United States or Saint Martin ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Nevertheless, to do those demoniacs justice, I had got through time imperceptibly by their pestilent help; and I was startled to see, by my watch, how late it was.
Such is a specimen of the flood of difficulties which poured in, through the great breach which the demoniacs had made in the credit of Biblical marvels. While I was in this stage of progress, I had a second time the advantage of meeting Dr. Arnold, and had satisfaction in finding that he rested the main strength of Christianity on the gospel of John.
Prejudice may perhaps, be removed; unbelief may be reasoned with; even demoniacs have been compelled to bear witness to the truth; but the stupidity of confirmed ignorance not only defeats the ultimate efficacy of the means for making men wiser and better, but stands in preliminary defiance to the very act of their application.
They found him full of sympathy and appreciation, dropping words of praise, ejaculations of admiration, tears. He surrounded himself with those who had tasted of his bounty, sick people whom he had cured, lepers whose death-in-life, demoniacs whose hell-in-life, he had terminated with a single powerful word.
He has 'enough for all, enough for each, enough for ever more. The reference to demoniacs adds nothing to the particulars in the earlier verses except the evidence it gives of the frequency of possession then. IV. Verses 42-44 show us Jesus seeking seclusion, but willingly sacrificing it at men's call.
And they with the demoniacs are the sole connecting link between that age and this.
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 diverges from them in mentioning two demoniacs instead of one.
I stood astonished, but, presently recovering myself, inquired when he considered it probable that the master would return, and whether he thought it would be two months or my tongue faltered two years; whereupon the Moldavian clerk made more signs than before, and yet more unintelligible; as I persisted, however, he flung down his pen, and, putting his thumb into his mouth moved it rapidly, causing the nail to sound against the lower jaw; whereupon I saw that he was dumb, and hurried away, for I had always entertained a horror of dumb people, having once heard my mother say, when I was a child, that dumb people were half demoniacs, or little better.
They represent demoniacs as having a supernatural acquaintance with Jesus, which, it now becomes manifest, they cannot have had. This must have been a credulous fiction. Indeed, the casting out of devils is so very prominent a part of the miraculous agency ascribed to Jesus, as at first sight to impair our faith in his miracles altogether.
He regarded him perhaps as a presence doubtful whether of angel or devil, even as the demoniacs regarded the Lord of Life who had come to set them free. Bewildered he must have been to find himself, towards the close of a long life of debauchery, wickedness, and the growing pains of hell, caught in a net of old times, old feelings, old truths.
Word Of The Day