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LECTURE VIII.

LONELY THANKFULNESS.

And it came to pass, as he went to Jerusalem, that he passed through the midst of Samaria and Galilee. And as he entered into a certain village, there met him ten men that were lepers, which stood afar off: and they lifted up their voices, and said, Jesus, Master, have mercy on us. And when he saw them, he said unto them, Go show yourselves unto the priests. And it came to pass, that, as they went, they were cleansed. And one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, and with a loud voice glorified God, and fell down on his face at his feet, giving him thanks; and he was a Samaritan. And Jesus answering said, Were there not ten cleansed? but where are the nine? There are not found that returned to give glory to God, save this stranger. And he said unto him, Arise, go thy way: thy faith hath made thee whole.-LUKE xvii. 11–19.

IN In my last lecture I explained the nature, or rather the moral and spiritual significance, of the disease which is here alluded to. I did so in commenting upon the cure of the leper, whom Jesus healed, and then sent to the priest to show himself, that he might have the attestation. of the priest that it was a cure, and that the ordinance of God, as long as it stood, might be thereby honoured. The physical disease has all but disappeared from the earth; its spiritual and moral significance as the type of sin, as I explained before, remains, and is instructive still. If the leprosy has passed away like the types of Levi, the spiritual disease of sin remains coeval with the existence of humanity; and, blessed be God, not wider than the cure that can thoroughly remove it.

We read on the last occasion of one leper; on the present occasion we read of ten. These ten were a mixed

company; there was, at all events, one thankful Samaritan, and there may have been more Samaritans, though thankless, and associated in spirit, as in person, with the Jews. Let us recollect that the Jew and the Samaritan were the bitterest antagonists. The one professed to be a churchman, the other assumed to be a seceder. This was not probably the proper modern explanation of their position, but certainly modern antipathies are the nearest possible approach to the antipathies that existed between the Jew and the Samaritan; for they held even exclusive dealing: "the Jews have no dealings with the Samaritans." This group, we find, are together-two hostile parties constituting one company apparently without murmur, protest, or dispute, or expression of the enmity they felt, and did not hesitate to express, on other and different occasions. Now what can be the explanation of their present concord? Our Lord could not meet the Samaritan woman without her reviving the old exasperating controversy, whether in this mountain or in that men should worship; but on this occasion, strange to say, the ten lepers, Jews and Samaritans, had no quarrel about where they should worship, but seem to have prayed in one litany for the blessing which they felt they must obtain. What was the reason? Perhaps it is this-that parties who, in ordinary circumstances, are full of exasperating feelings, of ill-will, animosity, pride, exclusiveness, want of forbearance, are, beneath the heat and pressure of a common calamity, fused into one, and made to forget in judgment what they will not forego in love-the deep and rankling sense of their common quarrels and disputes. A sense of common danger buries all disputes. Let a storm overtake the gallant ship; let the passengers have been at daggersdrawn in the cabin a few hours before; when the masts bend before the gale, and her timbers creak, and a watery

grave threatens every soul, they all forget their quarrels, and try to co-operate for deliverance. Let the storm come, with thunder, lightning, hail, and rain; and we shall find churchman and dissenter, tory and whig, Jew and Gentile, all rush into one shelter, so thankful for a covert from the storm that they forget they had been fighting only hours before. The knowledge of this, then, is the explanation, perhaps, of the fact that Jew and Samaritan were here present in peace. And may it not be, that the severe epidemic that has overflowed the land, and smitten great masses of the people, has been sent not only for the reasons which I specified on a previous Sabbath, but also to make men forget, beneath the pressure of a dire calamity, what they would neither forget or forgive amid the enjoyment of great blessings. I grieve that there should be any feeling among Christians that should require such judgment in order to eradicate it. Esau and Jacob, who quarrelled so bitterly in their prosperity, when their aged father died, met over his body and mingled their tears together in mutual sympathy and earnest forgiveness. Thus God sometimes drives together by the scourge those who will not be drawn together by the attractions of his mercy. If any man, then, have quarrelled with another—if there be any churchman now who is very bitter to dissenters, or any dissenter who is very bitter against churchmen, remember that one of the duties which every judgment God sends inculcates, is to be tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God, for Christ's sake, hath forgiven us. It is to teach all to pray, and pray as none ever prayed before, "Forgive us our trespasses, O our Father, even as we forgive them that trespass against us."

These ten, we read, as one man, "stood afar off." This was duty. I explained this to be the position that the leper

was bound by the law of the land to assume; not that the disease was contagious, but that it was significant or typical of the great separation that sin makes. Thus they stood afar off. This the law of the leper still teaches us, and was meant to teach the Jew in a sensuous economy, in which material things were made mirrors of spiritual and moral truths, that sin is the great separating, rending, splitting element. It is this that keeps us far off from God, and far off from each other. Nations are separated by seas, and languages, and deserts; and these languages, which we spend our youth in acquiring, are evidences of the sin and rebellion of man against God. Churches are separated by forms, ceremonies, protests, contendings, wrestlings, as they call them, for things which they deem significant, but which, when looked at in the right light, are too paltry, and in some respects worthless. Individuals are separated by place, by feeling, by enstrangement, by fear, by dread, from one another; and all are separated from God; till at length the points of repulsion between man and man, and man and God, grow more numerous and powerful than the points of attraction that should bind us into one brotherhood, and all into one family, with God our Father. These lepers stand afar off; and they tell us, as they stand, that sin has made us afar off; and remind us, by contrast, of the blessed truth, that we who were afar off are made nigh through the blood of the covenant in Christ Jesus.

The lepers, however, though standing afar off, prayed. Beautiful is this truth; there is no distance from God to which sin can drive us by its centrifugal force, which the voice of prayer cannot span; there is no chasm between God and us which the feet of love cannot wade, and which the wing of love cannot cross. It matters not how deep we have fallen, or how distant we have been driven; the silent, half-choked, half-suppressed cry, "God, be merciful

to me a sinner," will span that chasm, and cross that depth, and be heard in God's ear louder than the thunders, and sound the most musical tone amid the hosannas and hallelujahs of the blessed; for there is no shout in heaven more joyful or more beautiful than when an angel cries, or Jesus proclaims, "Behold, he prays." May I not say, if judgments have led us to pray, how sanctified! If fear for the safety of the poor casket has made the jewel think of the Rock from which it was struck, and to which it may be united, how blessed has that judgment been!

When these lepers prayed, they showed that they felt their misery. No man prays for deliverance till he feels danger; no one seeks a cure till he feels a disease. It is a strange contrast between sin in the soul, the moral disease, and the leprosy, or any other disease of the body, that the worse the bodily disease the more one feels it, but the worse the spiritual disease the less one feels it. In the spiritual disease insensibility is the evidence of the greatest peril. No man is so bad as he who says in his heart, "I am rich, and increased in goods, and in need of nothing;" for it is of that very man that God utters or registers the verdict in heaven, "Thou knowest not that thou art poor, and wretched, and blind, and miserable, and in need of all things." A deep sense of sin is one of the best evidences of a true interest in the grace of God, and in the salvation of the gospel. We do not say that men are to desire their sin should be great, but that their sense of their sinfulness should be deeper, more poignant, more real. Whenever there is a deep sense of sin created in the sinner's heart, there is the best evidence that the Spirit of God has begun that work which he will consummate in his own good time. With one voice, then, they prayed that Jesus would have mercy upon them, expressing their cure by the word mercy. There is skill in the cure of disease, and there may be at