SERMON XIII.

66

SIN AND DISEASE.

(SECOND SUNDAY IN LENT, 1869.)

'And as Jesus passed by, He saw a man which was blind from his birth. And His disciples asked Him, saying, Master, who did sin, this man or his parents, that he was born blind? Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents but that the works of God should be made manifest in him."-JOHN ix. 1-3.

THERE is one thing of which we may be sure with regard to this question put to our Lordthat it was put in perfect good faith. It was asked by those who were anxious to learn, not by those who wished to convict the Teacher of error or absurdity. The latter did, as we know, sometimes make the attempt. The Sadducees asked Him whose wife she should be in the Resurrection who had had seven husbands while on earth. The problem, though submitted to Him doubtless with great gravity, was intended to bring into ridicule His doctrine of the

many mansions in the Father's house. Again, it was the Pharisees who sent their emissaries to inquire of Him whether or not it was lawful to pay tribute unto Cæsar; and in this their object was to make Him enunciate views which might arouse the suspicions of the Roman authorities. But in the case before us it was His own disciples who submitted the question. They had often seen this poor blind man begging, as they followed their master about Jerusalem, and they had been troubled with one of the greatest perplexities of this world, the origin of evil. The connection between sin and disease, between sin and sorrow, this had not failed to awaken deep questionings within them, as within those to whom God has given an immortal nature. The superstitious, self-evolved view of sin was struggling against the new conception of sin which their Master spent His life in the endeavour to instil. There was the view of sin-which I called last Sunday the heathen view-as that of an offence against an enemy, who was bent on vengeance, whom it was necessary by all means to propitiate, and who punished by visible and obvious judgments, arbitrary in their character. When the tower in Siloam fell, and crushed those who chanced

to be standing by, the popular religion—popular then and since, because a faith projected from our dark selves is necessarily more popular than the light which comes from heavenpronounced (for so we may gather from the Saviour's reference to the event) that it was a Divine judgment upon the sufferers for some special iniquity. When the barbarians in Melita saw the viper which crawled out of the burning heap fix itself on Paul's hand, they at once exclaimed that he was some great malefactor whom the vengeance of Heaven had at length overtaken.

The same view of the connection between sin and judgment was lingering in the minds of these Christian disciples. "This man is blind, and from his birth," they reasoned. "For what sin is this the retribution? Had his parents committed some sin, and were they punished by having an afflicted and unprofitable child or has the man himself been the sinner?” forgetting, as it would seem, in their perplexity that in the latter case the punishment had preceded the offence.

Now we have spoken of this view of sin and punishment as heathen, in opposition to Christian, but we shall err if we at once reject it as simply an inspiration from the devil. The

instinct that there is a connection between sin and penalty is universal, and from God. The grossest forms of sacrifice that have made the name of religion horrible had their root in a true instinct. The revelation of God in Christ came not to uproot this belief, but to interpret it, to guide it, to lead it to bear fruit. It had borne fruit in many before His time; it was to bear fruit in many after Him who nevertheless failed to see in Him the satisfaction of their deepest wants. It taught Socrates, as it taught the slave Epictetus, that sin is its own greatest punishment; that, as the latter has left it under his own hand, "No one is a slave whose will is free." Not all the heathens shared the heathen view; nor, my brethren, are all Christians yet delivered from it. When misfortunes happen to a person we dislike: when an excursion-train meets with an accident on Sunday-it is not uncommon to hear the ready cry of “Judgment, judgment." The moral of the death of those on whom the tower in Siloam fell, and of those Galileans whose blood Pilate mingled with their sacrifices, is still lost upon many of us. Bodily sickness is to a certain extent the lot of all; and we may not show ourselves anxious to connect it with the notion of punishment for

specific acts. We have learned, too, since the days of the first Christians, something more of the laws of health than they were acquainted with, and this knowledge tends to reduce within narrower limits the afflictions which we designate as judgments. But the tendency to view sin and punishment as different things, and the connection between them as arbitrary, is unhappily not less strong in the full light of the nineteenth century than in the glimmering dawn in which the first Christians walked.

I am not forgetting, my brethren, that besides the promptings of their own unenlightened consciences, these disciples who carried their difficulties to their Teacher were also influenced by the teaching, as they understood it, of the Jewish law. In the second commandment of the Decalogue, God was revealed to Moses as a jealous God, "who visits the sins of the fathers upon the children." Now this declaration might come to confirm the secret suspicions of their hearts. That sin must needs bring suffering, and that a Being who enacts laws for the good of His people must attach sanctions to them, was a conviction they could not resist the law of Moses asserted this truth, and moreover affirmed that the punishment might be inflicted upon