but as for this fellow, we know not whence he is.”  That was the answer which set their minds at rest.  And by the help of much prejudice, and great unwillingness to yield, it might do so.  In the mind of the poor man restored to sight, which was under no such bias, and felt no such reluctance, the miracle had its natural operation.  “Herein,” says he, “is a marvellous thing, that ye know not from whence he is, yet he hath opened mine eyes.  Now we know that God heareth not sinners:  but if any man be a worshipper of God, and doeth his will, him he heareth.  Since the world began, was it not heard, that any man opened the eyes of one that was born blind.  If this man were not of God, he could do nothing.”  We do not find that the Jewish rulers had any other reply to make to this defence, than that which authority is sometimes apt to make to argument, “Dost thou teach us?”

If it shall be inquired how a turn of thought, so different from what prevails at present, should obtain currency with the ancient Jews; the answer is found in two opinions which are proved to have subsisted in that age and country.  The one was their expectation of a Messiah of a kind totally contrary to what the appearance of Jesus bespoke him to be; the other, their persuasion of the agency of demons in the production of supernatural effects.  These opinions are not supposed by us for the purpose of argument, but are evidently recognised in the Jewish writings as well as in ours.  And it ought moreover to be considered, that in these opinions the Jews of that age had been from their infancy brought up; that they were opinions, the grounds of which they had probably few of them inquired into, and of the truth of which they entertained no doubt.  And I think that these two opinions conjointly afford an explanation of their conduct.  The first put them upon seeking out some excuse to themselves for not receiving Jesus in the character in which he claimed to be received; and the second supplied them with just such an excuse as they wanted.  Let Jesus work what miracles he would, still the answer was in readiness, “that he wrought them by the assistance of Beelzebub.”  And to this answer no reply could be made, but that which our Saviour did make, by showing that the tendency of his mission was so adverse to the views with which this being was, by the objectors themselves, supposed to act, that it could not reasonably be supposed that he would assist in carrying it on.  The power displayed in the miracles did not alone refute the Jewish solution, because the interposition of invisible agents being once admitted, it is impossible to ascertain the limits by which their efficiency is circumscribed.  We of this day may be disposed possibly to think such opinions too absurd to have been ever seriously entertained.  I am not bound to contend for the credibility of the opinions.  They were at least as reasonable as the belief in witchcraft.  They were opinions in which the Jews of that age had from their infancy