saying, Behold my servant, whom I have chosen; my beloved, in whom my soul is well pleased. I will put my spirit upon him, and he shall show judgment to the Gentiles. He shall not strive nor cry; neither shall any man hear his voice in the streets. A bruised reed shall he not break, and smoking flax shall he not quench, till he send forth judgment unto victory*." A most sublime passage! which may thus be paraphrased. Behold my servant, whom I have chosen; my beloved, in whom my soul is well pleased! I will put my spirit upon him, and he shall teach true religion, not only to the people of Israel, but to the heathens also; and this he shall do with the utmost tenderness, mildness, and meekness, without contention and noise, without tumult and disturbance. A bruised reed shall he not break; he shall not bear hard upon a wounded and contrite, and truly humble and penitent heart, bowed down with a sense of its infirmities. And smoking flax shall he not quench; the faintest spark of returning virtue he will not extinguish by severity; but will cherish and encourage the one, and will raise, and animate, and enliven the other; till by these gentle conciliating means he shall have triumphed over the wickedness and malevolence of his enemies, and completely established his religion throughout the world. What an amiable picture is here given us of the Divine Author of our faith? and how exactly does this prophetic description correspond to the whole tenour of his conduct in the propagation of his religion.

The next remarkable occurrences, which present themselves in this chapter, are those of our Saviour casting a devil out of a man that was both blind and dumb; the reflections which the Pharisees threw upon him in consequence of this miracle, and the effectual manner in which he silenced them, and repelled their calumny.

The passage is as follows: "Then was brought unto him one possessed with a devil, blind and dumb: and he healed him; insomuch that the blind and dumb both spake and saw. And all the people were amazed, and said, Is not this the son of David? But when the Pharisees heard it they said, This fellow doth not cast out devils, but by Beelzebub, the prince of the devils._And Jesus knew their thoughts, and said unto them, Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation,

* Isaiah xlii, 1-3.

and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand and if Satan cast out Satan, he is divided against himself; how shall then his kingdom stand?"

This passage affords room for a variety of observation.

In the first place, it is evident from this, as well as from many other passages of holy writ, that, at the time when our Saviour promulgated his religion, there was a calamity incident to the human race, of which at present we know nothing, and that is, the possession of their bodies by evil spirits, or devils (as they are usually called in Scripture), which occasioned great torments to the unhappy sufferers, and often deprived them both of their sight and hearing, as in the present instance. Such possessions having long since ceased, they have appeared to several learned men so incredible, that they have been led to deny that they ever existed, and to maintain, that they were only diseases of a violent and terrifying nature, attended with convulsive or epileptic fits; that this sort of disease was ascribed by the Jews to the operation of evil spirits; and that our Saviour, in compliance with their prejudices, treated them as cases of real possession, and pretended to cast out devils, when in fact he only cured the disorder with which the patient was afflicted.

This opinion is supported by great names; but, however great and respectable they may be, it appears to me utterly indefensible.

Every expression that our Lord makes use of, with respect to these demoniacs, plainly supposes them to be really possessed; and it is not easy to assign any admissible reason why he should treat them as such if they were not so, and why he should not correct instead of countenancing so gross an error; as such a conduct could answer no one good purpose, and seems hard to reconcile with his own uniform fairness and sincerity of mind. To have done it to magnify his own power in casting out the evil spirits would have been, to all appearance, a very needless expedient; because the immediate removal of a natural disease (if it were one) would have been an equal proof of his divine power. But, besides this, there is everywhere a plain distinction made between common diseases and demoniacal possessions, which shows, that they were totally different things. In the fourth chapter of this Gospel, where the very first men

tion is made of these possessions, it is said, that our Lord's fame went throughout all Syria, and they brought unto him all sick people, that were taken with divers diseases and torments, and those which were possessed with devils, and he healed them. Here you see those that were taken with divers diseases and torments, and those possessed with devils, are mentioned as distinct and separate persons; a plain proof that the demoniacal possessions were not natural diseases: and the very same distinction is made in several other passages of holy writ.

There can be no doubt, therefore, that the demoniacs were persons really possessed with evil spirits: and although it may seem strange to us, yet we find from Josephus, and other historians, that it was in those times no uncommon case. In fact it appears, that, about the time of our Lord's ministry, that tremendous spirit, Satan, or, as he is sometimes called in Scripture, the prince of this world, had obtained an extraordinary degree of power over the human race, inflicting upon them the cruellest pains and torments, depriving them of their senses, rendering them wretched in themselves, and terrible to all around them. To subdue this formidable and wicked being, and to destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil, was one great object of our Saviour's divine mission; and it seems to have been indispensably necessary for accomplishing the redemption of mankind, that the kingdom of Satan should in the first place be destroyed, and that the sons of men should be rescued from that horrible and disgraceful state of slavery in which he had long held them enthralled. One of the first steps, therefore, that our Lord took, before he entered on his ministry, was to establish his superiority over this great enemy of mankind; which he did in that memorable scene of the temptation in the wilderness : and among the earliest of his miracles recorded is that of casting out devils from those who were possessed by them. And perhaps one reason, why these possessions were permitted, might be to afford our Lord an opportunity of giving the Jews a visible and ocular demonstration of his decided superiority and sovereignty over the prince of the devils and all his agents, and of his power to subdue this great adversary of the human species. He appears, indeed, to have been in a state of constant hostility and warfare with this wicked spirit; and in this

very passage Satan is described by our Saviour under the image of a strong man, whom it was necessary to bind before you could spoil his house, and exterminate him and his coadjutors, as Jesus was then doing. Yet so little were the Jews sensible of this enmity between Christ and Beelzebub, that on the contrary they charged them with being friends and confederates. They said, "this fellow doth not cast out devils, but by Beelzebub, the prince of the devils." The answer of our Lord to this was decisive and satisfactory to every reasonable mind. "Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand: and if Satan cast out Satan, he is divided against himself; how shall then his kingdom stand?" His argument is this: how absurd and prepos→ terous is it to suppose, that Satan will act against himself, by expelling his own ministers and agents, whom he has sent to take possession of the minds and bodies of men, and by assisting me to establish my religion, and thereby diffuse virtue and happiness throughout the world, which it is his great object to destroy, and to introduce vice and misery in their room. This must clearly end in his ruin, and the overthrow of his empire over mankind. It is evident, then, that it is not by his assistance, but by the power of God, that I cast out devils; and, if so, it is clear to demonstration, that I am commissioned by Heaven to teach true religion to mankind.

I cannot quit this subject of miracles without observing, what a remarkable difference there is between the sentiments of modern infidels and those of the first enemies of the Gospel, respecting the miracles of Christ. The former assert, that our Saviour wrought no real miracles; that miracles are in their own nature incredible and impossible; and that no human testimony whatever can give credit to events so contrary to experience, and so repugnant to the ordinary course of nature. But go to those unbelievers, who lived in the earliest ages of the Gospel, and even to those who were eye-witnesses to our Lord's miracles, and they will tell you a very different story. They assert, that Jesus did work miracles; they acknowledge, that he did expel evil spirits out of those that were possessed. They ascribed the miracle, indeed, to the power of Beelzebub, not of God; but this we know to be absurdity and nonsense. The fact of the miraculous cure they did not dispute; and this at once

establishes the divine mission of our Lord. To which, then, of these two descriptions of infidels shall we give most credit; to those, who lived near eighteen hundred years after the miracles were performed, or to those who saw them wrought with their own eyes, and, though they detested the author of them, admitted the reality of his wonderful works?

Our Lord then, continuing his conversation with the Pharisees, addresses to them, in the thirty-first verse, these remarkable words :

Wherefore I say unto you, all manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men. And whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of Man, it shall be forgiven him; but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come."

Our Lord's meaning, in this obscure and alarming passage, seems to be this: there is no other sin or blasphemy, which argues such a total depravation of mind, but that it may be repented of and forgiven. Even he that speaks against me, the Son of God, and is not convinced by my preaching, may yet be afterwards converted by the power of the Holy Ghost, by the miracles which he enables me and my disciples to work, and may obtain remission of his sin. But he, that shall obstinately resist this last method of conviction (that of miracles wrought before his eyes), and shall maliciously revile these most evident operations of the Spirit of God, contrary to the reason of his own mind and the dictates of his own conscience, such an one has no farther means left by which he may be convinced and brought to repentance, and therefore can never be forgiven.

From this interpretation, which is, I believe, generally admitted to be the true one, it appears, that there is no just ground for the apprehensions sometimes entertained by pious and scrupulous minds, that they may themselves be guilty of the sin here declared to be unpardonable, the sin against the Holy Ghost; for we see, that it is confined solely and exclusively to the case before us, that is, to the crime of which the Pharisees had just been guilty, the crime of attributing those miracles to the agency of evil spirits, which were plainly wrought by the Spirit of God, and which they saw with their own eyes.