and bare our sicknesses." But this was the very
revelation He came to make. He came to reveal God's love and God's
holiness, and every miracle He wrought was an impressive lesson to men
in the knowledge of God. Men learn by what they see far more readily
than by what they hear, and all that Christ taught by word of mouth
might have gone for little had it not been sealed on men's minds by
these consistent acts of love. To tell men that God loves them may or
may not impress them, may or may not be believed; but when Jesus
declared that He was sent by God, and preached His gospel by giving
sight to the blind, legs to the lame, health to the hopeless, that was a
form of preaching likely to be effectual. And when these miracles were
sustained by a consistent holiness in Him who worked them; when it was
felt that there was nothing ostentatious, nothing self-seeking, nothing
that appealed to mere vulgar wonder in them, but that they were dictated
solely by love,--when it was found that they were thus a true expression
of the character of Him who worked them, and that that character was one
in which human judgment at least could find no stain, is it surprising
that He should have been recognised as God's true representative?

Supposing, then, that Christ came to earth to teach men the fatherhood
and fatherliness of God--could He have more effectually taught it than
by these miracles of healing? Supposing He wished to lodge in the minds
of men the conviction that man, body and soul, was cared for by God;
that the diseased, the helpless, the wretched were valued by Him,--were
not these works of healing the most effectual means of making this
revelation? Have not these works of healing in point of fact proved the
most efficient lessons in those great truths which form the very
substance of Christianity? The miracles are themselves, then, the
revelation, and carry to the minds of men more directly than any words
or arguments the conception of a loving God, who does not abhor the
affliction of the afflicted, but feels with His creatures and seeks
their welfare.

And, as John is careful throughout his Gospel to show, they suggest even
more than they directly teach. John uniformly calls them "signs," and on
more than one occasion explains what they were signs of. He that loved
men so keenly and so truly could not be satisfied with the bodily relief
He gave to a few. The power He wielded over disease and over nature
seemed to hint at