no companion of His innocent boyhood, no friend of His sinless youth, accompany Him with awe, and pity, and regret? Such questions are not, surely, unnatural; not, surely, irreverent;-but they are not answered. Of all merely human emotions of His heart, except so far as they directly affect His mission upon earth, the Gospels are silent. We know only that henceforth other friends awaited him away from boorish Nazareth, among the gentle and noble-hearted fishermen of Bethsaida; and that thenceforth His home, so far as He had a home was in the little city of Capernaum, beside the sunlit waters of the Galilæan Lake.

CHAPTER XVII.

THE BEGINNING OF THE GALILEAN MINISTRY.

REJECTED of Nazareth, our Lord naturally turned to the neighbouring Cana, where His first miracle had been wrought to gladden friends. He had not long arrived when an officer from the neighbouring court of Herod Antipas, hearing of His arrival, came and urgently entreated that He would descend to Capernaum and heal his dying son. Although our Lord never set foot in Tiberias, yet the voice of John had more than once been listened to with alarm and reverence in the court of the voluptuous king. We know that Manaen, the fosterbrother of Herod, was in after days a Christian, and we know that among the women who ministered to Christ of their substance was Joanna, the wife of Chuza, Herod's steward. As this courtier (Baciukos) believed in Christ with his whole house, in consequence of the miracle now wrought, it has been conjectured with some probability that it was none other than Chuza himself.

The imperious urgency of his request, a request which appears at first to have had but little root in spiritual conviction, needed a momentary check. It was necessary for Jesus to show that He was no mere hakeem, no mere benevolent physician, ready at any time to work local cures, and to place His supernatural powers at the heck and call of any sufferer who might come to Him as a desperate resource. at once rebuked the spirit which demanded mere signs and prodigies as the sole possible ground of faith. But yielding to the father's passionate earnestness, He dismissed him with the assurance that his

He

son lived. The interview had taken place at the seventh hour—i.e., at one o'clock in the day. Even in the short November day it would have been still possible for the father to get to Capernaum; for if Cana be, as we believe, Kefr Kenna, it is not more than five hours' distance from Capernaum. But the father's soul had been calmed by faith in Christ's promise, and he slept that night at some intermediate spot upon the road. The next day his slaves met him, and told him that, at the very hour when Jesus had spoken, the fever had left his This was the second time that Christ had signalised His arrival in Galilee by the performance of a conspicuous miracle. The position of the courtier caused it to be widely known, and it contributed, no doubt, to that joyous and enthusiastic welcome which our Lord received during that bright early period of His ministry, which has been beautifnlly called the "Galilean spring."

son.

At this point we are again met by difficulties in the chronology, which are not only serious, but to the certain solution of which there appears to be no clue. If we follow exclusively the order given by one Evangelist, we appear to run counter to the scattered indications which may be found in another. That it should be so will cause no difficulty to the candid mind. The Evangelists do not profess to be scrupulously guided by chronological sequence. The pictures which they give of the main events in the life of Christ are simple and harmonious, and that they should be presented in an informal, and what, with reference to mere literary considerations, would be called inartistic manner, is not only in accordance with the position of the writers, but is an additional confirmation of our conviction that we are reading the records of a life which, in its majesty and beauty, infinitely transcended the capacities of invention or imagination in the simple and faithful annalists by whom it was recorded.

It was not, as we have already observed, the object of St. John to narrate the Galilæan ministry, the existence of which he distinctly implies (vii. 3, 4), but which had already been fully recorded. Circumstances had given to the Evangelist a minute and profound knowledge of the ministry in Judæa, which is by the others presupposed, though not narrated. At this point accordingly (iv. 54) he breaks off, and only continues the thread of his narrative at the return of Jesus to "a" or "the" feast of the Jews (v. 1). If the feast here alluded to were the feast of Purim, as we shall see is probably the case, then St. John here passes over the history of several months. We fall back, therefore, on the Synoptic Gospels for the events of the intervening ministry on the shores of Gennesareth. And since we have often to

choose between the order of events as narrated by the three Evangelists, we must here follow that given by St. Luke, both because it appears to us intrinsically probable, and lecause St. Luke, unlike the two previous Evangelists, seems to have been guided, so far as his information allowed, by chronological considerations.

It seems then, that after leaving Cana, our Lord went at once to Capernaum, accompanied apparently by His mother and His brethren, and made that town His home. His sisters were probably married, and did not leave their native Nazareth; but the dreadful insult which Jesus had received would have been alone sufficient to influence His family to leave the place, even if they did not directly share in the odium and persecution which His words had caused. Perhaps the growing alienation between Himself and them may have been due, in part to this circumstance. They must have felt, and we know that they did feel, a deeply-seated annoyance, if, refusing to admit the full awfulness of His mission, and entirely disapproving the form of its manifestation, they yet felt themselves involved in hatred and ruin as a direct consequence of His actions. Certain it is that, although apparently they were living at Capernaum, their home was not His home. Home, in the strict sense, He had none; but the house of which He made ordinary use appears to have been that which belonged to His chief apostle. It is true that Simon and Andrew are said to have belonged to Bethsaida, but they may easily have engaged the use of a house at Capernaum, belonging to Peter's mother-in-law; or, since Bethsaida is little more than a suburb or part of Capernaum, they may have actually moved for the convenience of their Master from the one place to the other.

The first three Evangelists have given us a detailed account of the Lord's first Sabbath at Capernaum, and it has for us an intrinsic interest, because it gives us one remarkable specimen of the manner in which He spent the days of His active ministry. It is the best commentary on that epitome of His life which presents it to us in its most splendid originality-that "He went about doing good." It is the point which the rarest and noblest of His followers have found it most difficult to imitate; it is the point in which His life transcended most absolutely the ideal of the attainments of His very greatest forerunners. The seclusion of the hermit, the self-maceration of the ascetic, the rapture of the mystic-al! these are easier and more common than the unwearied toil of a self-renouncing love.

The day began in the synagogue, perhaps in the very building which the Jews owed to the munificence of the centurion proselyte.

If Capernaum were indeed Tell Hûm, then the white marble ruins which still stand on a little eminence above the sparkling lake, and still encumber the now waste and desolate site of the town with their fragments of elaborate sculpture, may possibly be the ruins of this very building. The synagogue, which is not very large, must have been densely crowded; and to teach an earnest and expectant crowdto teach as He taught, not in dull, dead, conventional formulæ, but with thoughts that breathed and words that burned-to teach as they do who are swayed by the emotion of the hour, while heart speaks to heart-must have required no slight energy of life, must have involved no little exhaustion of the physical powers. But this was not all. While He was speaking, while the audience of simple-hearted yet faithful, intelligent, warlike people were listening to Him in mute astonishment, hanging on His lips with deep and reverential admiration-suddenly the deep silence was broken by the wild cries and obscene ravings of one of those unhappy wretches who were universally believed to be under the influence of impure spirits, and whoin the absence of any retreat for such sufferers-had, perhaps, slipped in unobserved among the throng. Even the poor demoniac, in the depths of his perturbed and degraded nature, had felt the haunting spell of that pure presence, of that holy voice, of that divine and illuminating message. But, distorted as his whole moral being was, he raved against it, as though by the voices of the evil demons who possessed him, and while he saluted "Jesus the Nazarene" as the Holy One of God, yet, with agonies of terror and hatred, demanded to be let alone, and not to be destroyed.

Then followed a scene of thrilling excitement. Turning to the furious and raving sufferer, recognising the duality of his consciousness, addressing the devil which seemed to be forcing from him these terrified ejaculations, Jesus said, "Hold thy peace, and come out of him." He never accepted or tolerated this ghastly testimony to His origin and office. The calm, the sweetness, the power of the divine utterance were irresistible. The demoniac fell to the ground in a fearful paroxysm, screaming and convulsed. But it was soon over. The man arose cured; his whole look and bearing showed that he was dispossessed of the over-mastering influence, and was now in his right mind. A miracle so gracious and so commanding had never before been so strikingly manifested, and the worshippers reparated with emotions of indescribable wonder.

Rising from the seat of the maphtir in the synagogue, Christ retired into the house of Simon. Here again he was met by the

strong appeal of sickness and suffering. Simon, whom he had already bound to Himself on the banks of the Jordan, by the first vague call to his future Apostolate, was a married man, and his wife's mother lay stricken down by a violent access of fever. One request from the afflicted family was sufficient: there was no need, as in the case of the more worldly nobleman, for importunate entreaty. He stood over her; He took her by the hand; He raised her up; He rebuked the fever; His voice, stirring her whole being, dominated over the sources of disease, and, restored instantaneously to health, she rose and busied herself about the household duties.

Possibly the strictness of observance which marked the Jewish Sabbath secured for our Lord a brief interval for refreshment; but no sooner did the sun begin to set, than the eager multitude, barely waiting for the full close of the Sabbath hours, began to seek His aid. The whole city came densely thronging round the doors of the humble home, bringing with them their demoniacs and their diseased. What a strange scene! There lay the limpid lake, reflecting in pale rose-colour the last flush of sunset that gilded the western hills; and here, amid the peace of Nature, was exposed, in hideous variety, the sickness and misery of man, while the stillness of the Sabbath twilight was broken by the shrieks of demoniacs who testified to the Presence of the Son of God.

"A lazar-house it seemed, wherein were laid
Numbers of all diseased; all maladies

Of ghastly spasm, and racking tortures, qualms
Of heart-sick agony, all feverous kinds,
Demoniac phrenzy, moping melancholy
And moonstruck madness;"

and amidst them all, not

"Despair

Tended the sick, busiest from couch to couch,

And over them triumphant Death his dart
Shook,"

but far into the deepening dusk, the only person there who was anexcited and unalarmed-hushing by His voice the delirium of madness and the screams of epilepsy, touching disease into health again by laying on each unhappy and tortured sufferer His pure and gentle hands-moved, in His love and tenderness, the young Prophet of Nazareth, the Christ, the Saviour of the world. Unalarmed indeed, and unexcited, but not free from sorrow and suffering. For sympathy is nothing else than a fellow-feeling with others: a sensible participation in their joy or woe. And Jesus was touched with a feeling of