dress ourselves to consider it in order; premising only, that to make this visit to the Gadarenes, who dwelt on the other side of the lake of Tiberias, or the sea of Galilee, he had with his disciples taken ship, and encountered a fearful storm, in which they would have been swallowed up, but for the omnipotence of that voice which said unto the winds, Be still, and to the waves, Cease your raging; and there was a great calm. He was proceeding on his mission of mercy to the people of Gadara, which was the chief town of the region of Peræa, beyond the Jordan. To this town, which was upon the extreme border of the Jewish territories, pertaining sometimes to Syria, but at this time to the Jews, our Lord proceeded, on the same errand on which we are told in the first verse of this chapter he had gone throughout every city and village of Galilee,-preaching and shewing the glad tidings of the kingdom of God. He had just proved himself the Lord of the winds and the waves, those two most rebellious and ungovernable of the elements of nature: speaking to them, and it was done; commanding them, and they stood fast. And he is about to encounter also two of the rebellious and ungovernable elements of the spiritual world, demons and men: of whom the former, doomed of old to chains of darkness and reserved unto the judgment of the great day, have yet liberty to afflict men for their sin, and were permitted to try themselves against the Son of Man in the days of his flesh; of whom the latter have not yet been visited with judgment, but are still prisoners of hope, living at large under the Gospel of grace and forgiveness, until the coming of the Son of Man. With these two regions of the spiritual world, let us now see how the Son of Man dealeth. It is very instructive, and, with the Lord's blessing, may be very profitable unto us all.

Verse 26.-If the incident narrated in the viiith chapter of Matthew be supposed to be the same with this, agreeing as it doth in most particulars, we are to believe that the name Gergasenes, which is there given to the country, has been inadvertently introduced, in the transcribing or otherwise, in some way by us unknown; which is confirmed by the ancient Syriac version of the Scriptures, which read Gadarenes. But there is another variation in Matthew's narrative not so easily to be accounted for, which is, that he speaks of two men being possessed, whereas Mark and Luke speak only of one. This, joined to the difference of place and country, and to other differences not so material, I confess rather makes me to believe that they are two different incidents, agreeing in the great outlines, like the two incidents of feeding the multitude with the loaves and the fishes. Not that such discrepancies in minute particulars amongst the Evangelists, while they agree in the great and substantial facts, are to a wise and judicious mind any stumbling-block in the way of faith, but rather a

greater proof of the honesty and trust-worthiness of the witness; a help, rather than a hindrance; as we find every day in courts of justice and in the affairs of life. If three of us had seen any remarkable event, and taken a part in it-for example,the saving of the crew and passengers of the Kent East-Indiaman by one of our brethren in Christ-and felt it our duty to draw up each a narrative of the wonderful providence; - one of us, say, for the use of the people of Calcutta, whither the Kent and her crew were proceeding; another in South America, whither the passengers of the ship that saved them were proceeding; and another here in England, as actually hath been the case ;-and suppose that after a century or two some one should take in hand to question the whole matter, and you were in possession of these three narratives, whether would you consider it a better case that these three narratives, agreeing in the main points-as, the names and destination of the vessels, the cause of the calamity, the circumstances of the deliverance; as, that the first living creature handed down out of the burning ship was a sleeping babe; that when the seamen that manned the boats murmured, and for a moment hesitated to return to the fearful wreck, the captain declared that not a man of them would he take on board unless they returned and brought away every living soul; how, when they were so closely packed on the deck of the little ship and there was not room to work her, the wind did fill their sails and blow them directly to our nearest ports; whither being arrived, but not able to enter, the wind did shift about just so far as to bring them in with ease, and when they were just got safely moored did shift about and blow a very hurricane direct away from our coasts:-agreeing in these and the other leading points, but differing in smaller matters; as to the exact words which were spoken, as to the number of times the boats passed and repassed on their errand of snatching living beings from a two-fold death, as to the exact name of the port they were brought to;-I say, whether would you consider that you had a better case against the doubter and denier by having three such narratives, agreeing all the way in the substance of the matters set forth, yet disagreeing all the way in the manner of setting them forth, and now and then from the different degrees of faithfulness in their memory, or diversity in their attention; differing also in some minute particular; than if they agreed to a nicety throughout all their narrative, and were, as it were, a transcript or copy of each other; so that the most ingenious could not find a discrepancy. Surely every one skilled in such matters would say the former is the better case of the two. The former is as it should be, when honest men, who take in hand, unknown to each other, without communication with each other, to set down the matter

as each remembers it to have taken place. For, you know, one man is more interested with one part of a complex event than another, and that which a man is most struck with sticks fast to his memory: the other things he remembers more loosely, and may easily, nay will almost certainly, err a little in setting down some of them. How much more were this the case if the fact were called in question, not in one or two centuries, but eighteen or twenty centuries after the event, when there remained nothing but the three narratives, with the tradition that they were written by three separate individuals unknown to one another? Then, indeed, these diversities of style and manner, and occasional discrepancies of circumstance also, become doubly valuable, by also verifying to us the constant tradition that they were written by three different persons; and that we actually have three narratives of the same events, drawn up in complete independence of one another. This remark I have been led into, once for all, to shew what great wisdom, and kind consideration of our doubt and scepticism, there was in the Holy Spirit permitting these occasional divergences from each other to be found in the three narratives which we have of our Lord's life: for that of John is rather a record of his discourses, with so much of narrative and incident as might shew the occasions on which they were delivered. But for the particular instance before us, I rather incline, I confess, for my own part, to believe that they were two different events which took place: the one in the country of the Gergasenes, that is, in the country of Gergasa, which was inhabited by the ancient Gergashites; the other in the country of the Gadarenes, whose chief town, Gadara, stood about eight miles distant from Tiberias.

No sooner had he set foot on this inhospitable shore, than there met him an object than which the earth held not atany time any more fearful, and perhaps hardly ever one so fearful. A lion or a tiger roaring in their strength against their prey, is a sight which hardly any animal can listen to without terror, and which a stout and courageous man fully armed feareth to encounter. But a frantic man, whom madness hath transformed into a fury, and fell destructiveness hath driven from the habitations of men, to dwell in the mountains and amongst the tombs; a maniac raging in the height of his fury, and coming against us in the fierceness of a ravenous creature; is a thing more horrid to human sight, though perhaps not so dangerous to human life, than any natural tenant of the wilderness. I remember once, when journeying amongst the mountains, and entertaining myself with the discourses of the sober and religious shepherds, it fell out to me one day, while crossing a wild and moorish upland, that I spied at a distance, beside a ruined shealing, or shelter for the sheep,

upon the summit of the hill, a man who seeemed to be watching his flock. Expecting to meet the refreshment of a pious peasant's conversation, for which I had forsaken the public highways, I hastened to draw near to him; and, coming up to him, I found him to be a helpless innocent, to whom the use of reason and of speech had been denied, in order to teach us the value of these divine and Godlike gifts: and never shall I forget, while memory lasts, the awful impression which was upon my mind, to find myself disappointed of a reasonable being in a reasonable being's form. It was not fear; for he was harmless, and piteously signified to me his helplessness: it was not a desire to help; for, alas! I wanted faith to be able to deliver him: it was not the being alone with him in the wild untenanted moorland; for I loved the wild, and was a stronger man than he, with reason to boot: I hardly know what it was, but there came over my soul such an unwonted and awful feeling that I want words to describe it. I never felt it in a city madhouse, nor in the streets of a village or town, when I have oft visited and encountered such helpless creatures. But to have my attention concentrated upon, my eye wholly occupied with, one who wore my form, and had about him all my animal functions; who looked and moved and listened like another man, and was able to guide himselfa-field, and somewhat tend a flock: and yet to find him destitute and naked of all reasonable gifts, his will absent, his mind astray, wholly unable to communicate with his kind-there was a fear, which yet was not fear; for I remember I hurried away from him, though I had yet no apprehension of danger from him.

This little incident, which more than a dozen years ago befel me amongst the pastoral solitudes of my native country, a little helpeth my imagination to conceive the scene, and the impression of the scene, which occurred to our Lord and his disciples upon their landing upon the mountainous shores of the Lake of Galilee, and which is thus described by St. Mark, with a wonderful picturesqueness. "And when he was come out of the ship, immediately there met him out of the tombs a man with an unclean spirit, who had his dwelling among the tombs; and no man could bind him, no, not with chains: because that he had been often bound with fetters and chains, and the chains had been plucked asunder by him, and the fetters broken in pieces: neither could any man tame him. And always night and day he was in the mountains and in the tombs, crying, and cutting himself with stones."

This creature in human form disguised by the power of Satan, and endowed of him with the superhuman strength of breaking iron chains, and bursting asunder every band with which they bound him; whom the spirit of evil had estranged from his kind

and drave continually into the wilderness, to keep it sacred to the powers of desolation, so that no man might pass that way: this wretched creature, combining the destructiveness of the wild beast with the arts and resources of human reason and the malicious suggestions of hell, no sooner saw a boat disembark its passengers upon his solitary and fearful domain, than, like the giants of fable, he hastened down with fury to do to them all possible injury. The naked savage, who loved the tombs of the dead better than the habitations of the living, was nothing daunted by the number of men who had landed upon the shore, but came down, as I believe, in the spirit of cruelty and destruction; for, brethren, I can hardly believe that the devils who possessed him would have brought him to Jesus on any other errand. They were not long, indeed, in perceiving their fatal error; for while they were afar off they recognised amongst the number Him who had come to destroy the works of the devil: which had they known at first, they would rather have carried him any whither than to meet Jesus, who was to spoil them for ever of their prey. But God, who is greater than the devil, desiring to shew forth the power and glory of his Son, that his disciples might believe on him; and having a pity for this poor wretched man, whom Satan so cruelly abused; did take these devils in their own wickedness, and, when they would have forced their victim upon mischief and murder, did lead him to his Redeemer, and force them upon their own defeat and disappointment: into which wonderful, and wonderfully instructive, act of Divine power, we would now inquire in order, making all careful observations upon every part of it; forasmuch as we are persuaded that all the actions of our Lord's life, and especially those which concern the possessed, are not only full of every human and Divine excellence, and much instruction both to the natural and spiritual life, but also because I have to notice that they are emblematical of things to come, which shall yet be accomplished by Him, not upon one or two individuals, or in a corner of the earth, or over three years of time, but every where, on all men, and for ever. And now may the Lord enable me to bring out of this act of his power all the instruction with which I believe it to be fraught!

In opening this subject, we shall shew,

First, That these demoniacal possessions, recorded in the Gospel, stood in the real presence of an evil spirit overruling the spirit and body of a man.

Secondly, We shall inquire into the Scriptures for information concerning the nature and operation of these evil spirits. Thirdly, We shall follow the narrative in order; and dwell upon the various persons and incidents contained in it, as the Lord giveth us the ability.