I now proceed to a group of individual cases in which, as far as we
can judge from the narratives, our Lord gave the gift of restoration
unsolicited. There are other instances of the same, but they fall into
other groups, gathered because of other features.

The first is that, recorded by St Luke alone, of the "woman which had a
spirit of infirmity eighteen years, and was bowed together, and could in
no wise lift up herself." It may be that this belongs to the class of
demoniacal possession as well, but I prefer to take it here; for I am
very doubtful whether the expression in the narrative--"a spirit of
infirmity," even coupled with that of our Lord in defending her and
himself from the hypocritical attack of the ruler of the synagogue,
"this woman--whom Satan hath bound," renders it necessary to regard
it as one of the latter kind. This is, however, a matter of small
importance--at least from our present point of view.

Bowed earthwards, the necessary blank of her eye the ground and not
the horizon, the form divine deformed towards that of the four-footed
animals, this woman had been in bondage eighteen years. Necessary as it
is to one's faith to believe every trouble fitted for the being who has
to bear it, every physical evil not merely the result of moral evil, but
antidotal thereto, no one ought to dare judge of the relation between
moral condition and physical suffering in individual cases. Our Lord has
warned us from that. But in proportion as love and truth prevail in
the hearts of men, physical evil will vanish from the earth. The
righteousness of his descendants will destroy the disease which the
unrighteousness of their ancestor has transmitted to them. But, I
repeat, to destroy this physical evil save by the destruction of its
cause, by the redemption of the human nature from moral evil, would be