to ruin the world. What in this woman it was that made it right she
should bear these bonds for eighteen years, who can tell? Certainly it
was not that God had forgotten her. What it may have preserved her
from, one may perhaps conjecture, but can hardly have a right to utter.
Neither can we tell how she had borne the sad affliction; whether in the
lovely patience common amongst the daughters of affliction, or with
the natural repining of one made to behold the sun, and doomed ever to
regard the ground upon which she trod. While patience would have its
glorious reward in the cure, it is possible that even the repinings
of prideful pain might be destroyed by the grand deliverance, that
gratitude might beget sorrow for vanished impatience. Anyhow the right
hour had come when the darkness must fly away.

Supported, I presume, by the staff which yet more assimilated her to the
lower animals, she had crept to the synagogue--a good sign surely, for
the synagogue was not its ruler. There is no appearance from the story,
that she had come there to seek Jesus, or even that when in his presence
she saw him before the word of her deliverance had gone forth. Most
likely, being bowed together, she heard him before she saw him.

But he saw her. Our translation says he called her to him. I do not
think this is correct. I think the word, although it might mean that,
does mean simply that he _addressed her_. Going to her, I think, and
saying, "Woman, thou art loosed from thy infirmity," "he laid his hands
on her, and immediately she was made straight, and glorified God." What
an uplifting!--a type of all that God works in his human beings.
The head, down-bent with sin, care, sorrow, pain, is uplifted; the
grovelling will sends its gaze heavenward; the earth is no more the
one object of the aspiring spirit; we lift our eyes to God; we bend no
longer even to his will, but raise ourselves up towards his will, for