blessed; are broken; are distributed. They did all eat, and were filled." None was sensible of the previous scarcity; none lacked provision to the extent of his necessity. They were all filled; and seven baskets of fragments-so plentiful the supply -remained over and above to them which had eaten.

The miracle bears its spiritual explanation in the mere relation of it. The bread of life, insufficient, in the mind of Jew, and Gentile, to give salvation to the soul. The meek, simple, unostentatious mode in which Christ distributed the invigorating truths of Redemption. The satisfying nature of his doctrines. Their power of embracing all ages, kindreds and relations of men. In each of these points the miracle speaks home with wondrous force to every soul upon the face of the earth. We see it ; ; we appreciate it; and bow in lowly adoration before that Holy Being who designed it for our wants, and adapted it for our consolation.

But did the multitudes, while lulling their hunger, before the miracle was made known unto them by its completion, and their eyes were opened - did they know, that they were thus demonstrating to the world in their own conduct, one of the most glorious principles of the religion of Jesus? Undoubtedly not. They were wholly ignorant of it. They performed of their own will a natural action. Their minds were bent to the alleviation of a pressing want. But Christ overruled the action to a religious intent; and followed up, in the mixed multitude, the self-same law which had been so repeatedly shown forth in the Patriarchs and Princes of the Jewish Dispensation. The following chapter ex

plains the design. The disciples had forgotten to take bread. They felt vexed at their forgetfulness; and talked among themselves of the omission. "Then said Jesus unto them: Take heed of the leaven of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees." Their minds were still unaware of the full range of the miracle. They caught at a lesser object; and "reasoned among themselves, saying, It is because we have taken no bread." Our Saviour reproved them for their forgetfulness of the inner bearing of the distribution of the loaves, and for the grossness of their understanding. He brought it again to their memory. He explained anew his allusion to the leaven ;— and then was it that they fully comprehended him and ،، understood, how that he bade them not beware of the leaven of bread, but of the doctrine of the Pharisees and the Sadducees."

St. Luke has preserved the memory of a miracle which, like those which have been thus lightly reviewed, not only throws forth from itself the same secret principle, but has also the advantage of our Lord's own indication of its real bearing. A woman who had been oppressed with an infirmity during eighteen years, appears before him. She was bowed down with weakness, " and could in no wise lift herself up. ."* Jesus beheld her in her severe suffering; and having compassion on her wretchedness, called her to him, and said unto her, "Woman, thou art loosed from thine infirmity." Taken thus, it is a mere exercise of power. The same thing might have happened at least as far as the infirmity of the woman was concerned — in thousands of instances.

*Luke xiii. 11.

In every city of note over the whole surface of the globe may persons be suffering under a like affliction; and the woman, recorded by St. Luke, presents, in this outward figure, no difference from multitudes of the infirm and stricken. The ruler of the synagogue, in which the cure was wrought, and the Jews who beheld the act of power, saw it only in its external phase. They had indignation against Jesus, because he had presumed to make her whole on the Sabbath day. They saw no deeper into the matter, than that one afflicted-like many others in Palestine had been restored to strength on the Sabbath. But in what manner did Jesus answer their objection? Not merely by the assertion that it was a justifiable act in the sight of God to do good on the Sabbath, of whatever nature might be the benefit conferred but that the restoration of this woman was peculiarly appropriate on that day, in that she had been spiritually bound in her infirmity, by Satan himself. "Thou hypocrite," he exclaims, "doth not each one of you on the Sabbath loose his ox, or his ass from the stall, and lead him away to watering? And ought not this woman, being a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan hath bound, lo, these eighteen years, be loosed from this bond on the Sabbath day?" Subject and bound by Satan, she cannot be confounded with the nameless multitudes of the afflicted in body. Christ has himself invested her with a higher character. He has made her an index to the objects of his clemency and compassion; and shown that she-like the wretched beings possessed with devils in that age-stood forth in a typical, as well as in an actual state of suffering.

;

"Whom Satan hath bound;" give every latitude to the Jewish idiom; let it be a forcible expression for an extreme infliction of pain and sorrow; but still we do not get rid of that inner application, in which, as we contend, the real strength and validity of the term consists.

The woman bowed down with infirmity, is the Heathen or the Jew, weak in knowledge, and bowed down with superstition, covetousness, or idolatry. She has been long in that state of enervation and bondage. Satan - the Principle of the world-of time, and sense - has retained her under his dominion. He would have retained her still longer but that Jesus having come into the world "called her to him," called her, as he did the natural soul, by a revelation of the Truth in God 1; and as soon as she was obedient to the call-"loosed her from her infirmity." Immediately on this exercise of his power, she was made straight; she arose in strength; and she "glorified God." She felt the potency of the Christian word of life; and, freed from her bondage unto Satan, gave her faith and her praise to that Being, who showed that he held a supremacy, not only over the ills of the body, but over the sins and infirmities of the soul.

We may readily imagine the influence which such a miracle would hold over the mind of the multitudes who beheld it; the eagerness in which they would bend before a Person, appearing as one sent from God, who assumed a double authority of such might and potency; and the re-action which the thought of a miracle, wrought under such circumstances, would cause in their own breast. It would

display the fulness of the divine Love in Redemption to them, as to us, under a symbol the most evident and striking; and cause, as we might hope -the heart ever to respond to the voice of the angel when he proclaimed the divine will to Joseph, "Thou shalt call his name JESUS - for he shall save his people from their sins."

We consider the principle fully established in these instances. They are plain and easy: and the key once given, are almost self-evident. We glance at one example more, which, while it harmonizes with the other miracles of our Lord, yet arises to the mind in some degree of peculiarity. We allude to the waters of Bethesda. "There is at Jerusalem,"

writes St. John-" by the sheep-market a pool, which is called in the Hebrew tongue, Bethesda, having five porches. In these lay a great multitude of impotent folk, of blind, halt, withered, waiting for the moving of the water. For an angel went down at a certain season into the pool, and troubled the water; - whosoever then first, after the troubling of the water stepped in, was made whole of whatsoever disease he had. And a certain man was there, which had an infirmity thirty and eight years.' The quality with which this water is thus stated to have been endowed, must, in any sense, be acknowledged as preternatural. It has by some writers been received as a type of the speedy accomplishment of Zechariah's prophecy, "In that day there shall be a fountain opened to the house of David, and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, for sin and for uncleanness." Jennings thus interprets it: "The foun

* John v. 2.

+ Zech. xiii. 1.