good God who creates, and delights to
create; who orders all worlds and heavens with perfect wisdom,
perfect power, perfect justice, perfect love; and peoples them with
immortal souls and spirits, that they may be useful, happy, blessed,
in keeping his laws, and doing the work which he has ordained for
them. Oh think, if but once, of God the perfect and all-loving
Father; and then you will know why Jesus looked up to him.

And you will see, too, why Jesus sighed. He sighed because he was
one with the Father. He sighed because he had the mind of God.
Because God, the Lord of health and order, hates disease and
disorder. Because God, the Lord of bliss and happiness, hates
misery and sorrow. Because God made the world at first very good;
and, behold, by man's sin, it has become bad.

Why did he sigh? Surely, also, from pity for the poor man. His
infirmity was no such great one; he had an impediment in his speech,
and with it, as many are apt to have, deafness also: but it was an
infirmity. It was a disease. It was something out of order,
something gone wrong in God's world; and as such, Christ could not
abide it; he grieved over it. He sighed because there was sickness
in a world where there ought to be nothing but health, and sorrow
where there ought to be nothing but happiness. He sighed, because
man had brought this sickness and sorrow on himself by sin; for,
remember, man alone is subject to disease. The wild animal in the
wood, the bird upon the tree, seldom or never know what sickness is;
seldom or never are stunted or deformed. They live according to
their nature, healthy and happy, and die in a good old age. While
man--Why should I talk of what man is, of how far man is fallen from
what God the Father meant him to be, while one hundred thousand
corpses of brave men are now fattening the plains of Italy for next
year's crop; while even in our favoured land, we find at every turn
prisons and reformatories, lunatic asylums, hospitals for numberless
kinds of horrible diseases; sickness, weakness, and death all round
us? Only look up yonder to Windsor Forest, and see the vast
building now in progress there before your eyes, for lunatic
convicts--the most miserable, perhaps, and pitiable of human
beings,--and let that building be a sign to you, how far man is
fallen, and what cause Jesus had to sigh, and has to sigh still,
over the miseries of fallen man.

Yes, my friends, not without reason did the o