acknowledgment of the Divinity of our Lord, and an acceptance of the Gospel records in substance as they stand, to hold that the miracles of healing—with the nature-miracles we are not here concerned—were the simple outcome of that all-embracing human pity which, in itself, betokened the expected Messiah; rather than an immediate exercise of Almighty power, and the utterance, within the physical order, of the Eternal Word. We find our Lord proclaiming Himself, in the synagogue of Nazareth, the Fulfiller of that great prophecy of Isaiah in his sixty-first chapter, in which the Messianic mission is set forth in language in which a spiritual and a physical deliverance are inseparably intertwined.[1] Similarly, in answer to the Baptist's message, the same blending of evangelical teaching and spiritual healing is to be noticed; and, once again, sin and disease stand out as the dominant factors in the condition of this present world.
(iii) But if the source of the miracles is thus to be sought in the Sacred Humanity, that Humanity is, after all, the perfect ideal and norm of all humanity. Whatever exceptional powers of genius, whatever special faculties and latent gifts of mind and will have appeared at rare intervals among men, these we should
- ↑ Luke iv. 18: note the double sense in the words
