this perfect consciousness of God and His imperturbable repose -of this elevation of soul in the feeling of harmony with the agitated element—and of this rhythmically borne and noblest corporeity, exhibits the unity of the new human life in the spirit as it attains dominion over nature. In this miracle the Man of the spirit, in His world-historical importance, is borne out of the water of nature-life. It is a symbolical fact which has gained a natural position in an extraordinary rich history of New Testament operations. The more man regains the full consciousness of the sovereignty of his spirit over nature, the more he regains power over the natural feelings of his life,the more does the dread of nature vanish from his path, and he resumes the full dominion over its forces.

But this discrepancy with nature into which man has fallen by his guilt, is further manifest in distinct evils with which man is afflicted, particularly in his infirmities and sicknesses. These evils are characteristic marks of the deep corruption of the old æon; they are united most intimately with sin. It would indeed be hyper-Jewish if we were disposed to lay as a burden on the individual, his peculiar infirmity as his desert. Such a view can be regarded only as a popular superstition. It is an insult to the spirit of the Hebrew religion to charge it with maintaining it. And if any one would ascribe it to Christ, it would be in opposition to His most explicit declarations. Yet, on the other

water.'-Extract from the Seherin von Prevorst. See Tholuck's Glaubwürdigkeit der evang. Geschichte, p. 100.

1 Strauss (ii. 75) finds, first of all, in the expressions of Jesus (Matt. ix. 1) a reference to the Jewish' view, that evil, and especially the sickness of the individual, is the punishment of his sin. His subsequent remark is at variance with this, that Jesus expressly declared of the case proposed to Him (John ix. 1, etc.), that this special evil was not owing to the criminality of the individual, but was founded on higher divine designs.' Thus the higher educated' author of the fourth Gospel seems to have allowed Jesus to reject the former view; yet, on the other hand, according to John v. 14, 'infirmity as a punishment of sin' is announced to the man cured at the pool of Bethesda. But this must relate to 'sinning generally,' so that the meaning of Jesus was, that if that man only sinned again generally, he would again be afflicted with disease. The passage in Luke xiii. 1 ought to confirm the view of the connection between sin and misfortune in every individual (whence it would follow, that the eighteen men on whom the tower of Siloam fell, according to the Lord's views, were all equally guilty). Along with this 'vulgar Hebrew' view of sickness and evil, Jesus must have been burdened with the opposite Essene-ebionitish 'view,' according to

hand, we must also mark it as hyper-heathenish, if the general connection of all sin with all evil, and the general appointment of all evils to be the punishment of all sins, and if, lastly, the spectacle that a thousand times individuals pay for their individual transgressions, should be denied. Only materialism in morals can wish to dissever the bond of connection between sin and punitive evil. Now, among the people of Israel the feeling of this connection was developed in a very high degree, and partially to a morbid excess. They had experienced God's chastisements under the discipline of the law, and often had bowed under His strokes with slavish dread. The miserable mental state of the unfortunate was aggravated by the harshness with which they were condemned by their more fortunate pharisaically-minded brethren. And at the time of Christ's advent almost all the fruits on the tree of human misery in Israel appeared to be ripened. The chronic diseases which are indigenous in Palestine, and countries of a similar climate, such as blindness, leprosy, paralysis, and nervous disorders, were very widely spread. Christ found Himself in the fulness of the Spirit placed in the presence of this misery. He met with many sufferers, who were at once in need of salvation and of bodily healing. By means of the latter, the sense of the former was ripened; and, in their desire for salvation, the state of mind was produced which fitted them for receiving bodily relief, that is, faith in the possibility of miraculous aid. In the fulness of the Spirit and of the peace of God lay the power of Christ to forgive the sins of those who felt their need of salvation, and, by the assurance of the grace of God, to animate their hearts with the glow of a new life. With an impulse of that positive confidence in God which He possessed, He could transport, by His consolations, to a heaven of divine joy those souls that felt themselves cast down to the gates of hell. How could Christ have cherished in His spirit this power to forgive sins in an abstract form; that is, only a power over the spirits of men, and not at the same time a power over their souls and bodily organisms? It was in accordance with His concrete victorious power over evil, that when it met Him in individual cases, He steadily re

which the righteous in this æon are the suffering, the poor, and the sick. Such are the contradictions which are here cast as reflections on the clear mirror of the ethical consciousness of Jesus.

garded it from the root to the summit. But so also would the diseased, who, under Israelitish discipline, were trained to exercise faith in His aid, expect from Him, according to their entire view of the world, concrete aid both spiritual and bodily. According to the prophetic promises, the Israelite expected in his Messiah a Saviour who would work miracles; therefore the Jew who was anxious for salvation could not have received and retained so firmly the consolation of the forgiveness of sins from the lips of Jesus, if it had not been confirmed to him by bodily aid. It is difficult for the penitent sinner to retain absolution in ' pure spirituality. The Christian finds the seal of his reconciliation in the renewed peace of his society (Sozietät), especially in the sacrament, by which he becomes one with the Church and with the Lord of the Church. The temporary sacrament with which the contrite Israelite received his absolution from the lips of Jesus, was the miracle. Although this connection between the outward and inward healing was not in all cases equally apparent and marked, yet even in those wherein it was faintest it existed in some measure, so that those who needed bodily aid did homage to the Lord as the Messiah; and Weisse has justly remarked, that faith in the forgiveness of sins, and the effect of it, is to be regarded as a prominent feature of the cures performed by Christ.

The case of the paralytic at Capernaum (Matt. ix. 1) appears to us the most striking example of this agency of Christ. First of all, he received from Christ the assurance of the forgiveness of his sins. But the pharisaical spirits wished to despoil him of this inestimable gift by pronouncing the absolution to be blasphemy; upon which our Lord ratified it with a heavenly sacrament which they could not gainsay, by saying to the sick man, Arise, take up thy bed, and go unto thine house!'

The words of Jesus, therefore, penetrated as a ray of vital

1 [So Ewald, while he maintains that Jesus satisfied all the deepest, godliest longing in Israel, says (p. 219 of his Geschichte Christus), 'The kingdom of the perfect, true religion must break the power and the destructive consequences of sin; but all human ills are so connected with sin, that even those which are bodily only through it become thoroughly dangerous and radically obstinate, and therefore even those are the proper objects of the deeds of might of the genuine King.'-ED.]

power the hearts of those who believed in His miracles, operating with creative energy, and imparting a healthy vitality to every part of the frame. There is a class of diseases which may be regarded as an exhaustion of the fulness and freshness of the organism, namely, hereditary bodily infirmities. Now it lies in the nature of the case, that such infirmities must soonest give way to Christ's vital ray which penetrates the life-root of the infirm through their organism. The cure of a man born blind may appear more difficult within the range of common experience, than the cure of one who has become blind, but in relation to the conception of miracle it may be considered as the easier. The sun with its fresh rays can most easily stimulate the stunted growth of a plant. The solar ray, which somehow was wanting to the bodily stunted in the very beginnings of their life, now darts suddenly into the root of their life, and completes their first birth with the beginning of the second. Also the lame and deformed appear to stand in a nearer relation to the psychico-electrical powerful agency, to the lightning flash of the miraculous word of Jesus.1

2

Fevers form another kind of suffering. Their cure shows how positive repose and heavenly tranquillity can be communicated with healing power to the sick; or how the fiery conflict of fever against evil can be instantaneously rendered victorious by the warm stream of life which proceeds from Christ.

The healing of lepers belongs to the most important cures effected by Jesus. The leprosy seemed to seize inexorably on the whole living substance of the sufferer, and to have doomed him to death. But this fearful disease, which in general was so fatal, was sometimes capricious. It would strike out on the surface of the body, and pass off in a white eruption on the skin. This natural process of cure corresponded entirely to Christ's method of cure; His healing operations proceeded from within outwards.

1 Cures of the blind are mentioned or narrated in Matt. ix. 27, xìi. 22, xv. 30, xx. 30, xxi. 14;—of the paralytic, to whom as a particular class the lame and the maimed belong, Matt. iv. 24, viii. 6, ix. 2, xi. 5, xii. 16, xv. 30; Luke vi. 6, xiii. 11; John v. 1;-the healing of the woman with the issue of blood, Matt. ix. 20;-the cure of a man with the dropsy is narrated Luke xiv. 2. Many cures are repeated in the parallel passages. 2 See Matt. viii. 14; John iv. 52.

3 Matt. viii. 2; Luke xvii. 12.

The demoniacs of the New Testament history are, on the one hand, classed by the Evangelists with the other sick; but on the other hand, they are distinguished as a peculiar class from the common sick. That first of all they were considered and treated as sick persons, is evident. They appear as such, according to the symptoms of their malady as nervous, epileptic, insane, raving, and the like. Matthew speaks of the sick who were affected with various distempers and plagues, and then divides these into three classes: those possessed with devils, and those which were lunatic, and those that had the palsy' (Matt. iv. 24). But they are distinguished again from the common sick. Mark says, 'Jesus healed many that were sick of divers diseases, and cast out many devils' (i. 34). By these distinctions with which, on the one hand, the Evangelists represent the demoniacs as sick, but on the other, as afflicted by a demon, their conception of the mysterious phenomenon goes beyond the opposition between the supernaturalist and the rationalist views. According to the first, it is asserted, these sufferers were possessed by demons, therefore they were not naturally sick. Then on the other side it is said, they were naturally sick, therefore not possessed by demons. The arguing on both sides may be thus represented: One party maintains, the wind blows into the chamber, therefore the window is not open; the other asserts, on the contrary, the window stands open, therefore the wind does not blow into the chamber.

Here we must revert to the doctrine we have stated above, of the infinitely delicate operation of ethical powers. As it is applicable to the doctrine of angels and of devils, so also to that of demons. The popular view of the material, plastic lodgment of one demon or more in the body of a possessed person is sensuously coarse; but hardly so much so as the opposite supposition, that a man is afflicted with a natural nervous disorder, and on that account does not lie under demoniacal influences. There are hereditary nervous disorders, mysterious obstructions of the psychical life; strange dissonances and disturbances enter into the course of life which have this common quality, that they more or less affect the freedom of man's ethical life. If he could be healthy in this want of freedom, he would go back to the pure instinct of animal life. But such a normal human-animal life would be, in its very naturalness, a frightful monstrosity.