^j The hand, more than any other limb or organ, differentiates man, begotten in the image of his Father, from the whole series of animal creations. No other animal has a hand. The corre- sponding organ in the anthropoid ape, which is the most like a hand, is not really a hand ; it can fashion nothing, it is fit for nothing but to cling to a branch or convey food to the mouth. Only man has a hand, and as with it he stamps his impress upon nature, and founds his sovereignty of civilization, and performs his deeds of heroism, so, when he would caress, or soothe, or comfort, or encourage, or bless, or stimulate, or welcome his fellow human being, in obedience to some secret instinct, he invariably automatically lays his hand upon him.2
Tj Jesus could have cured the leper with a word. There was no need He should touch him. No need, did I say ? There was
1 R. E. Thompson, Nature, the Mirror of Grace, 81 . 1 B. Wilberforce, The Tou-er that Worlceth in Us, 66.
2i4 THE LEPER
every need. For no one else would touch him. The healthy human hand, always more or less healing, was never laid on him ; he was despised and rejected. It was a poor thing for the Lord to cure his body ; He must comfort and cure his sore heart. Of all men a leper, I say, needed to be touched with the hand of love. Spenser says, " Entire affection hateth nicer hands." It was not for our master, our brother, our ideal man, to draw around Him the skirts of His garments and speak a lofty word of healing, that the man might at least be clean before He touched him. The man was His brother, and an evil disease cleaved fast unto him. Out went the loving hand to the ugly skin, and there was His brother as he should be — with the flesh of a child. I thank God that the touch went before the word. Nor do I think it was the touch of a finger, or of the finger-tips. It was a kindly healing touch in its nature as in its power. Oh, blessed leper! thou knowest henceforth what kind of a God there is in the earth — not the God of the priests, but a God such as Himself only can reveal to the hearts of His own.1
III.
The Gkeater Gift.
The physical cure is the pledge and promise of a still greater blessing. For leprosy was singled out by God Himself from the vast catalogue of human diseases and sufferings to keep before the eyes of His people of old a perpetual memorial of the vileness and awfulness of moral evil. The outer body was made by Him a mirror of the far deeper and darker taint in the soul. It was a silent preacher in the midst of the theocratic nation and to the end of time, testifying to the virulence of a more inveterate malady — that " from the sole of the foot even unto the head there is no soundness in us, but wounds and bruises and putrefying sores." Although it by no means invariably followed that the lepers of Israel were afflicted with their dire plague in con- sequence of personal sin, yet we know that this was the case in some instances, such as those of Miriam, Gehazi, and Uzziah. And at all events the disease was regarded by the Jews as a mark of the Divine displeasure. They spoke of it as "the finger of 1 G. MacDonald, The Miracles of Our Lord, 88.
ST. MATTHEW vm. 2, 3 215
God." It was considered an outward and visible sign of inward disorganization, guilt, and impurity.
^[ It is clear that the same principle [of the law of Moses] which made all having to do with death, as mourning, a corpse, the occasions of a ceremonial uncleanness, inasmuch as all these were signs and consequences of sin, might consistently with this have made every sickness an occasion of uncleanness, each of these being also death beginning, partial death — echoes in the body of that terrible reality, sin in the soul. But instead of this, in a gracious sparing of man, and not pushing the principle to the uttermost, God took but one sickness, one of these visible out- comings of a tainted nature, in which to testify that evil was not from Him, could not dwell with Him. He linked this teaching with but one ; by His laws concerning it to train men into a sense of a clinging impurity, which needed a Pure and a Purifier to overcome and expel, and which nothing short of His taking of our flesh could drive out. And leprosy, the sickness of sicknesses, was throughout these Levitical ordinances selected of God from the whole host of maladies and diseases which had broken in upon the bodies of men. Bearing His testimony against it, He bore His testimony against that out of which every sickness grows, against sin ; as not from Him, as grievous in His sight ; and against the sickness also itself as grievous, being as it was a visible manifestation, a direct consequence of sin, a forerunner of that death which by the portal of disobedience and revolt had found entrance into natures created by Him for immortality.1