So he turns to Christ.  Does he mean to parallel or to contrast his subordination and Christ’s position?  The ‘also,’ which, as I remarked, the Revised Version has rightly replaced in the text here, is in favour of the former supposition, that he means to parallel Christ’s position with his own.  And it is much more natural to suppose that a heathen man, with little knowledge of Christ and of the depths of the divine revelation in the past, should have attained to the conception of Jesus as possessing a real but subordinate and derived authority, than to suppose that he had grasped, at that early stage, the truth which Christ’s nearest friends took long years to understand, and which some of them do not understand yet, viz. that Christ possessed as His own the power which He wielded.

But if we take this point of view, and consider that the centurion’s conception falls beneath the lofty Christian ideal of Christ’s power in the universe, as it is set forth to us in the New Testament, even then His words set forth a truth.  For if we believe on the one hand in the divinity of our Lord and Saviour, we also believe that ’the Son is subject to the Father’ and listen to His own words when He says, ’All power is given unto Me in heaven and in earth.’  So that whatever difference there may be between His relation to the power which He wields and that of a prophet or miracle-worker, who derives his power from Him, this is true, that Christ’s power, too, is a power given to Him.  But the other side is one that I desire to emphasise in a few words, viz. that the centurion’s conception falls short of the truth, inasmuch as, if we believe in Christ’s witness to Himself, we must believe that the power which acted through His word, dwelt in Him, in an altogether different relation to His person from that in which an analogous power may have dwelt in any other man.  ’He spake and it was done, He commanded and it stood fast.’  Diseases fled at His word.  ’By the breath of His mouth He slew’ these enemies of men.  He rebuked the storm, and the howling of the wind and the dashing of the waves were less loud than His calm voice.  He flung a word into the depths of the grave, strangely speaking to, and yet more strangely heard by, the dull cold ear of death, and Lazarus, dazzled, stumbles out into the light.  Who is this, that commandeth the waves, and the seas, and the sicknesses, and they obey Him?  My brother, I pray that you and I, in these days of hesitation, when many a truth is clouded by doubt, may be able to answer with the full assent and consent of understanding and heart, ‘this is God manifest in the flesh.’