The miracles of Jesus - Classical Christian Literature by Athleo.net

INTENSIVE PUNISHMENT 187
dicated. Whilst there are forms of disease at work in
human society, which take on the shapes of deadly
sin, yet this is
a misleading and mischievous principle
to apply where there was responsibility at the
beginning, and the responsibility has been reestablished
again, as in the ministry of the Lord Jesus
to this healed man. Whilst sin may involve the
complete loss of self-mastery, yet the power of selfmastery
is again and again given back to us. But
with new opportunity the sin that tempts the man
reappears with increased virulence, and its perpetration
obviously assumes a deeper shade of guilt.
Evil,
cast out for a time from the soul, returns helped by
demoniac forces to its old malign tyranny in the lost
citadel.
A period of culminating moral discipline
had just
closed in the life of this man.
By early transgressions he had made himself for
thirty-eight years a useless and unhappy cripple, cut
off from the pleasures and activities of human society.
Alas !
if he had failed to profit by his hot ordeal, for
there was not much more to be learned in the
school of earthly suffering. He knew almost as
much as could be taught him. Providence could
scarcely afflict him more sternly
without making his
pains the interminable pains of the lost. It had no
other lashes of earthly distress to lay upon him.
Poor, lonely, bed-ridden, hopeless not only of natural
recovery but of the superhuman cure that came to
the favoured few !
If such a victim had not already
learned the judicial lessons of his history it
would be
difficult to say into what new school he could be put.
We should long ago have pronounced him intractable.