'who had given such power unto men.' We need not suppose that they very accurately explained to themselves, or could have explained to others, their feeling of holy exultation; but they felt truly that what was given to one man, to the Man Christ Jesus, was given for the sake of all, and given ultimately to all, that therefore it was indeed given unto men.' They dimly understood that He possessed these powers as the true Head and Representative of the race, and therefore that these gifts to Him were a rightful subject of gladness and thanksgiving for every member of that

race.

W

10. THE CLEANSING OF THE LEPER.

Matt. viii. 1–4; MARK i. 40-45; LUKE V. 12-16.

E are told that the ascended Lord confirmed the word of his servants with signs following (Mark xvi. 20); in the days of his flesh He did the same for his own. His discourse upon the Mount, that solemn revision of the moral code, lifting it up to a higher level, has scarcely ended, when this and other of his most memorable miracles are performed. He will thus set his seal to all that He has just been teaching, and vindicate his right to speak in the language of authority which He has there held' (Matt. vii. 29). As He was descending from the mountain, there came a leper and worshipped Him,' one, in the language of St. Luke, full of leprosy,' so that it was not a spot here and there, but the tetter had spread over his whole body; he was leprous from head to foot. This man had ventured, it may be, to linger on the outskirts of the listening crowd, and, undeterred by the severity of the closing sentences of Christ's discourse, came now to claim the blessings promised at its opening to the suffering and the mourning.

But we shall ill understand this miracle, unless first a few words have been said concerning leprosy in general, and the meaning of the uncleanness attached to it in the Levitical law. The medical details, the distinction between one kind of leprosy and another, as between the white (AɛUK), which among the Jews was the most frequent, and

1 Jerome (in loc.): Recte post prædicationem atque doctrinam signorum offertur occasio, ut per virt itum miracula præteritus apud audientes sermo firmetur.

the yet more terrible elephantiasis (thought by many to have been that with which Job was visited, and so named because in it the feet swelled to an elephantine size), would be here out of place. Only it will be necessary to correct a mistake, common to all writers who, like Michaëlis, can see in the Levitical ordinances little more, for the most part, than regulations of police or of a Board of health, or, at the highest, rules for the well ordering of an earthly society; thus missing altogether a main purpose which these ordinances had-namely, that by them men might be trained into a sense of the cleaving taint which is theirs from birth, into a confession of impurity and of consequent separation from God, and thus into a longing after purity and re-union with Him. I refer to the mistaken assumption that leprosy was catching from one person to another; and that lepers were so carefully secluded from their fellow-men, lest they might communicate the poison of the disease to others; as, in like manner, that the torn garment, the covered lip, the cry Unclean, unclean' (Lev. xiii. 45), were warnings to all that they should keep aloof, lest unawares touching a leper, or drawing into too great a nearness, they should become partakers of his disease. So far from any danger of the kind existing, nearly all who have looked closest into the matter agree that the sickness was incommunicable by ordinary contact from one person to another. A leper might transmit it to his children,' or the mother of a leper's children might take it from him; but it was by no ordinary contact communicable from one person to another.

All the notices in the Old Testament, as well as in other Jewish books, confirm the statement that we have here something very much higher than a mere sanitary regulation. Thus, where the law of Moses was not observed, no such exclusion necessarily found place; Naaman the leper commanded the armies of Syria (2 Kin. v. 1); Gehazi,

See Robinson, Biblical Researches, vol. i. p. 359.

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with his leprosy that never should be cleansed (2 Kin. v. 27), talked familiarly with the king of apostate Israel (2 Kin. viii. 5). And even where the law of Moses was in force, the stranger and the sojourner were expressly exempted from the ordinances relating to leprosy; which could not have been, had the disease been contagious, and the motives of the leper's exclusion been not religious, but civil.' How, moreover, should the Levitical priests, had the disease been this creeping infection, have ever themselves escaped it, obliged as they were by their very office to submit the leper to actual handling and closest examination? Lightfoot can only explain this by supposing in their case a perpetual miracle.

But there is no need of this. The ordinances concerning leprosy had another and far deeper significance, into which it will be needful a little to enter. principle which made all having to do with death, as It is clear that the same mourning (Lev. xxi. 1; Ezek. xliv. 25), a grave (Luke xi. 44; Matt. xxiii. 27), a corpse, the bones of a dead man (Ezek. xxxix. 12-15; 2 Kin. xxiii. 20), the occasions of a ceremonial uncleanness, inasmuch as all these were signs and consequences of sin, might consistently with this have made every sickness an occasion of uncleanness, each of these being also death beginning, partial death-echoes in the body of that terrible reality, sin in the soul. But in

1 See a learned dissertation by Rhenferd, De Leprá Cutis Hebræorum, in Meuschen, Nov. Test. ex Talm. illust. pp. 1086-1089; who concludes his disquisition on this part of the subject thus: Ex quibus, nisi nos omnia fallunt, certe concludimus, præcipuis Judæorum magistris, traditionumque auctoribus nunquam in mentem incidisse ullam de lepræ contagio suspicionem, omnemque hanc de contagiosâ leprâ sententiam plurimis antiquissimisque scriptoribus æque ac Mosi plane fuisse incognitam. Compare the extract from Balsamon, in Suicer, Thes. s. v. Ampoc, where, speaking of the custom of the Eastern Church, he says, 'They frequent our churches and eat with us, in nothing hindered by the disease.' In like manner there was a place for them, though a place apart, in the synagogues.-I ought to add that Dr. Belcher, in a very learned essay in the Dublin Quarterly Journal of Medical Science, May 1864, with the title The Hebrew, Medieval and Modern Leprosies Compared, does not consider that Rhenford has proved his point.

stead of this, in a gracious sparing of man, and not pushing the principle to the uttermost, God took but one sickness, one of these visible outcomings of a tainted nature, in which to testify that evil was not from Him, could not dwell with Him. He linked this teaching but with one; by his laws concerning it to train men into a sense of a clinging impurity, which needed a Pure and a Purifier to overcome and expel, and which nothing short of his taking of our flesh could drive out. And leprosy, the sickness of sicknesses, was throughout these Levitical ordinances selected of God from the whole host of maladies and diseases which had broken in upon the bodies of men. Bearing his testimony against it, He bore his testimony against that out of which every sickness grows, against sin; as not from Him, as grievous in his sight; and against the sickness also itself as grievous, being as it was a visible manifestation, a direct consequence, of sin, a forerunner of that death, which by the portal of disobedience and revolt had found entrance into natures created by Him for immortality.

And fearful indeed, as might be expected, was that disease, round which this solemn teaching revolved. Leprosy was nothing short of a living death, a corrupting of all the humours, a poisoning of the very springs, of life; a dissolution little by little of the whole body, so that one limb after another actually decayed and fell away. Aaron exactly describes the appearance which the leper presented to the eyes of the beholders, when, pleading for Miriam, he says, 'Let her not be as one dead, of whom the flesh is half consumed when he cometh out of his mother's womb' (Num. xii. 12). The disease, moreover, was incurable by the art and skill of man;' not that the leper might not return to health; for, however rare, such cases are contemplated in the Levitical law. But then the leprosy left the

1 Cyril of Alexandria calls it málos our iánμor. Dr. Thomson (The Land and the Book, pt. iv. c. 43) has a terrible account of this disease.