ΤΟ

THE PRESIDENT, VICE-PRESIDENT, AND GOVERNORS

OF

THE DEVON AND EXETER HOSPITAL,

WHO WERE PRESENT AT THE ANNIVERSARY,

AUGUST 29TH, 1848,

AND AT WHOSE REQUEST IT IS PUBLISHED,

This Sermon

IS, WITH SINCERE RESPECT, INSCRIBED,

BY THE AUTHOR.

A SERMON.

ST. MATTHEW, CHAP. VIII., VERSES 16, 17.

"When the even was come, they brought unto Him many that were possessed with devils: and He cast out the spirits with His Word, and healed all that were sick :

"That it might be fulfilled, which was spoken by Esaias the prophet, Himself took our infirmities, and bare our sicknesses."

THE words of the text are a brief and condensed statement of some of our Blessed Lord's Miracles of Mercy, and are also remarkable as an instance of a double application of Prophecy; here used in its lower and subordinate sense, the higher undoubtedly referring to the moral and spiritual diseases of our fallen nature.

It would seem that, on this occasion, our Lord poured forth His healing virtue in rich abundance, and that "many having been brought to Him possessed with devils, He cast out the Spirits with His Word, and healed all that were sick," in a free, spontaneous, unlimited exercise of Divine Charity and Compassion; as when on another occasion it is said, that "multitudes sought to touch Him; for there went virtue out of Him, and healed them all." Here, too, was combined the case of demoniacal possession, so

strongly and typically expressive of moral and spiritual disease, with that of ordinary sickness; as if the Great Physician were willing to exhibit the power of His healing touch both on souls and bodies, and to shadow forth that perfect restoration of body, soul, and spirit, hereafter to take place through the grace and efficacy of the great Atonement.

Let us linger awhile on the sacred scene, and picture to ourselves the Divine Redeemer suspending awhile the due penalty and punishment of sin, and the terrors of Divine Justice mitigated, for the moment, by the tender and compassionate spirit of the man Christ Jesus-touched with a feeling of the sorrows and infirmities of those whose nature in all things, sin only excepted, He had assumed and taken to Himself-beholding as Man, the creatures whom as God He had made-regarding their sorrows and sicknesses with human eyes-hiding his face from their sins, and seeing them only in their state of helpless misery; and we may imagine the tenderness with which He hastened to heal all that were sick, and the words and hand of Power which stayed not in their charitable office till all trace of human suffering had vanished before the virtue of His healing touch.

So is the Man Christ Jesus ever presented to us. In all His Miracles of Mercy there is doubtless, as was intended, an overpowering evidence of His Divine Mission and Authority. But it is the sympathy with suffering humanity that awakens all the deeper chords of human feeling, that draws us to Him and Him to us, 66 as with the hands of a

man," and convinces us, that the now risen and ascended

Saviour retains, even amidst the glories of His Father's throne, the same human sympathies, and that tender remembrance of the scenes and sorrows of His earthly sojourning, which prompts with a more prevailing prayer, His effectual and availing intercession before the Mercy Seat.

It was, indeed, but for a brief interval, in a small and obscure region, that the tide of human suffering was arrested by the voice and presence of the Divine Redeemer: since then it has never ceased to flow, and disease and sickness have reigned unchecked and unabated over the countless family of man. "By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin;" and bodily pain, its consequence and necessary attendant, has been a sad and perpetual remembrance of our fallen state, typical of our moral and spiritual maladies, and prompting those groanings and travailings in which the whole creation plaintively expresses its earnest yearnings and longings for deliverance from conscious bondage.

But has not the Advent of the Lord of Life, the second Adam, effected, if not a physical, yet a most important moral change in the character, end, and object of bodily suffering? Before, it was simply the punishment of sin, oppressive, hopeless, the manifestation of the wrath of a justly-offended God; but now its bitterness is tempered, and its pangs assuaged, by the " Grace, Mercy, and Truth that came by Jesus Christ." Disease and wasting sickness, indeed, in all their distressing and complicated forms, seeming almost to "rend asunder soul and spirit," "pierc