Now, there are two points that I desire to emphasise very briefly.  One is the prominence in Christ’s life which is given to His healing energy.  We are accustomed to think of His cures as miracles.  We are accustomed to think of them in that aspect as evidences of His mission, or as difficulties and stumbling-blocks, as the case may be.  But I ask you to put away all such thoughts for a minute, and think about the miracles simply as being cures.  Remember how enormous a proportion of our Lord’s time and pains and sympathy and thoughts was directed to that one purpose of healing people of their bodily infirmities.  We may almost say that to an outsider He would look a great deal liker a man who, as the Apostle Peter painted Him in one of his earliest addresses, ’went about doing good and healing,’ than as a teacher of divine wisdom, to say nothing of an incarnation of the divine nature.  His miracles of healing were certainly the most conspicuous part of His life’s work.

And then, remember, that whilst the great proportion of our Lord’s miracles are miracles of healing, we are sure that the whole of the recorded miraculous works of our Lord are the smallest fraction of what He really did.  You remember how there crop up, here and there, in the Gospels, general resumes of our Lord’s work, of such a kind as this:—­’And Jesus went about all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, and preaching the Gospel of the Kingdom, and healing all manner of sickness and all manner of disease among the people.  And they brought unto Him all sick people that were taken with divers diseases and torments, and those which were possessed with devils, and those which were lunatic, and those that had the palsy and He healed them.’  Or, again:—­’And Jesus departed from thence, and came nigh unto the sea of Galilee, and went up into a mountain, and sat down there.  And great multitudes came unto Him, having those that were lame, blind, dumb, maimed, and many others, and cast them down at Jesus’ feet, and He healed them.’  Now these are but specimens of the occasional generalisations which we find in the Gospels, which warrant us in saying that, according to the New Testament record, Christ’s works of healing were to be numbered, not by tens, but by hundreds, and perhaps by thousands.

That is the first fact calling for notice.  The words of our text suggest a second thought as to the cost at which these cures were wrought.  ‘Himself took and bare’ does not mean only ‘took away.’  It includes that, as a consequence, but it points to something before the removal of the sicknesses.  It points to the fact that Christ in some real sense endured the loads which He removed.  Of course, His cross is the highest exemplification of the great law which runs through His whole life, that He identifies Himself with all the evil which He takes away, and is able to take it away only because He identifies Himself with it.  But whilst the cross is the highest exemplification of this, every