CHAPTER I.

USES AND RELATIONS OF THE HEALING MINISTRY.

ALL the perplexed questions growing out of substitutions, imputations, legal satisfactions, and penal equivalents, have thus far been avoided. There has been no delving in our exposition, but we have been moving easily rather, along open ranges of thought, where nothing too abstruse, or difficult to serve a merely practical interest, has come in our way. In this manner, we have gone over a considerable tract of our field, meeting scarcely a point of debate, in the subject as commonly handled. We have discovered a meaning, not difficult, for the vicarious sacrifice, and for all the Scripture phraseology relating to the same. We have seen it to be grounded in principles of universal obligation, acknowledged, or to be acknowledged, by all good minds, uncreated and created, in all worlds and ages of time.

Having reached this point, we now pass to another general department of the subject; where, continuing still in this rather untrodden, some will think, too easy level of movement, we undertake to settle a Second stage of the argument. true conception of what Christ is doing in his sacrifice; viz., the end he will accomplish, the power by which he will accomplish it, and the course 130of life and benefaction by which he will obtain that power.

When this also is done, as I think it may be with the same facility and avoidance of perplexed questions, we may well enough comfort ourselves in the conclusion, that, if by and by, or from that point onward,’ we are obliged to go to sea in questions more perplexed and laborious, we have a considerable continent already gained behind us, where we shall have large enough room, and ranges wide enough in the truth, to afford a worthy, or even sufficient gospel by itself.

According to a current conception, Christ came into the world for the very purpose of the sacrifice, and not Christ not here to die, but dies because he is here. for ends beyond, in which the stress of his mission lay. The problem being to contribute so much of pain, or judicial suffering, as may be needed to square the account of sin, the conclusion naturally follows, when that view is taken, that he is here for the very purpose of the bleeding; that is to be substituted in our place, and take, or somehow compensate for, the release of our punishment. This, and not any thing different, is the coarsely conceived, legally quantitative vicariousness ascribed to him. We, on the other hand, regard the vicariousness in which he comes, only as the mode, or instinct of his love, when doing a work in the recovery and reconciliation of men. He was in vicarious sacrifice before he came into the world, having the world upon his feeling as truly as now, and only made the fact-form sacrifice, because he had the burden of it on him already. The 131sacrifice, taken as a fact in time, was not set before him as the end, or object of his ministry—that would make it a mere pageant of suffering, without rational dignity, or character—but, when it came, it was simply the bad fortune such a work, prosecuted with such devotion, must encounter on its way. The missionary, going out to spend his days among a heathen people, does not go to make so much of sacrifice, including even that perhaps of life itself—that being his purpose he might better stay at home-but he makes the sacrifice when the fit hour comes, because he is in a work, and because the work requires it of him. Christ, then, we must believe, is here to do something—some great and mighty work—not to make up a necessary quantum of pain, for the compensation of God’s justice. The sacrifice he makes, in becoming a man of sorrows, and dying a malefactor’s death, will be suffered under his work, and only for his work’s sake. He was not ignorant, of course, that he would suffer. He expected that, dying for his work would give eloquence and power to his mission; just because, not coming here to die, he would have it put upon him as the cost of his fidelity. Even as Anselm carefully and rightly distinguishes, when he says—“he suffered death of his own accord, not as an act of obedience, but on account of his obedience in maintaining right; for he held out so persistently, that he met death on account of it.”⁶⁶Cur Deus Homo—Lib. i Cap. ix.

What then is the end or object he is here to accomplish? By the supposition he is not here to square up 132the account of our sin, or to satisfy the divine justice for us. Neither is it any principal thing that he is here to What he undertakes to accomplish. prepare a possibility of forgiveness for sin. That is, if any thing, a secondary and subordinate matter, as will be discovered hereafter, in the Third Part of my argument. The true end, or object, of the sacrifice we shall find is very simple, though presented in the New Testament under manifold varieties of statement; for, widely different as the varieties are, they are all in radical agreement with each other. Taking our clue from one of the simplest and tenderest in beauty of them all—“The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which is lost;” or from one that is widest in range and contains the highest summation of all—“To wit that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself;” or from one most formally put, and, in a certain intellectual sense, the deepest of all—“To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I might bear witness to the truth”—taking hold of these and all such varieties of Scripture, we conceive a transaction moving on character in souls; a regenerative, saving, truth-subjecting, all-restoring, inward change of the life—in one word the establishing of the kingdom of God, or of heaven, among men, and the gathering finally of a newborn world into it.

But the farther unfolding of this central idea we shall find requires us, for convenience sake, to make a fourfold distribution of the field or subject matter. First, we shall naturally give attention directly to Christ’s 133Healing Ministry, and the large indication there made of what he is doing and to do, in his sacrifice elsewhere. Then we shall endeavor to show more exactly in another chapter, what work he undertakes or proposes to do in souls, by his sacrifice. In another and third chapter it will be shown that, for that work’s sake, he undertakes to be, and in the New Testament writings is conceived as being, the Great Moral Power of God, for its accomplishment. And then, fourthly, a chapter will be added to show how he becomes that power.

It is by no accident that Christ, not trained as a physician, and, as far as we can discover, never before exercised in matters of concern for the No accident that Christ is occupied with healings. sick, opens out the grand public ministry of his Messiahship directly into an office of healing, turning the main stress of it, we may almost say, down upon the healing of bodies, from that time onward. Hence it is the more remarkable, that, when so much is made, in the formulas, of his threefold function under the titles of Prophet, Priest, and King, he still makes no figure in them at all as a Physician or Healer. This latter he is in the literal fact of history, and a great part of his outward life is in this particular kind of engagement. The others he is, or is only to be, in some tropical, accommodated sense, where language helps its poverty by a figure more or less determinate. We discover, meantime, that while he does not disown, or repel these figures, permitting himself to be called a prophet, accepted as a priest, and exalted as 134a king, or Messiah, in his Kingdom, he does not conceive that he is specially distinguished in his lifetime, at least, in these characters; but assumes that he is to be known as the expected man of prophecy, even from the first, by the works of his Healing Ministry. Thus when John sends messengers to inquire—“Art thou he that should come or look we for another?” he sends back word in the affirmative, saying—“Yes I am the expected Healer.” “Go tell John what things ye have seen and heard, how that the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, to the poor the gospel is preached.” The plain inference is that however much, or little, may be meant by the three particular figures above named, he is, at any rate, in literal and solid fact of history, a healer—the Great expected Healer of mankind.

I do not call him the Physician, but the Healer, it may be observed; not because we need scruple to apply that name, but simply to call attention to the fact that the older designation, Healer, is the one always applied Disease goes with sin, Healing with salvation. to him in the New Testament, and has, in strict construction, a quite different meaning. There appears to be a deep seated, original conviction among men, that diseases are from God, or the gods—tokens of displeasure on account of sin. The bad consciousness of sin volunteers this appalling construction of them, and the sufferer hopes to recover, only by some mitigation of the powers he has offended. Hence the need of a Healer; one who shall have skill, or faith, or some kind of access to 135the retributive causes punishing the body, with power to abate their action, and accomplish the release of their victim. Thus also we find that, in almost all the savage races of the world, even now, the Healer is their Holy man, or Prophet, though in fact their conjurer only, or magician. The Physician, on the other hand, is one who deals in physic, one who cures the disorder of nature, by natural ingredients, working by their natural power. He and his work, and his means, are all in the plane of nature, (Phusis) and hence, from the days of Hippocrates downward, and perhaps in Egypt before that time, he is called a Physician. In that sense Christ was never a proper physician, for his cures were not wrought by prescription, but by the immediate extension, somehow, to the patient, of a divine, or supernatural power. He fulfilled, in this view, as probably it was never done before, the true idea of the Healer. The healing processes before resorted’ to had been of a mixed nature, more or less corrupted by superstition; operated, here and there by prescriptions obtained through oracles, or by application to prophets; sometimes seconded by appeal to God, in prayers and sacrifices offered by the priest. In the case of poison from the bite of serpents, incantations were specially resorted to. Diviners and magicians were often called in. If there was a pool, supposed to be stirred up, at certain hours, by an angel, the waters would be thought to have a special virtue. Now, at last, the Healer has come who can heal, and the true religious idea of the office is fulfilled in his person.

Why now this very remarkable devotion to the healing of bodies? Coming into the world, as we all agree, His object in the healing of bodies. for ends so intensely spiritual—to be a deliverer of souls, and to become the Head of a universal kingdom gathered in his own glorious likeness and beatitude—why does he strike directly into this low level of labor, and concern himself in this large degree, with the diseases and disabilities of men’s bodies?

It is a very common answer made to this question, that he does it from a wise consideration of the advantage he will gain by it, in men’s prejudices, or the power he will thus obtain over them, in the separate matter of their spiritual choices and affections. On the same principle, we, it will be urged, are to go directly down into the economic struggles and physical pains of men, ministering to their needs and the terrible woes of their vices, taking them, in that manner, at a wise advantage, and not shoving them away from us, by endeavoring to bolt in spiritual lessons upon them, without any care for their bodily wants and ailments.

There can be no doubt of this as far as we are concerned, in our own human charities. Neither is there any room to doubt, that Christ’s whole ministry and life change look, because of his healings, and the very systematic and tender care he has of men’s bodies. Omitting these, or conceiving these very practical mercies never to have been shown, his teachings would be only lectures, and the whole work of his ministry, comparatively speaking, flashy and thin. Every thing 137now is in a robust and rounded figure, just because these practical works in bodies keep away the look of theory and Targum, giving us a Saviour to worship and not a Rabbi to hear.

But that Christ really put himself to his works of healing for this purpose, we shall not be satisfied, after all, to believe. He has too much heart in His incarnation connects him with the fortunes of bodies. these works, to permit a thought that he is in them prudentially, or to gain some ulterior and remote advantage. No, there is a deeper reason. He is here as the incarnate Lord of the worlds, and he could not even be thought in that character, if, being flesh, he did not turn himself to all he meets in the flesh. And so much is there in this, that any one having deep enough insight to read such a matter beforehand, would say that if the Word is to be incarnate, then he will assuredly appear to bodies, minister to bodies, claim the kindship of bodies, by a tender sympathy for their pains and a healing touch upon their diseases. Being, in this manner, Son of Man, he is brought close to man, upon his human level. He has come to be with him in that level—touched with the feeling, not of his mental, or more respectable infirmities, but of those which are lowest and most loathsome. What could a fastidious Saviour do here? one who is too delicate and spiritual, to concern himself with the disagreeable and often revolting conditions of bodies?

Besides, he is here in God’s own love, and what shall that love grapple with, when it comes, but precisely that which is deepest in the consciousness of suffering?

No matter if he has come to be a Redeemer of souls. Souls and bodies are not so far apart as many try to Souls and bodies not far apart in their fall. believe. Where are the pains of bodies felt but in their souls? and where go the disorder and breakage of souls but directly into their bodies? How sovereign is the action of souls! how inevitable the reaction of bodies! And how nearly common are the fortunes of both! The fall of sin carries down body and soul together, and the quickening of the Spirit quickens, not the soul only, but the mortal body with it. We sometimes think the body is in health, when the soul is not; and the soul in health, when the body is not; but a great many diseases work latently, a long time, before they break out, and the returning of health is often working latently, a long time, before we discover it. After all, how nearly divine a thing is health, be it in the soul, or in the body; and as the fibres of both are intertwined, with such marvelous cunning, all through, how shall either fall out of God’s order alone, or come back into it alone?

The whole man quivers in the shock of sin. The crystalline order of soul and body is shivered by the same blow. Diseases consequent are nothing, after that, but the fact, that the harmonic condition of health is broken—nothing fitly joined together, nothing compacted by what every joint supplieth, nothing vitalized by the effectual and measurely working of all parts for each other. Why then should the Great Healer think to pass by bodies, when he comes for the healing of 139souls? And as all men know it, when their bodies are sick, and are ready enough to be healed—ignorant meantime altogether of the disorder in their souls, and wanting no help there—why should not the Healing Mercy apply itself, at once, where it is wanted, and not throw itself away on souls, in the attempting of a benefaction sure, at first, to be repelled?

Furthermore, if we are to understand this matter, we must carefully observe what opinion Christ himself had of men’s diseases and the bad implications whence they come. How large a part of his cures Discovers in diseases the virus of sin. are wrought on persons whom foul spirits—just now unwontedly “tormented” and stirred up to a special activity—have taken possession of. How often does he say, “go in peace, thy sins are forgiven thee;” though perhaps nothing has been said of their sins before, and possibly nothing more is meant than that they are cured of their malady. To the simply inoffensive broken invalid, whom he found at the pool of Siloam and healed, he says—“Sin no more lest a worse thing befall thee.” Over a poor disabled woman doubled by disease, he says, in softest pity, “whom Satan has bound these eighteen years.” In this manner he associates disease, even habitually, with malign causes, and very nearly identifies the burden of it with the curse and burden of sin itself. Over the young man, blind from his birth, he does indeed say that “neither he nor his parents have sinned, that he was born blind,” but he only means in this to repel the odious and half-superstitious impeachment, that was 140charging the very special suffering of the case, to some special criminality in the house. Had the impeachment been, that all the disabilities, and diseases, and the generally disordered health of men’s bodies are due to the great public fact of sin, and the retributive causes loosened by it, his profoundly accordant conviction is proved by his mission itself. Accordingly all his healings in bodies, were but so many types of the healing virtue he was dispensing, in the higher nature itself. Indeed the whole purpose of his life, comprehensively taken, was, in his own view, to work a healing general of the subject, a restoration thus to complete health and the crystal unity of heaven’s vital order. Sometimes he appears to have operated for the soul, through the body; and sometimes for the body through the soul, contriving in what manner to elicit faith before the cure and assuming, evidently, the fact of a reciprocal action and reaction, operating naturally between them—the healing of the body helped by the faith of the soul and the faith of the soul by the healing of the body. In the large view, his operation is but one, and life, complete life, is or is to be the result.

If now any one should ask what is the particular import, or importance, of this healing work of Christ in His healings incompatible with penal substitution. bodies, that it should even occupy a chapter in the doctrine of his sacrifice, the very simple and sufficient answer is, that it is a matter quite decisive, in respect to the nature of that substitutive office, which Christ undertook to fulfill. If we want to know in what sense, or manner, 141he suffered for the sins of mankind, his immense expenditure of toil, and feeling, and disgustful sympathy, and the murderous jealousy to be encountered in healing the diseases of mankind, will furnish the exact explanation required. Indeed, if he came simply to be the manifested love of God, and to be lifted up as the brazen serpent in the wilderness, for the healing of guilty souls, nothing could be more natural, in that love, having that sublime healing purpose in view, than that he should go directly into the healing of bodies, in the manner described by the evangelists. But if he came to satisfy God’s justice, or pacify God’s wrath against sin, so to prepare a ground of forgiveness for sin, there is a very palpable two-fold incongruity between his healings and such a work. First, between offering mere pain, or suffering to God, and a general operation of body-cure on mankind, there is no more real agreement, or consent of meaning, than between doing the same and building a college, or endowing a school of surgery. And secondly, since all diseases are but issues of penal consequence, under the retributive laws God has incorporated in our human nature for the redress of our sin, what is Christ doing, in his mighty works of healing, but simply blocking, or defeating the ordinances of justice, whose wrath he has come to satisfy, and whose rule to propitiate? The disagreement is radical and total, between being man’s substitute under God’s penalties maintained, and being man’s Healer under the same discontinued, or pushed by. The question how shall two walk together unless they 142be agreed? was never more apposite. The inference indeed is absolute, one way or the other, either that Christ engaged in no such work of healing, or that he came to fulfill no such office of suffering.

Meantime, the agreement between his healing ministry and the kind of vicarious action I have ascribed to Gloriously compatible with the healing of souls. him is complete. Nay, he could not come into the world, in that office, without undertaking one kind of ministry as naturally as the other; or, in fact, without feeling both to be one.

In this connection, therefore, that very important text which we have already cited comes back upon us, to magnify still farther its almost imperial authority—“That it might be fulfilled which was spoken by Esaias the prophet, saying,’ Himself took our infirmities and bare our sicknesses.’” Here is a passage quoted directly from that stock-fund chapter of vicarious language, the liii of Isaiah. The New Testament expression, “took our infirmities and bare our sicknesses,” represents “hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows,” in that chapter; where immediately follow words like these—“Yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement of our peace was upon him, and with his stripes we are healed.”

Now it will be seen that, in this passage, we have the stiffest looking terms of penal substitution any where to be found, and yet that we have also a clause at the 143beginning, and a clause at the end, determining the usus loquendi of all these terms, and showing, beyond a question, that their meaning is exhausted by the labors, and suffering sympathies, and wrongs of bitter violence Christ endured, as the bodily and spiritual Healer of mankind, For when it is said, “he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows,” it is no more possible to understand that he is literally substituted in our griefs and sorrows; for the language has been applied to Christ’s healings, and is even declared to be fulfilled in the fact, that he there, “took our infirmities and bare our sicknesses.” For he took them not literally upon him, but only assumed them to bear in a way of pains-taking labor, and exhaustive sympathy, and disgustful attention, coupled with much abuse and little gratitude. And then again, when he is said, in so many strong terms, to have been wounded and bruised for us, put in chastisement and stripes, how suddenly and even totally does the substitution change look, when the terminal aim, or end, or idea appears. The wounding and bruising, the chastisement and stripes, do not bring us out as we should expect, on the satisfaction of God’s justice, but we read, instead—“with his stripes we are healed;” or, as in Peter’s version—“by whose stripes ye were healed.” And so, taking all Christ’s ministry, from his beginning to the hour of his death, it turns out that he is in a grand work of healing for body and soul, charging on his burdened feeling all our sicknesses and pains, all the disorder of our transgressions and sins, weary, disgustful, deep in sorrow, circumvented, 144hated, persecuted and smitten, as it were, of God, yet persisting even unto death; and all this for our peace, or, what is nowise different, for our healing, or complete health. What a profound reality, and depth, and rationality, is there in such a vicariousness! Nobody is offended by it, and where is the heart it will not soften? Health, too, this divine health! typified by the cooling of so many fevers, the seeing of so many blind eyes, the leaping of so many crippled limbs, the leprous skin blushing into color, the weakness bounding into pulse, the tingling of new life where life was ebbing low, and, above all, the sense harmonically tuned to wind, and sky, and weather—take all this for sign, without, of that sublimer healing in the soul’s disorders within, following it upward into the state of complete life, and purity, and harmony with God, how great a matter is it, and how fit to occupy the burdened heart, the crucified fidelity, and all the suffering years of the Son of God! Is there any substitution worthier to be borne by him, or more to be admired, and glorified by us?

In this general view, it is hardly possible to overmagnify the importance of Christ’s healings, taken in Practical value of these analogies. their spiritual uses, and their connections with the preaching of his gospel afterwards. In them are provided the finest and most quickening analogies; so that every story of healing is, in fact, a sermon, yielding its own particular lesson of prayer and importunity, of holy conviction, of divine sympathy and strength-giving, of trust, of coöperative 145action, of public confession and devoted following. When rightly handled, there is a wonderful felicity in such lessons. No logical processes, or refinements are wanted to set them forth. They make their address directly to the sentiments, and get themselves interpreted by the practical wants and troubles of experience. Sin, too, is so very like to disease and so closely yoked with it, that it takes to itself, with quick facility, whatever is said, or done, for disease. Talking of blindness the sinner scarcely counts it a figure to say that his soul is blind. The being held by demons gets, how often, a ready interpretation from the terrible storms of the mind, and the unsubduable fires of hate and demonized passion! How easily, too, will the soul that is shamed and utterly broken, by guilty and remorseful convictions, take every thing said and done for a poor leper, as being wonderfully true for it! The healings, in this view, belong to the very staple matter of the gospel. Without them, it would be a soul without a body; for a gospel wants a body, as truly as a man, or a seed; and, as every seed hath its own body, so the outward facts of Christ’s healings are the very particular and proper body, of the mightier and diviner healings he has undertaken to work in character and the inner man of the spirit.

Besides, it is another very important office of these works on the body, that they emphasize the whole manner and working of Christ. We want, as sinners, a supernatural salvation if any, one that has power to turn back all the currents and causalities of retributive 146disorder in our sin. We are under sin, and a power is wanted that can draw us out and bring us clear Types and proofs of a supernatural salvation. of it. How much then does it signify that our Saviour was a Healer. Going along with him in his ministry, and seeing how he works; always competent to the thing he undertakes, unsealing eyes born blind, banishing foul spirits, commanding the white skin of lepers to redden into health, hearing every forlorn sufferer’s prayer, unable to be even touched in the hem of his garment without sending out some healing virtue; we have the feeling produced that we, too, can be healed, that the grip of retribution fastened upon us by our sin, all the bad causalities of our inward disorder, can be loosened. In the salvation offered us, there is a look of capacity; we feel that God is in our case, able to undertake, and carry, and complete, the work of our deliverance—able to save unto the uttermost. In this profoundly necessary impression, the other miracles also concur; but if these mighty works had not been wrought, nothing else that Christ could have done, in the sphere of truth and the spirit, would have had the necessary energy of a gospel. Not even his cross would have signified much beyond the proof of his weakness. It is only when the Great Healer dies, that we look to find his cross a deed of power.

After what was said, in the next previous chapter, of the recovery of men to a participation with Christ in his sacrifice, it may occur to some one to ask, whether 147it can be imagined, that his healings are to be thus participated? To which I answer that, in some very important degree, they probably are. And Partaking in the sacrifice, shall we also in the healings? here I will say nothing of the “gift of healing,” so-called, which many are quite positive is discontinued—showing still no Scripture for the fact; for if it were in still undisputed exercise, it would pertain only to such as are put in the gift, and not to the general condition of discipleship. We are looking here for that only in which the followers of their Master are to follow; that which belongs to their unity of spirit and object with him. Here we find them called to look on the things of others, even as he did, and to have the same mind with him in his condescension to the broken lot of mankind. And this includes, of course, a large, and full, and free sympathy with all suffering; a capacity of being burdened for the sick, and sometimes a necessary, knowing consent to exposure from contagious maladies, that involves the greatest peril to life. The ministry of love—no Christian can withhold himself from this, whether it relate to mind, or body, or sin, or sickness. Hence the expectation, apart from any gift of healing, that all disciples, in all grades and positions, will have their prayers burdened heavily, often, for the sick, and will sometimes prevail before God in suit for their recovery—this apart from any thought of miracle, and by virtue of the merely Christian efficacy of prayer, as affirmed by the doctrine of prayer itself.

Hence that remarkable passage in the close of the 148epistle of James, affirming the efficacy of prayer for the sick, and by the interjection of some vicarious image, or term, in almost every verse, giving it the very cast of the Christly sacrifice. It opens by permitting every sick person to send for the elders of the church, and laying it on them, as a charge belonging to their office, to pray over the sick, and help their own faith in doing it, by the ancient solemnity of a ritual anointing. Then it passes on to what is more general, belonging, not to church officers, but to the common efficacy of prayer itself; where the declaration is, that “the prayer of faith shall save the sick;” that the Lord—not the disciple—will raise him up, and that his sins shall be forgiven him, as they were forgiven by Christ in his healings. It will not be understood, of course, that the prayer of faith is pledged to restore all sick, but only that it will restore as many sick as can have the prayer of faith given, or allowed; for God will not help any one to pray in faith for such as he will not restore. In the next verse, the subject is enlarged, and all Christian friends are put in a kind of vicarious relation to each other, in respect to their faults and maladies of soul. “Confess your faults one to another”—ask sympathy, that is, in a free statement of your inward troubles—“and pray for one another that ye may be healed;” as if the matter wanted were a cure of inbred disorder. Then follows an appeal to the example, or instance of Elijah’s prayers; and the matter is put in a form to cut off forever the idea that such kind of prayer is, or ever can be, antiquated; for Elijah’s prayers we are told were not specially 149a prophet’s, or an angel’s, but only a man’s, and that “man subject to like passions as we are”—just as weak, and cloudy, and hard of faith as a proper human creature will be. Finally he goes on to speak of the care every brother will have for every brother, when he falls; how he will fly to the rescue, and turn him back, and be a Saviour to him, like his Master, only in a lower, less complete sense, proper to his own human weakness. Have it as a fact always in your feeling, he says, that “he which converteth a sinner [that is, a fallen brother] from the error of his way shall save a soul from death and hide a multitude of sins.” It is all along we shall perceive, in this passage, as if the Master were calling the disciple to have a close, dear part with him, in his healing and saving work. And, what is most of all impressive, he gives in that word “hide,” a part with him, so to speak, in his very work of reconciliation. The Old Testament word translated atonement, reconciliation, literally means to hide, or cover—“Thou hast covered all their sin”—“Blessed are they whose iniquities are forgiven and whose sins are covered.” As the Master has this power, and stands in this high honor, so the follower shall follow, and shall even hope, when he pities the fall of his brother, and prays him back, with many tears and tender watchings thereunto, that he also may be the minister of healing and a justifying peace, and may hide a multitude of sins.

Speaking thus of prayer and of works by prayer accomplished, not to put down, in connection, the remarkable 150promise of Christ, so often debated, and so difficult, as many think, to be rationally qualified, might even be a criminal omission—“Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me the works that I do shall he do also, and greater works than these shall he do, because I go unto my Father. And whatsoever ye shall ask, in my name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If ye shall ask any thing in my name I will do it.” This huge over-promise of the Saviour—what shall we make of it? how, and how far, shall we qualify it?