imating the
higher elements, was an exceptional moral and spiritual insight. This
insight guided him far upward in truths of conduct and of emotional life.
But it could not suffice to disclose those broad facts as to the
procedure of the phenomena of nature which we call science. To the Jew
of the New Testament period,--to Paul as much as to the fishermen of
Galilee,--the world was directly administered by a personal being who
habitually set aside for his own purposes the ordinary course of events.
The higher minds of the Greek-Roman world had reached a different
conception. Thinkers like Aristotle had assumed the constancy of nature
as the basis of their teaching, poets like Lucretius had proclaimed it.
But the great mass of the Greek-Roman world still believed, as the entire
Jewish people believed, in the habitual intervention of some divine
personality. What distinguished and dignified the Jewish belief was that
it attributed all such interventions to a single deity who embodied the
highest moral perfection, instead of to a mixed multitude representing
evil as well as good impulses. All Jewish history was written on this
hypothesis. The only records of the past which Jesus knew were the Old
Testament and its Apocrypha, in which each crisis of the nation or the
individual displayed the decisive interference of the heavenly power.
The occurrences which we name miracles were hardly distinguished by the
Jew as generically different from ordinary occurrences; they were only
more marked and special instances of God's working. That a man
especially beloved of God for his goodness should be given power to heal
the blind and the lunatic seemed as natural as it was that his loving
compassion should win the outcast and his fiery rebuke appall the
hypocrite.

It seems clear that Jesus, not less than his disciples, regarded his
power over physical ills as just as truly an incident of his character
and mission as was the power to inspire conduct and reclaim the erring.
What differentiated him from them was that he held the physical marvels
of far less relative account than they did. Obscure as the detailed
narratives must remain to us, it seems unmistakable that he habitually
discouraged all publicity and prominence for his works of healing. His
spiritual genius showed him that the stimulation of curiosity and
expectation in this direction diverted men from the principal business of
life, and the essential purport of his