in Jerusalem, and surround himself with ministers and servants selected exclusively from the chosen Hebrew

race.

Such being their creed, and the hope which it inspired in their bosoms, Jesus was not the Deliverer they looked for, and were ready to receive. We have been told, in one of the most recent productions of continental scepticism, that Jesus formed-nay, that He even modified His ideas of the kingdom of God to fit the times in which He lived, and the circumstances by which He was surrounded-that, "entering into the burning atmosphere created in Palestine by the idea of a Messiah conceived in the midst of the Jewish people," ,"* He addressed himself to the task of realizing the expectation fondly cherished by His race, and sought to impress the minds of His countrymen with the belief that He was Himself the fulfilment of those Messianic prophecies on which their hopes were based. This interpreter of the life of Jesus would have us to believe that it was the expectation of the people which created the Christ-that our Saviour succeeded by an unwarranted appropriation to Himself of the mission which existed only in the heated fancies of the Jews. It is entirely forgotten by the author, and the supporters of this theory, that, in every respect, Jesus contradicted the national expectation which He is alleged to have seized, and only pretended to fulfil. Had He come with a narrow mission, bounded by the limits of Judæa, and promising to meet and satisfy the selfish longings of the Hebrew hearthad He descended from the mountains of His native land, sword in hand, and with a train of patriotwarriors obedient to His word, ready to fight with naked steel for the

• M. Renan: Vic de Jésus.

material pre-eminence which the Jews were now regarding as the highest good-had He flung out a warlike banner to the winds, with a golden motto inscribed on its fluttering folds, asserting a claim to the throne of His father David, then doubtless the nation would have responded to His call-then would they have recognized in this combatant for earthly pomps and power the long-expected Christ of God. But not in this way does the Consolation of the true Israel come. Standing in the Temple, the son of Mary offers to His enslaved countrymen a kind of freedom which by far the greater number of them do not want to have at all-a freedom which they all need, but which few of them desire to be blessed with-a freedom from the cruel thrall of sin. Supremely distasteful to His audience are the words He utters; for they are words that make them wince they are words most galling to their pridethat frustrate all their dearest hopes, that pain them by demanding holiness, that wound their provincial vanity by putting them on a level with the other branches of the family of man. As He thus strives to humble these proud children of Abraham, who have turned the precious promises of Heaven into poison, so that what was a blessing to their faithful father is proving a curse to them, they have no welcome to give that Saviour for whom so many of their pious ancestors looked and longed. Denouncing, in sternly faithful words of rebuke, the prejudices and the vices of the times; proclaiming a spiritual revolution, which should bring the reign of hypocrisy and formalism to an end; calling upon these men of a deeply corrupted age to immediate repentance, all the welcome that they have for such a Messiah is contradiction and the cross. The more He tells them of the

gracious purpose of His coming, the more bitterly they revile Him. When He presents Himself to their view as the possessor of all the powers of the higher life, who can satisfy every desire and meet every want of the soul-when He repeats the gracious assurance that He is the Light of the sin-darkened world, the angry Pharisees assert that His witness is not true, because it rests on His own unsupported testimony; and when, in spite of all their taunts, that might well provoke Him to silence, He proceeds in mercy to declare His divine dignity and His pre-existence, saying unto them-"Verily, verily, I say unto you, before Abraham was, I am," the exasperation of the people rises to the highest pitch; the reply which they now vouchsafe to His sublime expression of the truth is in accordance with their bitter, hateful thoughts; their malicious tongues no longer suffice to convey the fiery resentment that is burning in their hearts, and they take up stones to cast at Him-they prepare to kill as a blasphemer the Christ of God.

But the hour of the Lord was not yet come. No human hand could harm Him. The shield of God rendered Him invulnerable against all these earthly foes. And so, proving Himself in action to be the possessor of the Almighty power which he had claimed in His words, "Jesus hid Himself, and went out of the Temple, going through the midst of them, and so passed by. And as Jesus passed by, He saw a man blind from his birth." And there the passing Saviour paused to do a wondrous work of grace and might upon the poor blind beggar lying at the Temple gate. This pause seems to me to be no less wonderful than the work which it witnessed. It is the pause (1) of one who is divinely calm, (2) of one who is divinely pitiful, and (3) of one who has a divine work to do.

I.

It is the pause of one who is divinely calm.-By the forthputting of an unseen, mysterious power, Jesus has just newly extricated Himself from the furious onslaught of His angry foes; for, though the narrative of the miracle which He is now about to perform opens a fresh chapter of the evangelical record, there is nothing to mark a break; and while we know that the preceding discourse in the Temple was delivered on the Sabbath-for it was spoken on the last day of the Feast of Tabernacles, which was always such-we also know, from what is stated in a subsequent part of the narrative, that the healing of the blind man was wrought on the Sabbath too. Only a few moments have elapsed, then, since the malice of the Jews had risen to its height, so that they had taken up stones to cast at Jesus. That last crowning act of ferocity had been preceded by a long and trying train of scornful questioning, by the scoffing remarks of hardened unbelief, by the malignant misuse of each answer which the patient and gentle Teacher had deigned to give them, as a new ground of vantage for further opposition to the truth which He proclaimed.

Yet, in spite of all that has but newly passed in His newly passed in His presence within the Temple walls, behold, how calm He is. It almost seems as if He had come from some grateful and refreshing solitude, from the peace-breathing atmosphere of the lonely mountain and private prayer, instead of from the scene of hot contention and a furious multitude of enraged men, who could not brook His doctrine, and who sought to take away His life. A rare moral grandeur, such as spirits on our lower level can but partially comprehend, has been disclosed in the attitude and the speech of Jesus during the whole of the

Temple scene; a spirit of unbroken composure He has maintained amidst all the taunts and insinuations of His subtle and desperate foes; but to see Him now, apparently unperturbed as ever in His soul, with that unearthly air of calm hanging like a robe of heaven around Him, in His inner as in His outer man, seemingly unaffected by all the sore trials that have just transpired, is to look upon peace the most profound, where we might rather expect to find a tempest of the soul; and this serenity rises to a still sublimer height when He pauses at such an hour, and on the very threshold (so to speak) of the Temple door, from which He is retreating, to regard the poor blind sufferer who is lying there. Beautiful and impressive beyond all the power of human language to express is that holy calm which He preserves amidst the most deadly manifestations of malice and scorn. No fear of interruption can be detected disturbing His survey of the afflicted man. The look which He bestows upon the sufferer, together with His subsequent words, and the work of healing with which the whole is crowned, are all distinguished by the most perfect freedom, and seem to bear the marks of an easy and unconcerned leisure rather than of a stormy and trying hour. This pause at the Temple gate is the pause of one who is divinely calm.

II.

It is the pause of one who is divinely pitiful.-We can survey no part of the life of Jesus in which it is not made manifest that compassion for man held the place of one of the master-forces of His soul. That man is worse than blind who can read the Scripture narrative of the Saviour's life without feeling the charm of the subduing tenderness which streams fresh from His heart,

and sheds itself, like a grateful balm, over the whole of His public career. Who can doubt that spiritual truth was very precious to His holy soul -that He was keenly, tenderly alive to all the rights and all the claims of God? Yet, when He gazed upon the multitudes, sinful and degrading as they were, much as their lives of sensuality and debasement were dishonouring to God, "He had compassion on them, because they were as sheep that had no shepherd." As He thought on thought on the amazing destiny which lay before each one of these immortal spirits, a destiny either of ineffable brightness and glory, or of unutterable gloom; as He reflected on the possibilities of splendour or of misery that lay in the unending future for them all; impulses of love and pity gushed up fresh and warm within His heart, and imparted a subduing pathos to every word He spoke, for "He had compassion on them" who had no compassion on themselves.

But, though such a simple sentence as that, and such tears as He wept over the city of Jerusalem, go far down into the depths of His being, and lay open to our view the spring of His loving ministrations on behalf of the fallen race, we cannot help believing that a more profound depth is sounded as we look upon Him at the Temple gate, pausing in the presence of the solitary sufferer who touches the chords of His sympathy, and, with the mute appeal of eyeballs that never beheld the light, craves help of His Almighty hand. For only remember what has been the ordeal through which He has but newly gone; He has just "endured such contradiction of sinners against Himself." The fear of interruption, and the ruffling of the spirit's calm, arising from a painful conflict with those whom He has come to teach and save, are not the only things that

we might suppose likely to freeze the genial currents of His soul, and stay His helping hand. These are, indeed, among the smaller of the influences that we should expect to find at work, repressing the loving ardour of His spirit, and leading Him to withhold the expression of His sympathy. Will He, can He, tarry in such a darksome hour as that, to accomplish a work of grace upon one who belongs to the very family who have sought to reward His instructions and His gracious aid with a blasphemer's death-who, if their power had corresponded with their purpose and their will, would even now, on this holy Sabbath, have stained the Temple floor with their benefactor's blood? Will not the sweet impulses of love and pity be for the moment quenched, even in that compassionate bosom? Will He not be found, at the least, seeking to get Him away for a time from the fierce malignity and the freezing ingratitude of man, that He may rest His wearied heart in the hushed and healing asylum that is furnished by the lonely mountain? Nay; it is not so with Him. It is so with us; but His thoughts are not our thoughts, neither are our ways His ways. Man, enfeebled in the prosecution of a good work by lack of sympathy, and made to drink of the bitter cup of ingratitude, may sigh for a lodge in some vast wilderness, and, even in the depth of his despondency, flee from the society of his fellow-men, leaving the sympathetic sense of brotherhood and the sphere of labour behind him. A small thing in the way of contradiction and trial will often suffice to turn us aside from duty; it takes but little to weaken and depress us, and make us forsake the road which we wish to find all smooth and plain, but which, in its rugged and uneven surface, does not answer to our anticipations and our

hopes. But nothing can quench the ardour with which Jesus loves, or withdraw Him for a moment from that rugged course of service in which He ever walks. Driven from Judæa by the envy and malice of the Pharisees, He goes into Galilee to meet new foes, working for the good of the half heathen and wholly degraded Samaritans at Sychar as He goes upon His way; for, impelled by the necessity of His compassionate nature, "He must needs go through Samaria." Rejected by His native Nazareth, He descends to the shore of the Galilean sea, and in Capernaum pursues the work of ministry which His fellow-townsmen had scorned. His second rejection by those who looked down upon Him as the carpenter's son is immediately succeeded by His third toilsome circuit of Galilee. No sooner does He escape from the hands of the unbelieving Jews in one place, than He is found labouring for their good in another; and over the city He weeps, which is willing to give Him only a cross and a grave. And preserving ever the same loving, patient, helpful spirit, we find Him now, even in the very neighbourhood and hour of danger-yea (what is more amazing still), at the very moment when wicked men have sought to murder Him-tarrying in the streets of the cruel city, almost within the precincts of the very Temple, to perform a work of love and grace on man. Not hurried away from His work, but rather hurried to it, by the malignant opposition of those for whose sake He toiled. We are surely entitled, then, to say that this is the pause of one who is not only divinely calm, but divinely pitiful.

III.

It is the pause of one who has a divine work to do.-We find this plainly proved, (1) by the knowledge

which Jesus shows Himself to have of what is hidden in the past; (2) by His declaration of what lies in the future; and (3) by the manner in which He vindicates a lofty claim.

1. Jesus proves the work to be divine by the knowledge which He shows Himself to have of what is hidden in the past.-No sooner have the disciples looked upon the sufferer than they begin to connect his calamity with great personal guilt, after the manner of men putting the darkest construction on the case of their smitten fellow-man. Their thought finds expression in the form of a question" Master, who did sin, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" But although their notion is put in this modest way, it is obvious that they have already reached a conclusion from which they will not be easily dislodged-that this birthblindness is a special punishment of the sufferer's own special sins. At once Jesus condemns the ungentle thought, and sharply shuts out the cruel surmise, by declaring what was in reality the purpose of God in permitting the great affliction to come upon the man. Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents," that he should be born blind; though in the swift directness of His reply, Jesus does not stay to utter all these words, but makes His correction of their error all the sharper by leaving a phrase unuttered which it is needful to understand-"Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents; but that the works of God should be made manifest in him." The man and his parents, and the purposes of God concerning him, were all known to the speaker. Jesus is acquainted with the things which lie far beyond mortal ken in the dim mysterious past; and He folds back this closed leaf in the book of God's providence, and reads out the entry concerning

this afflicted man- letting him, for the first time, into the glorious secret of his own sorrow, as He informs the disciples, first by the gracious word, and then by the healing act, that this affliction was suffered to come upon their fellow, that, through its removal, the grace and glory of God might be magnifiedthat it was a part of God's plan for the bringing of this man to the light of everlasting life, that he should for a while be left destitute of physical sight, that ultimately there might be poured upon his eyeballs a twofold light-the one light entering by the body's eye, and gladdening the heart through that crystal window of the soul; the other entering by the spiritual eye, and gladdening the soul itself.

2. But Jesus proves the work to be divine as well by His declaration of what lies in the future. "I must work the works of Him that sent me while it is day; the night cometh when no man can work." The meaning of these words is clear when they are read in the light which streams from Calvary. With such distinctness did the future rise upon the Saviour's view. He saw what was coming as the earth's reward of all His earthly toil; and so unquenchable was the love which accompanied this perfect knowledge, that, in the very fact that the hatred of His enemies must soon come to a head, and find its fitting consummation in His death, Jesus finds a motive impelling Him to use more diligently still, on man's behalf, those blessings which He has it in His power to bestow. "Need is," He exclaims to His disciples, who will too soon understand the meaning of words that are in the meantime obscure--"Need is that I work this work now, however out of season it may seem; for that night which the malice of the Jews is