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

230 THE MAN BORN BLIND
against all your talk. He knows that he was once a
vulgar, degraded being, an animal hardly conscious
of a soul, a lecherous, swinish, uncontrollable beast,
chained, led captive by his lusts, possessed with
seven devils, without hope and without shame, sinking
down to deeper depths and to very hell. Now the
devils are gone out of him, the chains are broken, he
is clothed and in his right mind, his infernal passions
are subdued ;
his
Life, which was all foul disease, has
been restored to health. He is a free man. And
Christ has done it. Christ's cross, Christ's love,
Christ's mighty spirit within him. You cannot move
this man by sophistical word-fencing and sneers.
He
will answer as the seeing man did in the story : I
know nothing about all your objections and your
clever reasonings
;
one
thing I know, that, whereas I
was blind, now I see.
And surely every real Christian has some such
answer as that to give ;
perhaps we have never been
raised from the mire, from the slough of filth and
moral degradation. We have never been drunkards,
adulterers, or anything of that sort. No, but we are
hardly Christians at all unless we are conscious of
certain things, very wonderful things, which Jesus has
done for us, and in us ; things which bear witness in
our spirits of His divine and miraculous power,
things which prove unmistakably that He is
a present,
living, mighty, shaping power in our lives. If you
have none of these things I pity you, I pray and
plead for your conversion. But if you have them it
will be well-nigh impossible to shake your hold upon
Christian truth. I think most of us could say Christ
has opened our eyes. He has made us see a hundred