause Julian, in his hatred against all memorials of Christianity, or according to others, Maximinus, to destroy them. There can be no doubt that a group, capable of being made to signify this event, was there, for Eusebius speaks as having himself seen it; but the correctness of the application is far more questionable. Justin Martyr's mistake of a statue erected at Rome to a Sabine deity (Semoni Sanco) for one erected in honour of Simon Magus, shows how little critical the early Christians sometimes were in matters of this kind (see Deyling, Obss. Sac. vol. i. p. 279; Muretus, Epistt. 1. 3, ep. 75). Even Jeremy Taylor, with all his uncritical allowance of legends, finds this one incredible (Life of Christ, part ii. sect. 12, § 20).

The apocryphal report of Pilate to Tiberius forcibly paints her extreme emaciation, ὡς πᾶσαν τὴν τῶν ὀστέων ἁρμονίαν φαίνεσθαι, καὶ θέλου dieŋy diavɣášev (Thilo, Cod. Apocryph. vol. i. p. 808).

2 See Lightfoot (Hor. Heb. in Marc. v. 26) for an extraordinary list of remedies in use for this disorder.

* She partook, as Grotius well remarks, in the notion of the philosophers, Deum agere omnia φύσει, οὐ βουλήσει.

that she touched the hem of his garment' (cf. Mark vi. 36), not merely as its uttermost part, that therefore which she, timidly drawing near, could most easily reach, but as attributing a peculiar sanctity to it. For this hem, or blue fringe on the borders of the garment, was put there by divine command, and served to remind the Jewish wearer of the special relation to God in which he stood (Num. xv. 37-40; Deut. xxii. 12). Those, therefore, who would fain persuade the world that they desired never to have this out of their remembrance, were wont to make broad, or to 'enlarge, the borders of their garments' (Matt. xxiii. 5). But the faith of this woman, though thus imperfect in its form, and though it did not, like a triumphant flood-tide, bear her over the peculiar difficulties which beset her, a woman, coming to acknowledge a need such as hers, was yet in its essence most true. It obtained, therefore, what it sought; it was the channel to her of the blessing which she desired. No sooner had she touched the hem of his robe than she felt in her body that she was healed of that plague.'1

The boon which she had gotten she would have carried away in secret, if she might. But this was not so to be. For 'Jesus, immediately knowing in Himself that virtue had gone out of Him, turned Him about in the press, and said, Who touched my clothes?' The Evangelists employ language which in a measure falls in with the current of the woman's thoughts; yet we cannot for an instant suppose that healing power went forth from the Lord without the full consent of his will,2-that we have here, on his part, an unconscious or involuntary healing, any more than on

1 ̓Απὸ τῆς μάστιγος, scil. Θεοῦ, since disease must ever be regarded as the scourge of God, not always of personal sin, but ever of the sin which the one has in common with all; cf. 2 Macc. ix. 11, sia paori, and Ecclus. xl. 9. So Eschylus (Sept. adv. Theb.), πλŋytis Otov páotiɣi. The word plague (ñλnyń, plaga) is itself a witness for this truth.

2 Chrysostom: Παρ' ἑκόντος ἔλαβε τὴν σωτηρίαν, καὶ οὐ παρ ̓ ἄκοντος ᾔδει γὰρ τὴν ἁψαμένην.