strength, the foundation of life is quite consumed, as in this sense it is said of the patriarchs, 'They died old and full of life, and were gathered to their fathers.' Even the Saviour Himself-He died; but He was never ill. The picture of the dead Jesus stands at all times before our eyes, and we should bear it in continual remembrance. But the thought of a very sick, or even of an ailing and physically-suffering Christ, we cannot entertain.1 A sickness our Lord could therefore consider something abnormal, could feel it as a demand for Him to attack it with His restoring power. But when death occurs, it is right to bow down under God, who allows man to die, and says, 'Return again to dust,' and, 'It is ordained for man once to die.' Even a Paul, however deeply he often longed for death, did not like to be ill, and called on the Lord to deliver him from 'the body of this death.'

Hence the rarity of raisings from the dead by Jesus, but also hence the perfect right of the supposition that our Lord must have had the most powerfully determining motives in each single case to induce

1 The passage in Matt. xxv. 36 may, in this view, present a difficulty. Everything else that our Lord says (I was hungry, thirsty, naked, a stranger, imprisoned) applied to Him, for He was really in these circumstances. But 'I have been ill, and ye have not visited me,' is wanting in historical support. It will be said that our Lord does not here mean Himself, but His brethren;' however, He has said it all first and immediately of His own person, and He could have introduced nothing which would have been impossible in Himself. But what is then the real meaning of nodevnoa? Must it be translated by 'I have been sick'? Why do we not stop at the next meaning, I was weak? The Vulgate translates it rightly, 'infirmus fui.' Of an άobéveα of Jesus in the sense of 'weakness' there is mention in Scripture; apart from the appearance of our Lord in Matt. xxvi. 37, 38, see 2 Cor. xiii. 4, 'He was crucified through weakness, we are weak in Him.' And passages such as 1 Cor. iv. 10, 2 Cor. xi. 29, 1 Thess. v. 14, on the one side, but on the other, admonitions, as in Jas. i. 27, 'visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction,' are well suited to recommend this more general acceptation of the expression.

Him to proceed to such an act; and hence, lastly, the demand on the expositor especially to show satisfactorily this motive.1 If such a motive cannot be shown in the case of the daughter of Jairus, it would be a strong argument against the accepting it as a real resurrection from the dead.

While we so strongly emphasize and place in the foreground the question of the motives of Jesus in the awakenings from the dead, we wish, at the same time, to bring out clearly that point of view by which apologetics will be here best promoted. In merely combating opposing views, there is here little to be done, and perhaps that little may be also easiest spared. The miracles now before us, like those which will be shown in the last group, have been and must be peculiarly inconvenient to Schleiermacher. Against the raising of the dead, the postulate which he demands for the recognition of a miracle, viz. the proof of an analogy with human dealings, could not possibly be given. And thus his perplexity appears very plain. He endeavours to free himself from his difficulty (Leben Jesu, p. 232) in a violent manner. He considers

the daughter of Jairus as only apparently dead, and makes use of the fact (certainly a very irrelevant one here) that people apparently dead, when they returned to consciousness, have made the assertion, that in their

1 The demand, that everywhere there should be shown the motive which determined Jesus to restore a dead man to life, is intended to be much more definite; and it goes much further than to say that the feeling or tone should be limited only to that region within which this activity of our Lord must have been kept. Feeling justly revolts against the thought that Jesus had been able to call back to life those that had lost it by a natural cause, or by such as the fall of the tower of Siloam (The Evangelia Infantiæ [in the Apocryphal Gospels] narrate a great number of such cases, and by it betray their character); just so, on the other hand, that He would have been willing to renew a life which had found its end at the limit set to mạn, by awakening the old man who had fallen asleep. There must have been reason for the wish, 'Take me not away in the half of my days;' it must, so to say, be worth while for the person to return again to the earthly life.

trance their hearing did not leave them. He makes the same supposition also of the young man at Nain; he calls to mind the Jewish custom of early burial; he is influenced, besides, by the fact that Luke alone narrates the history. By means of this makeshift he has fallen into the most ordinary rationalism, and in the case of Lazarus he is left in the lurch. How he, who stands up for the authenticity of the fourth Gospel, deals with this narrative, will be considered later.

Now, as regards Strauss; he also has a difficult position here. He cannot point out an Old Testament prophecy, applicable to the present narratives, which needed to be applied to the Messiah. To him it did not even seem sufficient that it was necessary for the Messiah to surpass Elijah and Elisha, who, according to 1st and 2d Kings, raised from the dead, and that, according to the idea held by the Jews, He ought at least not to be behind them. Hence he maintains that there is a second genetic factor, that a cause must be found existing in Christianity itself. "The Christians were not like other men, who have no hope beyond ... death appeared to them nothing but a sleep.. The faith in the resurrection of Christ involved, indeed, the principal guarantee for the future resurrection; but, together with this passive resurrection, men desired to see also active proofs of the exercise of His power on the part of Him who was to raise the dead; He must not merely have been raised from the dead Himself, but have also Himself raised the dead;' this he says was the genesis of our histories.

the grave,

It is easy to discover the deceptiveness of this manner of considering it. If any one says that Christianity is the religion of immortality and of the resurrection (Strauss' Leben, 464; Eng. transl. ii. 205),

he is bound to answer the question, On what is this faith grounded? from what source did the Christians draw it? Out of the Old Testament? But it needed the sharpness of the eye of Jesus, and of the enlightened view of the apostles, to discover the ground of such a hope there (Matt. xxii. 29; Heb. xi. 16). Or out of the opinions of the Judaism of the time? But Strauss himself has shown what there was in the theory of immortality as held by the Pharisees. Which of the two views is obvious to impartial thinkers, -the one, that Christians once got hold of the fancy of immortality, of awakening from death, and then invented it to suit and to support the myth of the resurrection of Jesus, and of the raisings of the dead which He has accomplished; or not rather the other, that they, just because Jesus had risen, and proved Himself as the Prince of Life, comforted themselves with an eternal life? Thus at least the Apostle Paul inferred in 1 Cor. xv. But we pursue the subject for an interest embracing much more than merely to show this arbitrariness. It is our object to render the probability of these miracles of our Lord conceivable, and to do so by exhibiting the motives which moved Him thereto.

THE RAISING OF THE DAUGHTER OF JAIRUS.-MATT. IX. 18; MARK V. 22; LUKE VIII. 41.

Strauss, from the point of view which he generally entertains of the narratives of the raisings from the dead by Jesus, makes the assertion, with regard to the one before us, that its theme is the saying, 'The maid is not dead, but sleepeth,' and that this theme is incorporated as a miraculous story. We refrain from passing a judgment on this view, relying with confidence on a thorough examination of the evangelical

representations. It is otherwise with a point which we ourselves consider a doubtful one, and which requires a closer discussion. The correct view of it, though in the end it cannot be doubtful, is not to be easily gained.

Expositors are reproached, that they have neglected to answer a question on which the whole turns-the question why our Lord performed this work. If the fact is merely stated, without elucidating the deed by this, the door through which a satisfactory view of the subject might be obtained remains closed. It does not seem good to return at once and immediately to the oft-considered question as to whether we have before us a real awakening from the dead, or if we have only the cure of a child sick to death, and already dying. We will certainly endeavour to walk in this path, but only so far as to point out that it does not lead us to any sure result; for, in order to decide the question, a totally different manner of proceeding is required.

All three evangelists narrate the incident, as already mentioned, in close connection with the account of the woman with the issue of blood. If we had Matthew's account alone, there could be no dispute on the point; for in chap. ix. ver. 18 he narrates, in unequivocal words, that the father of the child, falling at His feet, said to Jesus, My daughter ἄρτι ἐτελεύτησεν. Away, then, with this vain attempt to explain away these words: they are, 'my daughter is even now dead,' and nothing else. Strauss, although he cannot help calling the beseeching father'naïve,' because he makes the supposition that the awakening again of the dead child is easy work for Jesus, still sees in Matthew the beginning of the fabrication with a special tendency, and in the reports of Mark and Luke the further development of the myth. He does not even spare the