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made so crooked that we can never straighten it again. Our first born has become a liar, and our last born has run greedily after the devil, and our house is a place of emptiness. Thou hast sent a blight upon our fields, and suddenly turned away the tide of our prosperity; thou hast given us days of anxiety and nights of sleeplessness; and as for our poor strength, thou hast utterly withered it away.

Yet hast thou given us joys which could only have grown in heaven: thou hast blessed our eyes with light, thou hast set round about our table all pleasant things; no grave hast thou dug except it has been in the garden, where the flowers have hidden its hideousness; and thou hast not smitten us but in love, and if the stroke has been severe the kiss of thy love has been all-healing. Truly thou hast spared nothing from us; thou hast given us thine own Son. So hast thou dealt with our life so that it is all hill and dale -a strange, mysterious undulation, now rising up into heaven, and now deepening swiftly into places we dare not enter. Deal with us as thou wilt. If thou wilt take the last lamb, take it-not our will but thine be done. If thou wilt pluck the last flower, pluck it it was thine before it was ours; it is only ours because it is thine. If thou wilt send us prosperity, send us modesty along with it; if thou wilt greatly revive us with wondrousness of increase of life, then do thou touch the heart that it may be ready to answer thy greatest gifts with sweet hymns and solemn psalms of trust and love.

The Lord send a blessing to every one of us; may each heart have a line from heaven; let an angel sing in every ear; let no man feel himself lonely to sadness; let no heart shiver under the coldness of absolute isolation. Revive our best memories, relight our noblest hopes, kindle the passion of our early enthusiasm for Christ and his kingdom, and this day may men return from afar wandering, and with tears and love and trust and yearning, gather around the cross of the Lord Jesus and give to the Lamb of God, the Saviour of the world, their repentant and undivided heart. Amen.

Matthew viii. 28-34.

28. And when he was come to the other side into the country of the Gergesenes, there met him two possessed with devils, coming out of the tombs, exceeding fierce, so that no man might pass by that way.

29. And, behold, they cried out, saying, What have we to do with thee, Jesus, thou Son of God? art thou come hither to torment us before the time?

30. And there was a good way off from them an herd of many swine feeding.

31. So the devils besought him, saying, If thou cast us out, suffer us to go away into the herd of swine.

32. And he said unto them, Go. And when they were come out, they went into the herd of swine; and, behold, the whole herd of swine ran violently down a steep place into the sea, and perished in the waters.

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THE DIVINE LOOK.

33. And they that kept them fled, and went their ways into the city, and told everything, and what was befallen to the possessed of the devils. 34. And, behold, the whole city came out to meet Jesus: and when they saw him, they besought him that he would depart out of their coasts.

ΤΗ

THE SUPREME MIRACLE.

HIS is decidedly the worst case that has yet come up in the sacred narrative. There is always a testing case in every ministry. There are critical hours in every life. Jesus has been with wondrous placidity dealing with diseases of many kinds, touching them, and healing them, and driving them away; but most of the cases appear to have been what we should term of an ordinary kind, though there was nothing ordinary in them from any point of view but his own. That which is commonplace to him is a miracle to us; that which is a miracle to us was a commonplace to him. We do not occupy the same ground, we do not look at things from the same angle of vision. Here is a test case, and it makes me tremble. I have never seen Christ confronted after this sort before.

The men were exceeding fierce, so that no man might pass by that way. There was no mistake about the terribleness of this possession. The devils had been in the man a long time: he was naked; no house could hold him; he dwelt in the tombs; he was driven of the devil into the wilderness-the case was extreme; it makes me tremble; it turns all other incidents into ordinary events. How will Jesus Christ do now? We have put that question regarding one another in critical circumstances when great distress has come upon the life, when a loss of property has been threatened, when particular audiences have assembled for the purpose of giving judgment-in many other varieties of human experience we have asked concerning our friend, How will he carry himself now?

Whilst we are wondering what Jesus will do there is a cry of fear from the other side. He was working when we did not suppose he was doing anything; he was giving one of those silent looks* which eloquence cannot follow in descriptive terms; he was

* See a discourse on "The Silent Looks of Christ" at the end of the volume,

troubling the hidden devils with light which they only could see. The cry of distress comes from hell. Is there something in Christ's face that troubles the evil one? Is there anything in that calm, serene, majestic look which makes hell afraid? He alone was quiet. By-and-by it will be seen that this is the exact relation between parties in the universe: the good triumphant, the wicked cowardly and afraid. It does not look so now,

because the wicked are too demonstrative to show their real character they make a noise to keep their courage up, they fill their ears with their own vulgar din, and imagine that there is no other voice appealing to them. If I look at society from one point of view I am utterly disheartened-my hope goes out of me it is evidently devil-ridden and hell-bound, and nothing can stay it in its awful course; perdition must enlarge its borders to receive our enlarging civilisation. When I gather into one all the evil thinkers and evil doers that are in the world I feel that evil has the upper hand, and that God himself is but a theological term.

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Then, again, we come upon incidents that give a new point of view and a new reading of human events. We see that God is not dethroned when the true collision comes the result is won by a look. God is to do wonders by the brightness of his face the silent glance is to be as a sword before which nothing that is evil can stand. The ever-speaking but ever-silent face, gleaming with light, glowing with fire, is to make its way through the universe, and to leave heaven behind it. Oh, thou speaking man, and book-writing man, evangelist, apostle-call thyself by what name thou wilt, this conquest is not to be won by our noise, or fuss, or high demonstration of religious zeal-all this is right enough in its own place; it is part of the plan; it hath pleased God to do certain things by the foolishness of preaching; but the devil is to be burnt out with the divine look. Hold thy little light aloft; speak thou mightily or gently, in thunder or whisper as thou wilt, and do what little lies within the scope of thy little power; but understand that the final disposition of the devil, and the ultimate setting up of the dominion that is divine and beneficent, is to be done by the breath and the power and the glory of God. A nation shall be born in a day, the light shall fill the heavens in a moment, and the earth shall lose her cold shadows, and in the new warmth that shall penetrate her veins she shall give up her

54

TRUE KNOWLEDGE OF SELF.

dead, and be scarred and seamed no more by tombs and sepulchres and sanctuaries of death.

Read the histories as given by Matthew and by Luke, and regard them as completing one another, and as forming substantially the same incident, and you will see from its graphic colouring what man may become. Do not make little local anecdotes of these divine histories; do not let the years grow between you and the Book of God till they separate you as by a thick wedge from all that is venerable and true in history. This incident is occurring to-day. If I have to wander over a wilderness of eighteen hundred years to get at it I shall tire on the road. It occurs next door-to-morrow it may occur in our own house.

See here what man is, what man may become-what man really is in the sight and estimate of God. If you would profit by this incident see yourself in it. It is an evil temptation, one that will deplete you of every true sympathy and right conception of history and of the future, which leads you to think that this incident occurred once for all, and became an exciting and romantic anecdote in the neighbourhood in which it took place. You are the demoniac: I am the possessed with devils: they have never awakened yet altogether, but some of them are beginning to open their eyes, and to turn in restlessness, as if about to rise. Why will you put the Bible away from you thousands of years, and talk of Moses as if he were a dead man, and of the evangelists as though they lived only in epitaphs? These things are round about us now. When John Newton, the celebrated clergyman, saw a man being taken away to the scaffold to be hanged, he said, "There goes John Newton but for the grace of God." You cannot tell what you are; that is no merely earthly fire that burns in your blood. If you want to see what you may become go to the madhouse. It is an awful church, it is a terrible sanctuary; but if you want to see what you are made of go to the madhouse, into its very vilest and most appalling quarter, where no wise word is spoken, where no noble look ever illumines or elevates the human face, where no prayer to heaven is ever spoken, where there is violence extreme, cruelty only kept from its proper issues and outcomes by iron and granite, and all the forces of the most watchful civilisation. Pick out the worst specimen of that madness, and see yourself in those eyes of fire and those cheeks livid with excite

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ment, and in that whole frame shaken and torn by passions that cannot be controlled. I am afraid you have been too daintily reared I tremble lest you are the victims of your own respectability. There is no respectability in the sight of God. We see the contrast between the madman and the philosopher. That contrast is nothing as compared with the contrast between the sinner and what God meant him to be when he made him a man, and that appalling contrast is for ever in the sight of him that made us.

When I take this view of human nature, which is the only fundamental and profound view, all others being shams and tricks of an inventive immorality, I see our need of Christ. The doctor can heal my skin, the nurse can cool my brow, a friend may be able to lull me to momentary sleep in which I may forget my troubles; but when it comes to the point of agony, and I see the heart as it really is, and feel it as if it were on fire of hell, then I know that no water can quench it, but only blood can answer the great distress. You may whiten the sepulchre, you may make the outside of the cup and platter clean, you may look good to the eye that rests upon the skin, but to the eye that reads the inner life and sees every filament of your heart-to that eye we are wounds and bruises and putrefying sores.

The physiologist tells me that in every two square inches of the human brain there are two hundred million of fibres, each of which can receive a mental impression. I am lost in these astronomical figures. A hundred million of fibres in one square inch of the human brain! No theologian told me that, but the physiologist, a man whom everybody is ready to believe. That these should be kept for one hour is surely the supreme miracle of heaven. That these should be wrong and think amiss, and move the whole life in a forbidden direction, what is it but a tragedy that might make all heaven rain oceans of tears? It is a terrible thing to live, it is an appalling thing to be a man; there is but a step between the best of us and madness-yea, they who make psychology a study tell us that thin is the veil that separates genius from insanity.

There are people who would rather have devils in the land than have Jesus Christ. The whole city came out to meet Jesus, and when they saw him they besought him that he would depart out