Another passage in the same evangelist, and observable for the same purpose, is that in which he relates the resurrection of Lazarus; “Jesus,” he tells us (xi. 43, 44), “when he had thus spoken, cried with a loud voice, Lazarus, come forth:  and he that was dead came forth, bound hand and foot with graveclothes, and his face was bound about with a napkin.  Jesus saith unto them, Loose him, and let him go.”  One might have suspected, that at least all those who stood by the sepulchre, when Lazarus was raised, would have believed in Jesus.  Yet the evangelist does not so represent it:—­“Then many of the Jews which came to Mary, and had seen the things which Jesus did, believed on him; but some of them went their ways to the Pharisees, and told them what things Jesus had done.”  We cannot suppose that the evangelist meant by this account to leave his readers to imagine, that any of the spectators doubted about the truth of the miracle.  Far from it.  Unquestionably, he states the miracle to have been fully allowed; yet the persons who allowed it were, according to his representation, capable of retaining hostile sentiments towards Jesus.  “Believing in Jesus” was not only to believe that he wrought miracles, but that he was the Messiah.  With us there is no difference between these two things; with them there was the greatest; and the difference is apparent in this transaction.  If Saint John has represented the conduct of the Jews upon this occasion truly (and why he should not I cannot tell, for it rather makes against him than for him), it shows clearly the principles upon which their judgment proceeded.  Whether he has related the matter truly or not, the relation itself discovers the writer’s own opinion of those principles:  and that alone possesses considerable authority.  In the next chapter, we have a reflection of the evangelist entirely suited to this state of the case:  “But though he had done so many miracles before them, yet believed they not on him.” (Chap. xii. 37.) The evangelist does not mean to impute the defect of their belief to any doubt about the miracles, but to their not perceiving, what all now sufficiently perceive, and what they would have perceived had not their understandings been governed by strong prejudices, the infallible attestation which the works of Jesus bore to the truth of his pretensions.

The ninth chapter of Saint John’s Gospel contains a very circumstantial account of the cure of a blind man; a miracle submitted to all the scrutiny and examination which a sceptic could propose.  If a modern unbeliever had drawn up the interrogatories, they could hardly have been more critical or searching.  The account contains also a very curious conference between the Jewish rulers and the patient, in which the point for our present notice is, their resistance of the force of the miracle, and of the conclusion to which it led, after they had failed in discrediting its evidence.  “We know that God spake unto Moses,