faculty of mind and body perfect, save one, the blind are yet, for the most part, helpless as little children; and when guided, as they often are, by the hands of little children, it is a touching picture, if we may so speak, of helplessness helping helplessness, of weakness propping weakness. It is recorded of Archbishop Leighton, that, one day meeting a blind beggar, his touching remark was, "Methinks this poor sufferer cries out in behalf of the whole human race as its representative, and let what he so earnestly craves be given to him, as readily as God bestows on the spiritually blind who need it." The blind are, indeed, an apt representation of our spiritual condition, and among the many symptoms of spiritual disease enumerated by our Saviour, in the church at Laodicea, blindness is one. "Thou knowest not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked." And yet how much of compensating mercy is there even in the withdrawal of one sense! how, generally speaking, are other faculties sharpened and strengthened by the privation of one! How many a source and channel of happiness, with which a stranger intermeddleth not, are opened to the blind, to the religious blind especially! How much of consolatory communion with God, how much of inward light and brightness, and the "opening of the eyes of the understanding," that puts to shame the darkness and blindness of those that do see! And so it was here. These blind men, even in the streets of

godless Capernaum, follow Jesus, proclaiming aloud, that he was the Son of David, that it was He that should come into the world; and the very terms in which Jesus grants their cure, attest the reality and sincerity of their conviction, "According to your faith be it unto you. And their eyes were opened." But few, if any, amid the crowd that followed him, save his own disciples, had the same conviction; and far happier and more blessed was the blindness which led them to Jesus than that sight, which, seeing, sees not, and doth not perceive. "For judgment I am come into this world, that they which see not might see; and they which see might be made blind." The same might be said of the dumb man, whose case comes next under review. No doubt unhappy in his affliction, separated from his kind, though not altogether an outcast from their sympathy, for they brought him to Jesus; and yet, afflicted as he was, "far better," as has been well said, "to be a dumb devil, than a blaspheming one." Better to have been for ever dumb, than to have employed the organs of speech, the very gifts of God, as these Pharisees did, in impugning His power, vilifying His work, and ascribing to the agency of Satan the operations of His love and goodness. It is a responsibility little thought of, that we are in possession of our faculties; it is a mercy little acknowledged, perhaps, with thanksgiving, that we have still our organs of sight, and speech, and hearing unimpaired; and yet these

are among the “talents" for which we must give account. It was a sad reproach on Israel, by the prophet, reiterated by the Saviour, and again by the apostle, "The heart of this people is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes have they closed, lest they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them."

SECTION XXXII.

(Chapter x. verses 1—24.)

OUR Lord, you remember, in his sermon on the mount, had said, "Take no thought for the morrow." He is now about to put his disciples' reception of that precept to the test, by sending them forth on a perilous and painful errand, without provision for the way, and in simple dependence on His promise.

Every injunction in this chapter is so extraordinary in itself,-every declaration contained throughout it so far more likely to repel than to attract-its assurances of persecution and suffering on every side and from every quarter, are so distinct, and clear, and formidable, that one can only account for the instant and zealous obedience with which they were received, by a power accompany: ing the words on the hearts of these twelve apo

stles, as miraculous as when Jesus said to the paralytic, "Arise and walk," or to the ruler's child, "Maid, I say unto thee, Arise!" This mission was indeed confined to the house of Israel, to the cities of Judea and Galilee,-even Samaria was excluded on the present occasion; but as it lay between Judea and Galilee, and in passing from one to the other a traveller must needs pass by the way of the Samaritans, our Lord makes a distinction between them and the Gentiles: "Go not into the way of the Gentiles, and into any city of the Samaritans enter ye not." But even for this comparatively limited mission, no provision was to be made. Even the commonest necessaries of life were to be left,-not indeed to casual supply, or what the world might call chance, but to the express promise of Him who had said, "All these things shall be added unto you." And did that promise fail? Hear their own testimony:-" Jesus said unto them, When I sent you without purse, and scrip, and shoes, lacked ye anything? And they said, Nothing." Well may we ask, with the son of Sirach, "Did any ever trust in the Lord and was confounded?" It might be supposed, that, sent forth as they were by Him-who had power over every element, who could with a word expel evil spirits from their dwelling in man, and recall departed life, He might and would exercise some secret and mysterious influence over the minds, and dispositions, and feelings of those among whom

they went, to win some, at least, to receive themselves with kindness, and their message with reverence. But there is no promise of the kind. They are, on the contrary, enjoined to shake off the dust of their feet as a testimony against the house or the city that would not receive them; and, if persecuted in one city, they were to flee to another. In fact, it is impossible to read this chapter and not feel that, from first to last, in all its progressive details, and all its predictions of augmented sufferings, it is like the command to the patriarch, to "take his son, his only son, Isaac, whom he loved," a heightening of distress in every step to try his faith, and magnify the promise of God. If there be an expression of tenderness, a yearning for the desolate, it is more for those to whom Jesus sends, than for the messengers whom He sends. There is something touching in the character under which he depicts those to whom he is sending, not Gentiles, not Samaritans, but Israel, and not merely Israel, but the house of Israel, and the lost sheep of that house,-children of the same covenant of promise with themselves, and still more pathetically recommended to their compassion as lost and wandering ones.*

The twelve had indeed miraculous powers conferred upon them; but these were solely as credentials of their message, and were in no way to be employed either for their support, their *Bishop Jebb's Sac. Lit.