considerable which we read of in the whole course of our Lord's ministry; and was an apt prelude to that greatest miracle of all, the seal of his mission and of our hope, his own resurrection from the dead. Accordingly, we find him preparing himself for this exhibition of his power on the person of his deceased friend with particular care and solemnity. He was at a distance from Bethany, the place of Lazarus's residence, when Lazarus first fell sick; the alarm of the Jewish rulers, excited by his cure of the man born blind, and by his open claim to be the Son of God and One with the Father, having obliged him to retire to Bethabara. When he received the news of his friend's illness, notwithstanding his affection for Lazarus and his sisters, he continued two days in the place where the message found him; that the catastrophe might take place before his miraculous power should be interposed. He had indeed already restored life in two instances: The daughter of Jairus was one; and the widow's son of Nain was the other. But in both these instances, the evidence of the previous fact, that death had really taken

place, was not so complete and positive as our Lord intended it should be, and as it really was, in the case of Lazarus. Accordingly, it is remarkable, that our Lord's apostles, although they had been witnesses to these miraculous recoveries of Jairus's daughter and the widow's son of Nain, entertained not at the time of Lazarus's death the most distant apprehension that their Master's power went to the recovery of life once truly and totally extinguished. This appears from the alarm and the despair indeed which they expressed, when he informed them that Lazarus was dead, and declared his intention of visiting the afflicted family. They had so little expectation that the revival of Lazarus could be the effect, or that it was indeed the purpose of his journey, that they would have dissuaded him from leaving the place of his retirement; conceiving, as it should seem, that the only end of his proposed visit to Bethany would be to gratify the feelings of a useless sympathy at the hazard of his own safety. "Master," they say unto him, they say unto him, "the Jews of late sought to stone thee, and goest thou thither again?" And when they found him

determined to go, "Let us also go," said St. Thomas; "that we may die with him." They rather expected to be themselves stoned by the Jews, together with their Master, and to be one and all as dead as Lazarus, in a few days, than to see the life of Lazarus restored.

I must observe, by the way, that these sentiments, expressed by the apostles upon this and similar occasions, afford a clear proof that the disciples were not persons of an over easy credulity, who may with any colour of probability be supposed to have been themselves deceived in the wonders which they reported of our Lord. They seem rather to have deserved the reproach which our Lord after his resurrection cast upon them, "Fools and slow of heart to believe!" They seem to have believed nothing till the testimony of their own senses extorted the belief. They reasoned not from what they had once seen done to what more might be: They built no probabilities of the future upon the past: They formed no general belief concerning the extent of our Lord's

power from the effects of it which they had already seen. After the miraculous meal

of the five thousand upon five loaves and two fishes, we find them filled with wonder and amazement that he should be able to walk upon a troubled sea and to assuage the storm. And in the present instance, their faith in what was past carried them not forward to the obvious conclusion, that he who snatched the daughter of Jairus from the jaws of death, and raised a young man from his coffin, would be able to bring back Lazarus from the grave. And this indeed was what was to be expected from persons like them, of low occupations and mean attainments, whose minds were unimproved by education and experience: For however certain modern pretenders to superior wisdom may affect to speak contemptuously of the credulity of the vulgar, and think that they display their own refinement and penetration by a resistance of the evidence which satisfies the generality of men, the truth is, that nothing is so much a genuine mark of barbarism as an obstinate incredulity. The evilminded and the illiterate, from very dif

ferent causes, agree however in this, that they are always the last to believe upon any evidence less than the testimony of their own senses. Ingenuous minds are unwilling to suspect those frauds in other men to which they feel an aversion themselves: They always therefore give testimony its fair weight. The larger a man's opportunities have been of becoming acquainted with the occurrences of his own and former ages, the more he knows of effects daily arising from causes which never were expected to produce them, of effects in the natural world of which he cannot trace the cause; and of facts in the history of mankind which can be referred to no principle in human nature to nothing within the art and contrivance of man. Hence the man of science and speculation, as his knowledge enlarges, loses his attachment to a principle to which the barbarian steadily adheres that of measuring the probability of strange facts by his own experience. He will be at least as slow to reject as to receive testimony; and he will avoid that obstinacy of unbelief which is satisfied