miracle of mercy which He wrought is an illustration of the same principle in its appropriate fashion, and upon a lower level.  And although we cannot say that the physical sufferings which He alleviated were physically laid upon Him, yet we can say that He so identified Himself with all sufferers by His swift sympathy as that He bore, and therefore bore away, the diseases as well as the sins of the men for whose healing He lived, and for whose redemption He died.

The proof of this crops up now and then.  What did it mean that, when He stood beside one poor sufferer, before He could utter from His authoritative lips the divine word of power, ‘Ephphatha, be opened,’ the same lips had to shape themselves for the utterance of an altogether human and brotherly sigh?  Did it not mean that the condition of His healing power was sympathy, that He must bring Himself to feel the burden that He will roll away?  That sigh proves that His cures were the works, not without cost to the doer, of a sympathising heart, and not the mere passionless acts of a miracle-monger.

In like manner, what meant that strange tempest of agitation that swept across the pacific ocean of His nature ere He stood by the grave of Lazarus?  Why that being ‘troubled in Himself’ before He raised him?  Wherefore the tears that heralded the restoration of the man to life?  They could not be shed for the loss that was so soon to be repaired.  They can only have been the emotion and tears of One who saw, as massed in one black whole, the entire sorrows that affected physical humanity, and rose in a holy passion of indignation and of sorrow at the sight of that enemy, Death, with whose beginnings He had wrestled in many a miracle of restoration, and whose sceptre He was now about to pluck from his bony clutch.  Therefore I say that Christ the healer bore, and thereby bore away, the sicknesses and the infirmities of men.

Amidst mountains of rubbish and chaff, the Rabbis have a grain of wheat in their legend which tells us that Messias is to come as a leper, and to be found sitting amongst the lepers at the city’s gate; which is a picturesque and symbolical way of declaring the same truth that I am now insisting upon, the participation by the Redeemer in all burdens and sorrows of body and of spirit which He takes away.

II.  And now with these facts—­for I take them to be such—­for the basis of our thoughts, let me ask you to turn, in the second place, to some plain practical conclusions that come from them.

The first of these that I would suggest is the lesson as to the proper sweep and sphere of Christian beneficence.  As I said in my introductory remarks, we do not rightly measure the whole circumference of Christ’s work unless we regard it as covering and including all forms of human evil.  He is the antagonist of everything that is antagonistic to man—­pain, misery, sickness, death itself.  All these are excrescences on the divine design, transient accompaniments of disordered relations between God and man.  And this great physician of souls fights the disease and does not neglect the symptoms; deals with the central evil and is not so absorbed with that as to omit from His view or His treatment the merely superficial manifestations of it.