er, 'I will come and heal
him,' throbs with the consciousness of power, and is gentle with
tenderness, quick to interpret unspoken wishes, and not slow to answer,
unless it is for the wisher's good to be refused. When He was asked to
go, because the asker considered that His presence was necessary for His
power to have effect, He refused; when He is not asked to go, He
volunteers to do so. He is moved to apparently opposite actions by the
same motive, the good of the petitioner, whose weak faith He strengthens
by refusal, whose strong faith He confirms by acquiescence. And that is
the law of His conduct always, and you and I may trust it absolutely, He
may give, or retain ungiven, what we desire; in either case, He will be
acting in order that our trust in Him may be deepened.

That brings us to the remarkable and unique conception of our Lord's
manner of working and power to which this centurion gives utterance. 'I
also' (for the true text of Matthew has that 'also,' as the Revised
Version shows), 'I also am a man under authority, having soldiers under
me, and I say to this man, Go, and he goeth; to another, Come, and he
cometh; to my servant, Do this, and he doeth it. Speak thou with a word
only and my servant shall be healed.' A centurion was likely to
understand the power of a word of command. His whole training had taught
him the omnipotence of the uttered will of the authoritative general,
and although he was but an officer over a poor sixtieth part of a
legion, yet in some limited measure the same power lay in him, and his
word could secure unhesitating submission. One good thing about the
devilish trade of war is that it teaches the might of authority and the
virtue of absolute obedience. And even his profession, with all its
roughness and wickedness, had taught the centurion this precious lesson,
a jewel that he had found in a dunghill, the lesson that, given the
authoritative lip, a word is omnipotent. The commander speaks and the
legion goes, though it be to dash itself to death.

So he turns to Christ. Does he mean to parallel or to contrast his
subordination and Christ's position? The 'also,' which, as I remarked,
the Revised Version has rightly replaced in the text here, is in favour
of the former supposition, that he means to parallel Christ's position
with his own. And it is much more natural to suppose that a heathen man,
with little knowledge of Christ and of the depths of the divine
revelation in the