culties in perfection: and if we would know what a perfect soul is, we must consider what a perfect body is. When the body of man is in a state of perfection, its senses are all perfect. Its sight is quick and strong; its hearing is uninterrupted; its limbs are vigorous and active; it distinguishes all tastes and all odours without error, and in its feelings it is sensible of all the impressions of the elements. So when the soul is in equal health, it sees and understands things spiritual; it sees God and his truth as plainly as the eye sees the light of the day; it hears and attends to all important and useful information: it walks with God in the way of his commandments, and even runs with pleasure to do his will, as the angels fly through the heaven for the same purpose it distinguishes good and evil without error; and, apprehending their different effects and consequences, it relishes the one and abhors the other its speech is employed in the praises of God, and will be telling of his wonders from day to day, for it knows no end thereof; it therefore preserves its relation to God, as his child, his scholar, his subject, in affection, attention and obedience. O blessed state! who can survey this condition of humanity without bewailing its loss, and aspiring to its restoration?

For

For lost it was; and under that loss we are now suffering; and as such sufferers we were visited by Jesus Christ. When sin entered, man fell from this perfect state of mind, into ignorance and blindness of heart; inattention to divine knowledge and instruction; aversion to spiritual things; error of judgment; insensibility of the consequences of good and evil; and inability, as well as indisposition, to do the will of God. His soul is as a body maimed and distempered: for sin is not only a defect, but a positive disease, including the nature of all the diseases incident to man. The eyes of his mind are blind; its ears are deaf; its tongue is dumb; its feet are lame; its constitution infected with foul distempers; it is agitated with vain cares, cheated with vain pleasures, and distressed with emptiness and want. When the apostle had this subject before him, well might he exclaim, O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death? For the life we have upon these terms as natural men, is rather death than life; and so the gospel hath considered it: we are dead in trespasses and sins, and the world in which we live is dead unto God.

Now as Jesus Christ came to restore us from this state of disease and death into which we

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are fallen, all his mighty works present him to us as a deliverer from these evils; and therefore while his miracles were evidences of his own divine mission, they were signs of our, salvation. They all spake the same sense; and our Saviour himself hath given us a key to the right interpretation of them all: who, when he was about to give sight to a man born blind, did not proceed to the cure, till he had instructed his disciples in the sense of it, in such terms, as could not be applied to it as a bodily cure. "As long as I am in the world, I am "the light of the world," as if he had said, "I give light to this man born in darkness, as a sign that I give light to mankind, who are all "born in the like state. This man is but an “individual; and all the persons to whom I "shall restore their bodily sight are but few; "but a spiritual discernment in the eyes of the "mind is necessary to all mankind; therefore "I who give it am a light to the whole world, " and I give sight to this man as a sign of it."

That the miracle might be more instructive, a very peculiar form was given to it. He moulded the dust of the ground into clay, and having spread it upon the eyes of the man, he commanded him to go and wash off this dirt in the pool of Siloam. Here the reason of the

thing speaks for itself. What is this mire and clay upon the eyes, but the power this world has over us in shutting out the truth? Who are the people unto whom the glorious light of the gospel of Christ cannot shine, but they whose minds the God of this world hath blinded? So long as this world retains its influence, the gospel is hidden from the eyes of men; they are in a lost condition; and nothing can clear them of this defilement, but the water of the divine Spirit sent from above to wash it away.This seems to be the moral sense of the miracle: and a miracle thus understood becomes a sermon, than which none in the world can be more edifying. Our Saviour himself preached in the same way to his disciples, to instruct them in the nature of his mission, and of their own salvation. In short the gospel is sealed up, and a man may as well read a modern system of morality, unless he sees that Jesus Christ is the physician of human nature, and that a miserable and sickly world is in daily want of his healing power.

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The same spiritual turn is given to the miraculous distribution of bread in the wilderness. Christ informed the people, that if they followed him only to eat of this bread, for the feeding of their bodies, they mistook the nature of the miracle.

miracle. Ye seek me because ye did eat of the loaves and were filled. Labour not for the meat. that perisheth, but for that meat which endureth unto everlasting life, which the Son of man shall give unto you. The meat he then gave was only a figure of that which he gives in a higher. sense to all that believe on him, and which is meat indeed; no other in comparison of this being worthy of the name. By bread our Saviour sometimes means the doctrine of the gospel, which nourishes the mind; and sometimes his own body spiritually taken in the eucharist; but whether we here understand the bread of the Lord's supper, or the preaching of the word; both are distributed to the hungry multitude of mankind in the midst of this desert: and a sort of food this is, which, like the manna laid up in the tabernacle (called the hidden manna *) never perisheth, but nourisheth the soul to life eternal.

From the curing of the blind and the feeding of the hungry, let us proceed to the raising of the dead. It appears to us as a most wonderful thing, that a dead man' should hear the voice of Jesus Christ and return to life: but it is more wonderful that the grace of God and the calling of his gospel should revive a man dead in sin; because,

Revelation ii. 17.