his mother's womb." But this man shall carry present memento of his past sin.

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his bed, a

But the Jews," not here the multitude, but some among the spiritual heads of the nation, whom it is very noticeable that St. John continually characterizes by this name, (i. 19; vii. 1; ix. 22; xviii. 12, 14;) find fault with the man for carrying his bed in obedience to Christ's command, their reason being because "the same day" on which the miracle was accomplished" was the Sabbath ;" and the carrying of any burden was one of the expressly prohibited works of that day. Here, indeed, they had apparently an Old Testament ground to go upon, and an interpretation of the Mosaic Law from the lips of a prophet, to justify their interference, and the offence which they took. But the man's bearing of his bed was not a work by itself; it was merely the corollary, or indeed the concluding act, of his healing, that by which he should make proof himself, and give testimony to others, of its reality. It was lawful to heal on the Sabbath day; it was lawful then to do that which was immediately involved in and directly followed on the healing. And here lay ultimately the true controversy between Christ and his adversaries, namely, whether it was most lawful to do good on that day, or to leave it undone. (Luke vi. 9.) Starting from the unlawfulness of leaving good undone, he asserted that he was its true keeper, keeping it as God kept it, with the highest beneficent activity, which in his Father's case, as in his own, was identical with deepest rest, and not, as they accused him of being, its breaker. It was because he had himself "done those things," (see ver. 16,) that the Jews persecuted him, and not for bidding the man to bear his bed, which was a mere accident and consequence involved in what he himself had wrought*. This, however, first attracted their notice;

• Calvin: Non suum modò factum excusat, sed ejus etiam qui grab. batum suum tulit. Erat enim appendix et quasi pars miraculi, quia nihil quàm ejus approbatio erat.

whereupon they "said unto him that was cured, It is the Sabbath day it is not lawful for thee to carry thy bed." Already the pharisaical Jews, starting from passages such as Exod. xxiii. 12; xxxi. 13-17; xxxv. 2, 3; Num. xv. 32-36; Nehem. xiii. 15-22; had laid down such a multitude of prohibitions, and drawn so infinite a number of hair-splitting distinctions, as we shall have occasion to see, Luke xiii. 15, 16, that a plain and unlearned man could hardly come to know what was forbidden, and what was permitted. This poor man concerned himself not with these subtle casuistries. He only knew that the man with power to make him whole, the man who had shewn compassion to him, had bid him do what he was doing, and he is satisfied with this authority: "He that made me whole, the same said unto me, Take up thy bed and walk." Surely a good model of an answer, when the world finds fault and is scandalized with what the Christian is doing, contrary to its works and ways, and to the rules which it has laid down!

For this man, the greater offender, they inquire now, as being the juster object of censure and of punishment: "Then asked they him, What man is that which said unto thee. Take up thy bed and walk?” The malignity of the questioners, coming out as it does in the very shape in which they put their question, is worthy of note. They do not take up the poor man's words on their most favourable side, and that which plainly would have been the more natural; they do not say, "What man is he that made thee whole?" but, probably, themselves knowing perfectly well, or at least guessing, who his Healer was, yet wishing to undermine any influence which he may have obtained over this simple man, -an influence already perceptible in his finding the authority of Jesus sufficient to justify him in his own eyes for transgressing their commandment.—they insinuate by the form of the question

* Augustine (In Ev. Joh., Tract. 17): Non acciperem jussionem à quo receperam sanitatem?

that the man could not be from God, who gave a command at which they, the interpreters of God's Law, were so greatly aggrieved and offended*.

But the man could not point out his benefactor, for he had already withdrawn: "Jesus had conveyed himself away, a multitude being in that place." Many say, as Grotius for instance, because he would avoid ostentation and the applauses of the people: but "a multitude being in that place" may be only mentioned to explain the facility with which he withdrew he mingled with and passed through the crowd, and so was lost from sight in an instant. Were it not that the common people usually took our Lord's part in cases like the present, one might imagine that a menacing crowd under the influence of these chiefs of the Jews had gathered together while this conversation was going forward betwixt the healed cripple and themselves, from the violence of whom the Lord withdrew himself, his hour being not yet come.

Though we cannot of course draw any conclusion from the circumstance, yet it is a sign of good augury that "Jesus findeth him in the temple," rather than anywhere else. It is as though he was there returning thanks for the great mercy which had been so lately vouchsafed him. (Cf. Isai. xxxviii. 22; Acts iii. 8.) And now our Lord, whose purpose it ever was to build upon the healing of the body the better healing of the soul, suffers not this matter to conclude without a word of solemn warning, a word which showed that all the past life of the sufferer lay open and manifest before him; even things done more than thirty-eight years ago, before, that is, his own earthly life had commenced: "Behold, thou art made whole: sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee"—a worse thing than those thirty and eight years of pain and infirmity !—words which give us an awful glimpse

Grotius: En malitiæ ingenium! non dicunt, Quis est qui te sanavit? sed, Quis jussit grabatum. tollere? Quærunt non quod mirentur, sed quod calumnientur.

of the severity of God's judgments. This infirmity had found him a youth and left him an old man; it had withered up all his manhood, and yet "a worse thing" even than this is threatened him, should he sin again *.

What the past sin of this sufferer had been, to which the Lord alludes, we know not, but the man himself knew very well; his conscience was the interpreter of the warning. This much, however, is plain to us; that Christ did connect the man's suffering with his individual sin; for however he rebuked man's uncharitable way of tracing such a connexion, or the scheme of a Theodice, which should in every case affirm a man's personal suffering to be in proportion to his personal guilt, a scheme which all experience refutes, much judgment being deferred and awaiting the great day when all things shall be set on the square; yet he meant not thereby to deny that much, very much of judgment is even now continually proceeding. However unwilling men may be to receive this, bringing as it does God so near, and making retribution so real and so prompt a thing, yet is it true not the less. As some eagle pierced with a shaft feathered from its own wing, so many a sufferer, even in this present time, sees and cannot deny that it was his own sin that fledged the arrow of God's judgment, which has pierced him and brought him down. And lest he should miss the connexion, oftentimes he is punished, it may be himself sinned against by his fellow-man, in the very kind in which he himself has sinned against others. The deceiver is deceived, as Jacob; the violater of the sanctities of family life is himself wounded in his tenderest and dearest relations, as was David. And many a sinner, who cannot read his own doom, for it is a

Calvin: Si nihil ferulis proficiat erga nos Deus, quibus leniter nos tanquam teneros ac delicatos filios humanissimus pater castigat, novam personam et quasi alienam induere cogitur. Flagella ergo ad domandum nostram ferociam accipit. . . . Quare non mirum est si atrocioribus pœnis quasi malleis conterat Deus, quibus mediocris pœna nihil prodest: frangi enim æquum est, qui corrigi non sustinent.

final and a fatal one, yet declares in that doom to others that there is indeed a coming back upon men of their sins: the grandson of Ahab is himself treacherously slain in the portion of Naboth the Jezreelite; (2 Kin. ix. 23;) William Rufus perishes, himself the third of his family, in the New Forest, the scene of the sacrilege and the crimes of his race*.

But to return; "The man departed, and told the Jews that it was Jesus which had made him whole." Whom he did not recognise in the crowd, he has recognised in the temple. This is Augustine's remark, who builds on it many valuable observations upon the inner calm and solitude of spirit in which alone we shall recognise the Lordt. Yet while these remarks may stand in themselves, they scarcely find place here. The man probably learned from the bystanders the name of his deliverer, and went and told it,-scarcely, as some assume, in treachery, or to augment the envy which was already existing against him, at least there is not a trace of this in the narrative itself, but gratefully proclaiming aloud and to the rulers of his nation the physician who had healed him. He expected, probably, in the simplicity of his heart, that the name of him, whose reputation, if not his person, he had already known, whom so many counted as a prophet, if not as the Messiah himself, would have been sufficient to stop the mouths. of the gainsayers. Had it been in a baser spirit that he went,

Tragedy in its highest form continually occupies itself with this truthno where, perhaps, so greatly as in the awful reproduction in the Choephora of the scene in which Clytemnestra stood over the prostrate bodies of Agamemnon and Cassandra—a reproduction with only the difference that now it is she and her paramour that are the slain, and her own son that stands over her.

+ In Ev. Joh., Tract. 17: Difficile est in turbâ videre Christum . . Turba strepitum habet; visio ista secretum desiderat . . . In turbâ non eum vidit, in templo vidit.

Calvin: Nihil minus in animo habuit quàm conflare Christo invidiam; nihil enim minus speravit quàm ut tantopere furerent adversùs Christum. Pius ergo affectus fuit, quum vellet justo ac debito honore medicum suum prosequi.