turning the miracles into evidences that the doer of them was a
child of the Devil. It appears to have been a well-worked formula
too, for it is found again in chap. xii. 24, and in Luke xi. 15, in
the account of another cure of a dumb demoniac. It is possible that
the incident now before us may be the same as this, but there is
nothing improbable in the occurrence of such a case twice, nor in
the repetition of what had become the commonplace of the Pharisaic
polemic. But what a piercing example that explanation is of the
blinding power of prejudice, determined to hold on to a foregone
conclusion, and not to see the sun at noon! Jesus in league with
'the prince of the devils'! And that was gravely said by religious
authorities! They saw the loveliness of His perfect life, His gentle
goodness, His self-forgetting love, His swift-springing pity, and
they set it all down to His commerce with the Evil One. He was so
good that He must be more than humanly bad.




A CHRISTLIKE JUDGMENT OF MEN


'But when He saw the multitudes, He was moved with
compassion on them, because they fainted, and were
scattered abroad, as sheep having no shepherd.'
--MATT. ix. 36.

In the course of our Lord's wandering life of teaching and healing,
there had naturally gathered around Him a large number of persons who
followed Him from place to place, and we have here cast into a symbol