d, behold, the whole city came out
to meet Jesus: and when they saw Him, they besought Him that He
would depart out of their coasts.'--MATT. viii. 28-34.

Matthew keeps to chronological order in the first and second miracles of
the second triplet, but probably His reason for bringing them together
was rather similarity in their contents than proximity in their time.
For one cannot but feel that the stilling of the storm, which manifested
Jesus as the Peace-bringer in the realm of the Natural, is fitly
followed by the casting out of demons, which showed Him as the Lord of
still wider and darker realms, and the Peace-bringer to spirits tortured
and torn by a mysterious tyranny. His meek power sways all creatures;
His 'word runneth very swiftly.' Winds and seas and demons hearken and
obey. Cheap ridicule has been plentifully flung at this miracle, and
some defenders of the Gospels have tried to explain it away, and have
almost apologised for it, but, while it raises difficult problems in its
details, the total effect of it is to present a sublime conception of
Jesus and of His absolute, universal authority. The conception is
heightened in sublimity when the two adjacent miracles are contemplated
in connection.

There is singular variation in the readings of the name of the scene of
the miracle in the three evangelists. According to the reading of the
Authorised Version, Matthew locates it in the 'country of the
Gergesenes'; Mark and Luke, in the 'country of the Gadarenes'; whereas
the Revised Version, following the general consensus of textual critics,
reads 'Gadarenes' in Matthew and 'Gerasenes' in Mark and Luke. Now,
Gadara is over six miles from the lake, and the deep gorge of a river
lies between, so that it is out of the question as the scene of the
miracle. But the only Gerasa known, till lately, is even more
impossible, for it is far to the east of the lake. But some years since,
Thomson found ruins bearing the name of Khersa or Gersa, 'at the only
portion of that coast on which the steep hills come down to the shore'
(Smith, Historical Geography of the Holy Land, p. 459). This is probably
the site of the miracle, and may have been included in the territory
dependent on Gadara, and so have been rightly described as in 'the
country of the Gadarenes.'

Matthew again abbreviates, omitting many of the most striking and solemn
features of the narrative as given by the other two evangelists, and he
also diver