come?' let Him speak for Himself, and
He will answer you: 'I that speak unto thee am He.' When He asks each of
us, as He does now, 'Whom sayest thou that I am?' oh that we may all
answer, with the assent of our understandings, with the love of our
hearts, with the submission of our wills, 'Thou art the Christ, the Son
of the living God.'

THE TOUCH THAT CLEANSES

'When He was come down from the mountain, great multitudes followed
Him. 1. And, behold, there came a leper and worshipped Him, saying,
Lord, if Thou wilt, Thou canst make me clean. 3. And Jesus put
forth His hand, and touched him, saying, I will; he thou clean. And
immediately his leprosy was cleansed. 4. And Jesus saith unto him,
See thou tell no man; but go thy way, shew thyself to the priest,
and offer the gift that Moses commanded, for a testimony unto
them.'--MATT. viii. 14.

THE great collection of Jesus' sayings, which we call the Sermon on the
Mount, is followed by a similar collection of Jesus' doings, which we
call miracles. It is significant that Matthew puts the words first and
the works second, as if to teach us the relative importance of the two.
Some one has said that miracles are 'the bell rung before the sermon,'
but Matthew thinks that the sermon comes first. He masses together nine
miracles (the raising of Jairus' daughter and the healing of the woman
with the bloody issue being so closely connected that they may be
regarded as one) which are divided into three groups of three each, and
are separated by three sections of more general character, like three
landings in a broad flight of stairs, or three breaks in a procession
(ch. viii. 18-22; ix. 9-17, 35-38).

The first triplet comprises miracles of bodily healing, and shows Jesus
as the great physician, curing leprosy, palsy, and fever, three types of
disease which have their analogues in the moral world. The cure of the
leper comes first, apparently not from chronological reasons, but
because leprosy had been made by the Old Testament legislation the
symbol of sin. The story is found in all the Synoptic Gospels, with
slight variations, which make more impressive their verbal identity in
reporting the leper's appeal and the Lord's answer.

A leper had to keep apart from men and was shunned by them, but this one
ventured to mingle with the 'great multitudes' that 'followed' Jesus,
till he reached His side. He must have known something of Christ