Every one of these manifold miracles which the Saviour wrought may be taken as parabolical.  You and I grope in darkness as the blind.  You and I have ears deaf to hear, and lips dumb to speak, the praises and the love and the word of God.  We are lame in the powers of mind and spirit to run in the way of His commandments, and to walk unfainting in the paths of duty.  The fever of hot, passionate, foolish desires burns in the veins of us all with its poison.  The paralysis of a will that is slothful to good infests and hinders us all.  But there comes to us that great hope and promise that Christ has the Spirit of the Lord upon Him to bring liberty to the captive, sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, healing to the fevered, vigour to the palsied, activity to the lame.  Only let us set our trust in Him, carry our weaknesses to Him, acknowledge our sins to Him, seek the touch of His healing and quickening hand, and the miracle shall be wrought.

The old-fashioned surgery used to believe in the transfusion of blood from a sound to a diseased person, and the consequent expulsion of disease.  That is the fact about our relation to Christ.  Put your arm side by side with His by simple faith in Him.  Come into contact with Him, and the blood of Jesus Christ, the ’law of the spirit of life that was in Him,’ will pass into the veins of your spirits, and make you whole of whatsoever disease you have.  ’Then shall the eyes of the blind be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped; then shall the lame man leap as a hart, and the tongue of the dumb shall sing.’  And so shall you begin that course of healing and purifying, which will know no pause nor natural termination until, redeemed in body, soul, and spirit, you reach the land ’where the inhabitant thereof shall no more say, I am sick,’—­’and there shall be no more death, neither shall there be any more pain.’

CHRIST REPRESSING RASH DISCIPLESHIP

     ’And a certain scribe came, and said unto Him, Master, I will
     follow Thee whithersoever Thou goest. 20.  And Jesus saith unto him,
     The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the
      Son of Man hath not where to lay His head.’—­MATT. viii. 19-20.

Our Lord was just on the point of leaving Capernaum for the other side of the lake.  His intended departure from the city, in which He had spent so long a time, and wrought so many miracles, produced precisely opposite effects on two of the crowd around Him, both of whom seem to have been, in the loose sense of the word, disciples.  One was this scribe, whom the prospect of losing the Master from his side, hurried into a too lightly formed and too confidently expressed undertaking.  The other presented exactly the opposite fault.  That other man in the crowd, at the prospect of losing sight of the Christ, began to think that there were imperative duties at home which would prevent his following the Master, and said, ‘Suffer me first to go and bury my father.’  A sacred obligation, and one which Christ would not have desired him to suspend, unless there had been something more behind it!