spirits, they were raised above the ban of the Sanhedrim by the peculiar sacredness of their calamitous state; and as confessors of Jesus, they were peculiarly the objects of His compassion.

But no such mediation of the miracles of Christ appears at first sight to be given in the case of the dead whom He restored to life; yet, on carefully considering the circumstances, we shall find that there is a mediation, or rather a double one. The three dead persons whom Christ restored, even when dead were held by strong bonds in the vicinity of life;—the daughter of Jairus, by the loud mourning of the parental house; the young man at Nain, by the inconsolable grief of his mother; and lastly, Lazarus, not merely by the ceaseless yearning with which his sisters waited for the Lord, but also by the unsatisfied expectation with which he himself had sunk into the grave. Even though dead, therefore, these three still experienced the strong attraction towards life on this side the grave. But as spirits, they understood the voice of the Prince of spirits. The modes of mediating the miracles of Christ in His operations on external nature are hardest to discover. Here also the connecting links have been lost for the most part, because sufficient account has not been taken of the co-operation of hearts. This applies especially to the miracles of food and drink which Jesus wrought. How very much has it been the practice to pass over, in these miracles, the mental states of the persons for whom they were wrought! In many a dissertation on the miracle at Cana, the exclamation,They have no wine! no wine!' meets us at every turn; and some theological treatises upon it handle the whole question after so grossly material a fashion, so utterly without a surmise of the significance of the spiritual transaction in this history, that one would think they were composed in a tavern, or meant to lay the scene of the narrative in a publichouse! But how could these miracles have a New Testament power and significance, if they were not performed in the element of emotional life (Gemüthsleben) and of the sphere of faith? We do not intend to enlarge on this remark here, but reserve the development for the sequel. In the stilling of the storm on the Lake of Gennesaret, the mediating consisted in this, that first of all the hearts of the disciples, as the firstlings of the new humanity, were laid at rest before the winds and

VOL. II.

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waves were stilled. The cursing of the fig-tree was mediated by that presentiment of the judgment awaiting Jerusalem and the end of the world, which so deeply moved Christ in His last days.

It will be understood that the supernatural, which is operative in all Christ's miracles, must be always and immediately looked for in His divine life-power. This life-power, in the case where Christ performed a miracle, is identical with the omnipotence of God; for He performed such an act only according to the will of the Father, and in unity with Him. It was the overpowering agency of the sovereign principle which was placed in the centre of the world, in order to destroy its corruption and effect its glorification. But the expressions of the power of Christ, as they differ in different miracles, so also the forms they assume are different. To the leprous Christ presented Himself as positive purity, the absolute power of all purification; to the deaf, as the ear-forming word; and to the dead, as the positive life-giving life. And as Christ in such agency becomes one with the Father, so is the disposition in which He accomplishes His miracle one with Him. His word is the fructifying principle with which the receptive faith takes in the victorious lifepower which is destined to effect the miracle in its own lifecircle. The believers in miraculous power therefore received, in the moment of the performance of the miracle, by a sympathetic elevation of their disposition, a share in the noble-mindedness of Christ, and in this moment of their highest nearness to heaven the miracle became incorporated with their life.

But in all cases an old naturalness, either a dark form or a fettering limitation, or an evil of the old world which has become nature, is broken through and taken away by the miraculous agency of Christ. At one time, it is the roaring storm; at another time, it is water in the colourless form which it takes as a defect in contrast with the wine; and at a third time, it is the grave. This character of destruction is most prominent in the cursing of the fig-tree.

But, lastly, we also see that all the miracles of Jesus bear the impress of true miracle, because they enter nature with creative, liberating, formative power, and complete themselves as natural processes. The men whom Christ heals or restores to life come forward again, as forms restored to this world, in

all their native freshness. To the daughter of Jairus food is given to eat (Mark v. 43). Lazarus soon after his resurrection is found among the guests at a feast. Our Lord causes this subsidence of miracle into natural life to appear even in effecting His own miracles. The blind man whom Christ cured at Bethsaida (Mark viii. 22), after Christ's first operation, exclaimed, 'I see men as trees walking!' Visible objects still appeared before his eyes in indistinct outline, nor did he perfectly recover his sight till Christ had touched his eyes a second time. The Lord seems carefully to have given prominence to this natural side of the cures He effected, and to have drawn, so to speak, a veil round the strictly miraculous operation by availing Himself more or less of natural operations. Even the word by which He usually effected His work, is not in itself alone to be regarded as a mere unsensuous expression of the spirit. As in its meaning it is a divine thought, so outwardly it is a thunderbolt of the soul's life-a powerful psychical act, inflaming the hearts and agitating the organs of the susceptible. Such a word of Christ is, in miniature, an image of the crcative universal agency of God by which He created the world—that infinite expression of God, which inwardly was altogether His sunbright thought and will, and outwardly a mysterious, darkly brooding, immeasurably rich fulness of life --that creative basis of the world which now appeared in Him in individual personality. But the nature-side of His miraculous agency was more striking when He touched the sufferers or laid hold of them by the hand. Such contact must have been, in the case of the leprous especially, a revolting operation (Matt. viii. 3). With such an one Christ placed Himself in the relation of defilement. He exposed Himself thereby to the danger, according to the Levitical law, of being excluded from the congregation as an unclean person; He even hazarded His life for the sake of curing the leprous when He touched them. This moral operation itself, in its living power to touch the soul, was for the diseased like a flash of lightning from heaven. But it is remarkable, that Jesus never went beyond touching. Though, according to the account in Mark's Gospel (vi. 13), the disciples of Jesus often anointed the sick with oil, and thus restored them to health, yet we are not warranted by this circumstance to conclude that Jesus Himself used such means.

The disciples, with their weaker miraculous power, appear to have depended on a more natural act of healing; as, according to the direction of James, the elders of the Church were obliged to do at a later period. In fact, besides touching, imposition of the hands, or laying hold of the hand of the diseased, in which the complete miraculous power of His holy hand was manifested, Christ only employed one physical means repeatedly, one distinctly individual, a natural bodily means-His spittle. The ancients attribute to the saliva a sure healing power, especially for many disorders of the eyes; an opinion which is still held in our own times.1 But Christ appears to make this means the vehicle of a higher power. If the personality of Christ is regarded according to its peculiar significance as the life-giving life, as positive healthfulness, we may venture to expect that every bodily substance or quality which has proved itself elsewhere in any degree curative, will be found again in His life in the highest potency, and, as an expression of that life, will exhibit the highest healing efficiency. But Jesus applied the same means in different ways. He healed (according to Mark vii. 33) a deaf and dumb man by putting His fingers in his ears, and then, after spitting on His finger, touching his tongue.2 In the case of the blind man at Bethsaida, the spittle seems to have been directly applied to the eyes of the blind, and followed by the imposition of hands (viii. 22). When He cured the man born blind at Jerusalem (John ix.), He spat on the ground and made a paste, with which He anointed the eyes of the blind, and ordered him to go and wash in the pool of Siloam. We have here again an advanced application of the spittle the paste which He spread on the eyes of the blind, as something more than a momentary application, and the time spent in going to the pool at Siloam, during which it remained, constituted this advanced use of it. The washing in the pool of Siloam, which the afflicted man had to perform, seems to have been only a symbolical act in which, with his faith, his cure was to be completed. At all events, it was otherwise with

'See Fleck, die Vertheidigung des Christenthums, p. 150; Tacitus, Hist. iv. 81; Suetonius, Vesp. vii.

2 The ears appear to have been touched with one hand and the tongue with the other simultaneously; and this operation seems to mark a peculiar influence.

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the spittle. The repetition of its application plainly shows that it was used as a means; and although its application does not do away with the miraculous character of the cures in which Jesus made use of it, yet it shows how He was inclined to conceal, in a degree, His miraculous acts,-to soften the sublime abruptness of their direct operation by a connection with some form, more or less known, of the extraordinary art of healing.1 It was a little thing, an act of condescension, for Him to perform these single miracles; while the people were astonished at them as the highest expressions of His life. This induced Him to make His healing operations approach a natural form, and to clothe them in poor, flat, and strange forms, in order to bring the exalted power that revealed itself in Him into communication with the life of the world. Yet He could not have given His miracles this form, if He had found in it no healing power whatever. For this very reason, this form of Christ's miraculous cures, the application of His spittle, was peculiarly suited to make what was miraculous in His operations appear as natural, and what was natural in His life appear as miraculous. This nature-side of His miraculous power meets us most strikingly in the history of the woman suffering from the issue of blood, who was healed by the believing touch of His garment. The Lord had not conversed with her; yet He was aware that He had been touched, and that by this contact a cure had been effected, for He declared that 'virtue had gone out' of Him (Luke viii. 46). Does not the healing power of Christ here appear almost in a pathological form as a suffering? Offence has been taken at this narrative. And yet it only manifests the most delicate feeling for life in a personality most rich in

1 [Ewald (Christus, p. 224, 4th ed.) notices in this connection how our Lord sometimes inquired into the symptoms of the bodily disease. All these forms of 'mediation' prove to his mind that His human acting was bound to the universal laws of the divine order, and that this He would in no wise arrogantly violate.'-ED.]

2 Considering the means of cure objectively, we must at all events distinguish between the animal healing power residing in the saliva and the psychical healing power communicated through the intention of the worker of the miracle, perhaps through His breath. If the ancients, embracing both these elements in their concrete unity, contemplated the miraculous element as the decisive one, it does not follow that they denied the natural

one.