mam esh Shefa_, the
Bath of Healing. It seems to have been an intermittent spring, which
possessed some healing virtue for a certain class of ailments. Its
repute was well established, for a great multitude of hopeful patients
waited for the moving of the waters.[14]

To this natural hospital Jesus wended His way on the Sabbath of the
feast. And as the trained eye of the surgeon quickly selects the worst
case in the waiting-room, so is the eye of Jesus speedily fixed on "a
man which had an infirmity thirty and eight years," a man paralysed
apparently in mind as well as in body. Few employments could be more
utterly paralysing than lying there, gazing dreamily into the water, and
listening to the monotonous drone of the cripples detailing symptoms
every one was sick of hearing about. The little periodic excitement
caused by the strife to be first down the steps to the bubbling up of
the spring was enough for him. Hopeless imbecility was written on his
face. Jesus sees that for him there will never be healing by waiting
here.

Going up to this man, our Lord confronts him with the arousing question,
"Are you desiring to be made whole?" The question was needful. Not
always are the miserable willing to be relieved. Medical men have
sometimes offered to heal the mendicant's sores, and their aid has been
rejected. Even the invalid who does not trade pecuniarily on his disease
is very apt to trade upon the sympathy and indulgence of friends, and
sometimes becomes so debilitated in character as to shrink from a life
of activity and toil. Those who have sunk out of all honest ways of
living into poverty and wretchedness are not always eager to put
themselves into the harness of honest labour and respectability. And
this reluctance is exhibited in its extreme form in those who are
content to be spiritual imbeciles, because they shrink from all arduous
work and responsible position. Life, true life such as Christ calls us
to, with all its obligations to others, its honest and spontaneous
devotion to spiritual ends, its risks, its reality, and purity, does not
seem attractive to the spiritual valetudinarian. In fact, nothing so
thoroughly reveals a man to himself, nothing so clearly discloses to him
his real aims and likings, as the answer he finds he can give to the
simple question, "Are you willing to be made whole? Are you willing to
be fitted for the highest and purest life?"

The man is sufficiently alive to feel the implied