In respect of the purpose I have in view, it is of little consequence in
what order I take the miracles. I choose for my second chapter the story
of the cure of St Peter's mother-in-law. Bare as the narrative is,
the event it records has elements which might have been moulded with
artistic effect--on the one side the woman tossing in the folds of the
fever, on the other the entering Life. But it is not from this side that
I care to view it.
Neither do I wish to look at it from the point of view of the
bystanders, although it would appear that we had the testimony of three
of them in the three Gospels which contain the story. We might almost
determine the position in the group about the bed occupied by each of
the three, from the differences between their testimonies. One says
Jesus stood over her; another, he touched her hand; the third, he lifted
her up: they agree that the fever left her, and she ministered to
them.--In the present case, as in others behind, I mean to regard the
miracle from the point of view of the person healed.
Pain, sickness, delirium, madness, as great infringements of the laws of
nature as the miracles themselves, are such veritable presences to the
human experience, that what bears no relation to their existence, cannot
be the God of the human race. And the man who cannot find his God in the
fog of suffering, no less than he who forgets his God in the sunshine of
health, has learned little either of St Paul or St John. The religion
whose light renders no dimmest glow across this evil air, cannot be more
than a dim reflex of the true. And who will mourn to find this out?
There are, perhaps, some so anxious about themselves that, rather than
say, "I have it not: it is a better thing than I have ever possessed,"
they would say, "I have the precious thing, but in the hour of trial it
is of little avail." Let us rejoice that the glory is great, even if we
dare not say, It is mine. Then shall we try the more earnestly to lay
hold upon it.
So long as men must toss in weary fancies all the dark night, crying,
"Would God it were morning," to find, it may be, when it arrives, but
little comfort in the grey dawn, so long must we regard God as one to be
seen or believed in--cried unto at least--across all the dreary flats of
distress or dark mountains of pain, and therefore those who would help
their fellows must sometimes look for him, as it were, through the eyes
of those who suffer, and try to help them to think, not from ours, but
from their own point of vision. I shall therefore now write almost
entirely for those to whom suffering is familiar, or at least well
known. And first I would remind them that all suffering is against the
ideal order of things. No man can love pain. It is an unlovely, an
ugly, abhorrent thing. The more true and delicate the bodily and mental
constitution, the more must it recoil from pain. No one, I think, could
dislike pain so much as the Saviour must have disliked it. God dislikes
it. He is then on our side in the matter. He knows it is grievous to
be borne, a thing he would cast out of his blessed universe, save for
reasons.
But one will say--How can this help me when the agony racks me, and the
weariness rests on me like a gravestone?--Is it nothing, I answer, to be
reminded that suffering is in its nature transitory--that it is against
the first and final will of God--that it is a means only, not an end?
Is it nothing to be told that it will pass away? Is not that what you
would? God made man for lordly skies, great sunshine, gay colours, free
winds, and delicate odours; and however the fogs may be needful for the
soul, right gladly does he send them away, and cause the dayspring from
on high to revisit his children. While they suffer he is brooding over
them an eternal day, suffering with them but rejoicing in their future.
He is the God of the individual man, or he could be no God of the race.
I believe it is possible--and that some have achieved it--so to believe
in and rest upon the immutable Health--so to regard one's own sickness
as a kind of passing aberration, that the soul is thereby sustained,
even as sometimes in a weary dream the man is comforted by telling
himself it is but a dream, and that waking is sure. God would have us
reasonable and strong. Every effort of his children to rise above
the invasion of evil in body or in mind is a pleasure to him. Few, I
suppose, attain to this; but there is a better thing which to many, I
trust, is easier--to say, Thy will be done.
But now let us look at the miracle as received by the woman.
She had "a great fever." She was tossing from side to side in vain
attempts to ease a nameless misery. Her head ached, and forms dreary,
even in their terror, kept rising before her in miserable and aimless
dreams; senseless words went on repeating themselves ill her very brain
was sick of them; she was destitute, afflicted, tormented; now the
centre for the convergence of innumerable atoms, now driven along in an
uproar of hideous globes; faces grinned and mocked at her; her mind
ever strove to recover itself, and was ever borne away in the rush of
invading fancies; but through it all was the nameless unrest, not an
aching, nor a burning, nor a stinging, but a bodily grief, dark, drear,
and nameless. How could they have borne such before He had come?
A sudden ceasing of motions uncontrolled; a coolness gliding through
the burning skin; a sense of waking into repose; a consciousness of
all-pervading well-being, of strength conquering weakness, of light
displacing darkness, of urging life at the heart; and behold! she is
sitting up in her bed, a hand clasping hers, a face looking in hers. He
has judged the evil thing, and it is gone. He has saved her out of her
distresses. They fold away from off her like the cerements of death. She
is new-born--new-made--all things are new-born with her--and he who
makes all things new is there. From him, she knows, has the healing
flowed. He has given of his life to her. Away, afar behind her floats
the cloud of her suffering. She almost forgets it in her grateful joy.
She is herself now. She rises. The sun is shining. It had been shining
all the time--waiting for her. The lake of Galilee is glittering
joyously. That too sets forth the law of life. But the fulfilling of the
law is love: she rises and ministers.
I am tempted to remark in passing, although I shall have better
opportunity of dealing with the matter involved, that there is no sign
of those whom our Lord cures desiring to retain the privileges of
the invalid. The joy of health is labour. He who is restored must be
fellow-worker with God. This woman, lifted out of the whelming sand of
the fever and set upon her feet, hastens to her ministrations. She has
been used to hard work. It is all right now; she must to it again.
But who was he who had thus lifted her up? She saw a young man by her
side. Is it the young man, Jesus, of whom she has heard? for Capernaum
is not far from Nazareth, and the report of his wisdom and goodness must
have spread, for he had grown in favour with man as well as with God. Is
it he, to whom God has given such power, or is it John, of whom she has
also heard? Whether he was a prophet or a son of the prophets, whether
he was Jesus or John, she waits not to question; for here are guests;
here is something to be done. Questions will keep; work must be
despatched. It is the day, and the night is at hand. She rose and
ministered unto them.
But if we ask who he is, this is the answer: He is the Son of God come
to do the works of his Father. Where, then, is the healing of the
Father? All the world over, in every man's life and knowledge, almost
in every man's personal experience, although it may be unrecognized
as such. For just as in certain moods of selfishness our hearts are
insensible to the tenderest love of our surrounding families, so the
degrading spirit of the commonplace _enables_ us to live in the midst of
ministrations, so far from knowing them as such, that it is hard for us
to believe that the very heart of God would care to do that which his
hand alone can do and is doing every moment. I remind my reader that I
have taken it for granted that he confesses there is a God, or at least
hopes there may be a God. If any one interposes, saying that science
nowadays will not permit him to believe in such a being, I answer it
is not for him I am now writing, but for such as have gone through a
different course of thought and experience from his. To him I may be
honoured to say a word some day. I do not think of him now. But to
the reader of my choice I do say that I see no middle course between
believing that every alleviation of pain, every dawning of hope across
the troubled atmosphere of the spirit, every case of growing well again,
is the doing of God, or that there is no God at all--none at least in
whom _I_ could believe. Had Christians been believing in God better,
more grandly, the present phase of unbelief, which no doubt is needful,
and must appear some time in the world's history, would not have
appeared in our day. No doubt it has come when it must, and will vanish
when it must; but those who do believe are more to blame for it, I
think, than those who do not believe. The common kind of belief in God
is rationally untenable. Half to an insensate nature, half to a living
God, is a worship that cannot stand. God is all in all, or no God at
all. The man who goes to church every Sunday, and yet trembles before
chance, is a Christian only because Christ has claimed him; is not a
Christian as having believed in Him. I would not be hard. There are so
many degrees in faith! A man may be on the right track, may be learning
of Christ, and be very poor and weak. But I say there is no _standing_
room, no reality of reason, between absolute faith and absolute
unbelief. Either not a sparrow falls to the ground without Him, or there
is no God, and we are fatherless children. Those who attempt to live in
such a limbo as lies between the two, are only driven of the wind and
tossed.
Has my reader ever known the weariness of suffering, the clouding of the
inner sky, the haunting of spectral shapes, the misery of disordered
laws, when nature is wrong within him, and her music is out of tune and
harsh, when he is shot through with varied griefs and pains, and it
seems as there were no life more in the world, save of misery--"pain,
pain ever, for ever"? Then, surely, he has also known the turn of the
tide, when the pain begins to abate, when the sweet sleep falls upon
soul and body, when a faint hope doubtfully glimmers across the gloom!
Or has he known the sudden waking from sleep and from fever at once, the
consciousness that life is life, that life is the law of things, the
coolness and the gladness, when the garments of pain which, like that
fabled garment of Dejanira, enwrapped and ate into his being, have
folded back from head and heart, and he looks out again once more
new-born? It is God. This is his will, his law of life conquering the
law of death Tell me not of natural laws, as if I were ignorant of them,
or meant to deny them. The question is whether these laws go wheeling
on of themselves in a symmetry of mathematical shapes, or whether
their perfect order, their unbroken certainty of movement, is not the
expression of a perfect intellect informed by a perfect heart. Law is
truth: has it a soul of thought, or has it not? If not, then farewell
hope and love and possible perfection. But for me, I will hope on,
strive on, fight with the invading unbelief; for the horror of being the
sport of insensate law, the more perfect the more terrible, is hell and
utter perdition. If a man tells me that science says God is not a likely
being, I answer, Probably not--such as you, who have given your keen,
admirable, enviable powers to the observation of outer things only, are
capable of supposing him; but that the God I mean may not be the very
heart of the lovely order you see so much better than I, you have given
me no reason to fear. My God may be above and beyond and in all that.
In this matter of healing, then, as in all the miracles, we find Jesus
doing the works of the Father. God is our Saviour: the Son of God comes
healing the sick--doing that, I repeat, before our eyes, which the
Father, for his own reasons, some of which I think I can see well
enough, does from behind the veil of his creation and its laws. The cure
comes by law, comes by the physician who brings the law to bear upon us;
we awake, and lo! I it is God the Saviour. Every recovery is as much his
work as the birth of a child; as much the work of the Father as if
it had been wrought by the word of the Son before the eyes of the
multitude.
Need I, to combat again the vulgar notion that the essence of the
miracles lies in their power, dwell upon this miracle further? Surely,
no one who honours the Saviour will for a moment imagine him, as he
entered the chamber where the woman lay tormented, saying to himself,
"Here is an opportunity of showing how mighty my Father is!" No. There
was suffering; here was healing. What I could imagine him saying to
himself would be, "Here I can help! Here my Father will let me put forth
my healing, and give her back to her people." What should we think of a
rich man, who, suddenly brought into contact with the starving upon his
own estate, should think within himself, "Here is a chance for me! Now I
can let them see how rich I am!" and so plunge his hands in his pockets
and lay gold upon the bare table? The receivers might well be grateful;
but the arm of the poor neighbour put under the head of the dying man,
would gather a deeper gratitude, a return of tenderer love. It is heart
alone that can satisfy heart. It is the love of God alone that can
gather to itself the love of his children. To believe in an almighty
being is hardly to believe in a God at all. To believe in a being
who, in his weakness and poverty, if such could be, would die for his
creatures, would be to believe in a God indeed.