father's mind, before he had pre-occupied him with a word of confidence and encouragement*. This, The Lord took with him but three of his apostles, the same three who were allowed, more than once on later occasions, to be witnesses of things hidden from the rest. however, is the first time that we read of any such election within the electionf, and the fact of such now finding place would mark, especially when we remember the solemn significance of the other seasons of a like selection, (Matt. xvii. 2; xxvi. 37,) that this was a new era in the life of the Lord. That which he was about to do was so great and holy that those three only, the flower and the crown of the apostolic band, were its fitting witnesses. The parents were present on grounds altogether different. Those, and these, and none other, accompanied him into the house. There, as every where else, he appears as the calmer and pacifier: "Why make ye this ado and weep? the damsel is not dead, but sleepeth." Some, and those not unbelievers, nor persons who have learned to regard miracles as so much perilous ware, from which it is always an advantage when the Gospels can be a little lightened,-Olshausen, for instance‡, who is as far as possible from wishing to explain away the wonderful works of our Lord,-have yet considered his words, repeated by all the narrators, "The maid is not dead, but sleepeth," to be so explicit and distinct a declaration that death had not absolutely taken place, that in obedience, as *Titus Bostrensis (in CRAMER'S Cat., in Luc.): "Iva yap μn einη kai αὐτὸς, Επίσχες, οὐ χρείαν σου ἔχω, Κύριε, ἤδη γέγονε τὸ πέρας, ἀπέθανεν, ἣν προσεδοκῶμεν ὑγιαίνειν· ἄπιστος γὰρ ἦν, Ἰουδαϊκὸν ἔχων φρόνημα, φθάνει ὁ Κύριος καὶ φησι, Μὴ φοβοῦ, παῦσον τῆς ἀπιστίας τὰ ῥήματα. + The three, Peter, James, and John, are called therefore by Clement of Alexandria, ἐκλεκτῶν ἐκλεκτοτέρους. Origen (Con. Cels., ii. 48,) has, I think, the same view of this miracle. He is observing on the absence of all prodigality in the miracles, and notes that we have but three raisings from the dead in all: mentioning this first of Jairus daughter, he adds, περὶ ἧς οὐκ οἶδ' ὅπως εἶπεν, Οὐκ ἀπέθανεν, ἀλλὰ καθεύδει λέγων τι περὶ αὐτῆς ὅ οὐ πᾶσι τοῖς ἀποθανοῦσαι προσῆν, but he does not express himself very plainly. they believe, to these words of our Lord's, they refuse to number this among the actual raisings from the dead. They will count it only a raising from a death-like swoon; though one it may have been from which the maiden would never have returned but for that life-giving touch and voice. Had this, however, been the case, Christ's word to the father would clearly have been different, when the tidings came that the spirit of the child was actually fled. The consolation must have clothed itself in another language. He might have brought out the side of his omniscience, and bidden him not to fear, for he knew that no such evil had befallen him as he imagined. But that "Be not afraid, only believe," points another way; it is an evident summoning him to a trust in the all-might of the gracious helper, who is coming with him to his house. And as regards the Lord's words, that the maiden was not dead, but slept, he uses exactly the same language concerning Lazarus, "Our friend Lazarus sleepeth;" (John xi. 11,) and when Olshausen replies to this obvious objection, that Christ explains there distinctly that he meant the sleep of death, adding presently, "Lazarus is dead," it is enough to answer that he does not do so till his disciples have misunderstood his words: he would have left those words, but for their mistaking them and supposing he had spoken of natural sleep-“Then said Jesus unto them plainly, Lazarus is dead." But as Lazarus only slept, because Jesus was going that he "might awake him out of sleep," so was she only sleeping, because her awakening was so near. Beside this, to speak of death as a sleep, is an image common, I suppose, to all languages and nations. Thereby the reality of the death is not denied, but only the fact implicitly assumed, that death will be followed by a resurrection, as sleep is by an awakening. Nor is it hard to perceive why the Lord should • Fritzsche: Puellam ne pro mortuâ habetote, sed dormire existimatote, quippe in vitam mox redituram. have spoken in this language here. First, in regard of the father, the words are an establishing of a tottering faith, which the sight of all these signs of mourning, these evidences that all was finished, might easily have overturned altogether. They are a saying over again, "Be not afraid, only believe." He, the Lord of life, takes away that word of fear, "She is dead," and puts in its room that milder word which gives promise of an awakening, "She sleepeth." And then in regard of the multitude, according to that holy humility which makes him ever withdraw his miracles as much as possible from observation, he will by this word of a double signification cast a veil over that which he is about to accomplish. And now, having thus spoken, he expelled from the house the crowd of turbulent mourners, and this for two reasons; and first, their presence was evidently inappropriate and superfluous there; they were mourners for the dead, and she was not dead; or, at least, her death was so soon to give place to returning life, that it did not deserve the name; it was but as a sleep and an awakening, though they, indeed, who heard this assertion of the Lord, so little understood it, that they met it with laughter and with scorn, "knowing that she was dead," that they were mourners for the dead. This would have been reason enough for silencing and putting out those mourners. But in addition to this, the boisterous and turbulent grief of some, the hired lamentations, it may be, of others, gave no promise of the true tone and temper, which became the witnesses of so holy and awful a mystery, a mystery from which even apostles themselves were excluded-not to speak of the profane and scornful spirit with which they had received the Lord's assurance, that the child should pre The presence of the hired mourners at a funeral, in general women, (Opnrooi, præficæ, cornicines, tubicines,) was a Greek and Roman, as well as a Jewish, custom. (See BECKER's Charikles, v. 2, p. 180.) sently awake. The scorners were not to witness the holy act; the pearls were for others than for them*. - The house was now solitary and still. Two souls, believing and hoping, stand like funeral tapers beside the couch of the dead maiden-the father and the mother. His Church the Lord sees represented in his three most trusted apostles. And now the solemn awakening finds place. He took the child, for such she was, being but twelve years of age, (Mark v. 42,) “by the hand, and called, saying, Maid, arise." St. Mark gives us the very words which the Lord spake in the very language wherein he uttered them, "Talitha Cumi," no doubt as having something especially solemn in them, as he does the "Ephphatha" on another occasion. (vii. 34.) And at that word, and at the touch of that hand, "her spirit came again†, and she arose straightway (Luke viii. 55) and walked.” (Mark v. 42.) And then at once to strengthen that life which was come back to her, and to prove that she was indeed no ghost, but had returned to the realities of a mortal existence, (Luke xxiv. 41; John xxi. 5; Acts x. 41,) "he commanded to give her meat;" which precaution was the more necessary, as the parents in that ecstatic moment might easily have forgotten it. These miracles of raising from the dead, whereof we have been now considering the first, have always been regarded as the mightiest outcomings of the power of Christ; and with justice. They are those, also, at which unbelief is readiest to stumble, standing as they do in a yet more striking contrast than any of the other, to all that experience has known. The line between health and sickness is not definitely fixed; the two conditions melt one into the other, and the transition We may compare 2 Kin. iv. 33, where every one is in like manner excluded. + The words of St. Luke, kui inéσтρeực tò пveûμa avтs, are exactly the same as those 1 Kin. xvii. 22, LXX. from this to that is frequent. In like manner storms alternate with calms; the fiercest tempest allays itself at last, and Christ's word did but anticipate and effect in a moment, what the very course of nature must have effected in the end. Even the transmutation from water to wine, and the multiplication of the bread, are not without their analogies, however remote; and thus too is it with most of the other miracles. But between being and the negation of being the opposition is not relative but absolute; between death and life a gulf lies, which nothing that nature lends, helps us even in imagination to bridge over. These considerations sufficiently explain how it should come to pass that these raisings from the dead are signs more spoken against than any other among the mighty works which the Lord accomplished. The present will be an apt moment for saying something ( concerning them and the relations of difficulty in which they stand, if not to the other miracles, yet 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 greater 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, so is it, though not in so great a 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 and, according to that Jewish legend which may rest on a very deep truth, lingers for a while and hovers near the tabernacle where it has dwelt so long, and to which it knows itself bound by links, which even now have not 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 |