peutics rise in possibility and importance.[1] The bringer of light and happiness, the calmer and pacifier, or invigorator and stimulator, is one of the chiefest of doctors. Such a doctor was Jesus; such an operator, by an efficacious and real, though little observed and little employed agency, upon what we, in the language of popular superstition, call the unclean spirits, but which are to be designated more literally and more correctly as the uncleared, unpurified spirits, which came raging and madding before him. This his own language shows, if we know how to read it. 'What does it matter whether I say, Thy sins are forgiven thee! or whether I say, Arise and walk!'[2] And again: 'Thou art made whole; sin no more, lest a worse thing befall thee!'[3] His reporters, we must remember, are men who saw thaumaturgy in all that Jesus did, and who saw in all sickness and disaster visitations from God, and they bend his language accordingly. But indications enough remain to show the line of the Master, his perception of the large part of moral cause in many kinds of disease, and his method of addressing to this part his cure.
It would never have done, indeed, to have men pronouncing right and left that this and that was a judgment, and how, and for what, and on whom. And so, when the disciples, seeing an afflicted person, asked whether this man had done sin or his parents, Jesus checked them and said: 'Neither the one nor the other, but that the works of God might be made manifest in him.'[4] Not the less clear is his own belief in the moral root of much physical disease, and in moral therapeutics; and it is important to note well the
