THAT the gospel Jesus taught and demonstrated was one of works as well as words, is the only reasonable conclusion to be deduced from the record of his public ministry as set down by the four evangelists. It is true that he preached the gospel of the kingdom wherever he went after he had gathered about him those whom he had chosen to be "fishers of men," for as he told the people he had not come to destroy the law promulgated from Sinai and handed down through many generations by the prophets invested by the supreme Lawgiver with power to declare His word, but he had come to exemplify in himself its glorious fulfilment. Yet from the beginning his preaching in the synagogues and in the open was accompanied by the healing works,—he was "moved with compassion" for the burdened ones who so plainly evidenced their need of something more in the way of relief than the letter of the law had thus far availed them.
The priests and rulers at first gave little heed to the lowly Nazarene; it was not until his fame as the long-promised Messiah, he who was to redeem his people Israel from bondage, had spread far and wide, that they began to see in him a possible danger to their prestige and rule, and doubtless the vision of a temporal kingdom loomed large in the hopes of the people smarting under oppression and burdened with poverty and woe. Christ Jesus had come to redeem his people, not only from sin but from a despotism they had accepted as a matter of course,—sickness and suffering were the common lot, and he who with a word or touch could bid these evils depart was a prophet indeed.
The narrative is tersely given, but we can picture, as the Master journeyed from one village to another, whither his fame had preceded him, how quickly the word was passed from house to house that the "great Physician," he who healed all manner of diseases,—the blind and the deaf, they who were possessed of evil spirits and the lame and the halt,—had come, and how dull eyes brightened and despair was changed to hope. As he preached the word, "opened unto them the scriptures," the people gathered about him, bringing their sick and afflicted that he might heal them; and again and again we read that "he healed them all,"—it mattered not what evil had bound them, the bonds were loosed and they were freed, made whole!
