with His by simple faith in Him. Come into contact with
Him, and the blood of Jesus Christ, the 'law of the spirit of life that
was in Him,' will pass into the veins of your spirits, and make you
whole of whatsoever disease you have. 'Then shall the eyes of the blind
be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped; then shall the
lame man leap as a hart, and the tongue of the dumb shall sing.' And so
shall you begin that course of healing and purifying, which will know no
pause nor natural termination until, redeemed in body, soul, and spirit,
you reach the land 'where the inhabitant thereof shall no more say, I am
sick,'--'and there shall be no more death, neither shall there be any
more pain.'

CHRIST REPRESSING RASH DISCIPLESHIP

'And a certain scribe came, and said unto Him, Master, I will
follow Thee whithersoever Thou goest. 20. And Jesus saith unto him,
The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the
Son of Man hath not where to lay His head.'--MATT. viii. 19-20.

Our Lord was just on the point of leaving Capernaum for the other side
of the lake. His intended departure from the city, in which He had spent
so long a time, and wrought so many miracles, produced precisely
opposite effects on two of the crowd around Him, both of whom seem to
have been, in the loose sense of the word, disciples. One was this
scribe, whom the prospect of losing the Master from his side, hurried
into a too lightly formed and too confidently expressed undertaking. The
other presented exactly the opposite fault. That other man in the crowd,
at the prospect of losing sight of the Christ, began to think that there
were imperative duties at home which would prevent his following the
Master, and said, 'Suffer me first to go and bury my father.' A sacred
obligation, and one which Christ would not have desired him to suspend,
unless there had been something more behind it!

These two men, then, represent the two opposite poles of weakness, the
one too swift, the other too slow, to take a decisive step. And Christ's
treatment of them is, in like manner, a representation of the two
opposite methods which He adopts for curing opposite diseases, and
bringing both back to the same state of health. He stimulates the too
sluggish, He represses the too willing (if such a paradox may be
allowed). His treatment is at once spur and bridle. To the one man He
administers a sobering representation of what h