the
same lips had to shape themselves for the utterance of an altogether
human and brotherly sigh? Did it not mean that the condition of His
healing power was sympathy, that He must bring Himself to feel the
burden that He will roll away? That sigh proves that His cures were the
works, not without cost to the doer, of a sympathising heart, and not
the mere passionless acts of a miracle-monger.

In like manner, what meant that strange tempest of agitation that swept
across the pacific ocean of His nature ere He stood by the grave of
Lazarus? Why that being 'troubled in Himself' before He raised him?
Wherefore the tears that heralded the restoration of the man to life?
They could not be shed for the loss that was so soon to be repaired.
They can only have been the emotion and tears of One who saw, as massed
in one black whole, the entire sorrows that affected physical humanity,
and rose in a holy passion of indignation and of sorrow at the sight of
that enemy, Death, with whose beginnings He had wrestled in many a
miracle of restoration, and whose sceptre He was now about to pluck from
his bony clutch. Therefore I say that Christ the healer bore, and
thereby bore away, the sicknesses and the infirmities of men.

Amidst mountains of rubbish and chaff, the Rabbis have a grain of wheat
in their legend which tells us that Messias is to come as a leper, and
to be found sitting amongst the lepers at the city's gate; which is a
picturesque and symbolical way of declaring the same truth that I am now
insisting upon, the participation by the Redeemer in all burdens and
sorrows of body and of spirit which He takes away.

II. And now with these facts--for I take them to be such--for the basis
of our thoughts, let me ask you to turn, in the second place, to some
plain practical conclusions that come from them.

The first of these that I would suggest is the lesson as to the proper
sweep and sphere of Christian beneficence. As I said in my introductory
remarks, we do not rightly measure the whole circumference of Christ's
work unless we regard it as covering and including all forms of human
evil. He is the antagonist of everything that is antagonistic to
man--pain, misery, sickness, death itself. All these are excrescences on
the divine design, transient accompaniments of disordered relations
between God and man. And this great physician of souls fights the
disease and does not neglect the symptoms; deals with the central evil
and