past, should have attained to the conception of Jesus
as possessing a real but subordinate and derived authority, than to
suppose that he had grasped, at that early stage, the truth which
Christ's nearest friends took long years to understand, and which some
of them do not understand yet, viz. that Christ possessed as His own the
power which He wielded.

But if we take this point of view, and consider that the centurion's
conception falls beneath the lofty Christian ideal of Christ's power in
the universe, as it is set forth to us in the New Testament, even then
His words set forth a truth. For if we believe on the one hand in the
divinity of our Lord and Saviour, we also believe that 'the Son is
subject to the Father' and listen to His own words when He says, 'All
power is _given_ unto Me in heaven and in earth.' So that whatever
difference there may be between His relation to the power which He
wields and that of a prophet or miracle-worker, who derives his power
from Him, this is true, that Christ's power, too, is a power given to
Him. But the other side is one that I desire to emphasise in a few
words, viz. that the centurion's conception falls short of the truth,
inasmuch as, if we believe in Christ's witness to Himself, we must
believe that the power which acted through His word, dwelt in Him, in an
altogether different relation to His person from that in which an
analogous power may have dwelt in any other man. 'He spake and it was
done, He commanded and it stood fast.' Diseases fled at His word. 'By
the breath of His mouth He slew' these enemies of men. He rebuked the
storm, and the howling of the wind and the dashing of the waves were
less loud than His calm voice. He flung a word into the depths of the
grave, strangely speaking to, and yet more strangely heard by, the dull
cold ear of death, and Lazarus, dazzled, stumbles out into the light.
Who is this, that commandeth the waves, and the seas, and the
sicknesses, and they obey Him? My brother, I pray that you and I, in
these days of hesitation, when many a truth is clouded by doubt, may be
able to answer with the full assent and consent of understanding and
heart, 'this is God manifest in the flesh.'

And remember that this prerogative of dealing with physical nature, by
the bare forth-putting of His word, is not only a doctrine of
Christianity, but that more and more physical investigation is coming to
the unifying of all forces in one, and to the resolvin