esteemed Liturgists, is offered us as the thanksgiving of the humble, who are healed by God, according to the hope they had put in him.1

1 Rup. ubi supra";"DURAND. Ration. vi. 125.

solutum est vinculum linguæ ejus, et loquebatur recte. Et præcepit illis, ne cui dicerent. Quanto autem eis præcipiebat, tanto magis plus prædicabant: et eo amplius admirabantur, dicentes: Bene omnia fecit: et surdos fecit audire, et mutos loqui.

his ears were opened, and the string of his tongue was loosed, and he spoke right. And he charged them that they should tell no man. But the more he charged them, so much the more a great deal did they publish it. And so much the more did they wonder, saying: He hath done all things well; he hath made both the deaf to hear and the dumb to speak.

Jesus is no longer in Judea; the names of the places, mentioned in the beginning of to-day's Gospel, tell us very clearly, that the Gentile world has become the scene of the divine operations for man's salvation. What manner of man, then, is this who is led to the Saviour, and the sight of whose miseries make the Incarnate Word heave a sigh? And what is the meaning of the extraordinary circumstances which produce the cure? A single word of Jesus could have done it all, and his power would have shone forth all the more brightly. But, the miracle, which is here related, contains a great mystery; and the Man-God, who aims mainly at giving us a lesson by this his mercy, makes the exercise of his power subordinate to the teaching which he desires to convey to us.

The holy Fathers tell us, that this man represents the entire human race, exclusive of the Jewish people. Abandoned for four thousand years in the sides, that is, in the countries, of the North, where the prince of this world was ruling as absolute master," it has been experiencing the terrible effects of the seeming forgetfulness, on the part of its Creator and Father, which was the consequence of original sin. Satan,-whose perfidious craftiness has caused man

1 LUDOLPH. CARTH. Vita J. Chr. i. 90.

2 Is. xiv. 12.

to be driven out of Paradise,-has made him his own prey, and nothing could exceed the artifice he has employed for keeping him in his grasp. Wisely oppressing his slave, he adopted the plan of making him deaf and dumb, for this would hold him faster than chains of adamant could ever do. Dumb, he could not ask God to deliver him; deaf, he could not hear the divine voice; and thus, the two ways for obtaining his liberty were shut against him. The adversary of God and man,-Satan,-he may boast of his tyranny. The grandest of all God's creations looks like a failure; the human race, in all its branches, and in all nations, seems ruined; for, even that people whom God had chosen for his own, and was to be faithful to Him when every other had gone astray, even that has made no other use of its privileges than the denying its Lord and its King, more cruelly than all the rest of mankind!

2

What, then! is the Bride, whom the Son of God came to seek upon the earth,-is the society of saints, -to be limited to those few who declared themselves his disciples during the years of his mortal life? Not so: the zeal of the newly formed Church, and the ineffable goodness of God, produced a far grander result. Driven from Jerusalem, as her divine Spouse had been, the Church met the poor captive of Satan beyond the boundaries of Judea; she would fain bring him into the kingdom of God; and, through the apostles and their disciples, she brings him to Jesus, beseeching Him to lay his divine hand upon him. No human power could effect his cure. He, deafened by the noise of his passions, it is only in a confused way, that he can hear even the voice of his own conscience; and, as to the sounds of tradition, or the speakings of the prophets, they are to him but as an echo, very distant and faint. Worst

1 Exod. i. 10.

2 Deut. xxxii. 9.

of all, as his hearing is gone, that most precious of our senses whilst on earth,-so, likewise is gone the power of making good his losses, for as the Apostle teaches, the one thing that could save him is Faith, and Faith cometh by hearing,1 and his hearing is dead.

5

Our Jesus groans, when they have brought this poor creature before him. He was grieved at seeing the cruelties the enemy had inflicted on this his own privileged being, this beautiful work, of which He himself had served as model and type to the Blessed Trinity, at the beginning of the world. Raising up to heaven those eyes of his sacred Humanity,-those eyes, whose language has such resistless power,3-he sees the Eternal Father acquiescing to the intentions of his own merciful compassion. Then, resuming the exercise of that creative omnipotence, which, in the beginning, had made all things to be very good, and all his works be perfect, he, as God and as the Word, utters the mighty word of restoration: Ephpheta! Be thou opened! Nothingness, or rather (in this instance) Ruin, which is worse than nothingness, obey the well-known voice; the ears of the poor sufferer are opened, joyfully opened to the teachings, which his delighted Mother the Church pours into them. She is all the gladder, because it was her prayers that won this deliverance; and he, in whom Faith comes now through his ears making him a changed being, -he, finding that his tongue can speak, speaks, or rather, sings out a canticle of praise to his God,-a canticle none the less well sung, because it is the first time he has been able to be its chanter. 7

And yet, as we were observing, this merciful Lord of ours, by this cure, aims not so much at showing the power of his divine word, as at giving a glorious teaching to his followers; he wishes to reveal to

1 Rom. x. 17.

2 Gen. i. 26.

3 St. John, xi. 42.

4 Gen. i. 31.
5 Deut. xxxii. 4.

St. John, i. 3. 7 Ps. 1. 17.

them, under certain visible symbols, the invisible realities produced, by his grace, in the secret of the Sacraments. It is for the sake of such teaching, that the Gospel has mentioned such an apparently trifling detail as this, that when the deaf and dumb man was brought before him, he took him apart, apart, so to say, from the multitude of the noisy passions and the vain thoughts,' which had made him deaf to heavenly truths. After all, would there be much good in curing him, if the occasion of his malady were not removed, and he were to relapse perhaps that same day? So then, having, by this separation, taken precautions for the future, Jesus inserts into the ears of the man's body his own divine fingers which bring the Holy Ghost, and make to penetrate right to the ears of his heart the restorative power of this Spirit of love. And finally, more mysteriously, because the truth which was to be expressed is more profound,He touches, with the saliva of his sacred mouth, that tongue which had become incapable of giving glory and praise; and Wisdom (for it is she that is here mystitically signified,)—Wisdom, that cometh forth from the mouth of the Most High, and flows for us from the Saviours fountains as a life-giving drink, yes, this Wisdom openeth the mouth of dumb man, just as she maketh eloquent the tongues of speechless infants."

2

3

5

6

Therefore it is, that the Church, in order to show us that the event recorded in to-day's Gospel is figurative, not merely of one individual man, but of us all, has prescribed, that the circumstances which accompanied the cure of this deaf and dumb sufferer shall be expressed in the ceremonies of holy Baptism. The Priest, before pouring the water of the sacred Font on the person who is presented for Baptism, puts on the Catechumen's tongue the salt of Wisdom,

1 V. BED. in Marc. ii. 2 Cf. St. Luke, xi. 20; St. Matth. xii. 28,

3 Ecclus. xxiv. 5.
4 Is. xii. 3.

5 Ecclus. xxiv. 5.

6 Wisd. x. 21.
7 Ibid.