The Pulpit Commentary — Mark — Volume 1 — Section 366

test, cured two blind men in the house whither they had followed him. Besides these epocially recorded casos, we have several references of a general kind to our Lord's healing of the blind. The great number of instances of this kind is accounted for by the fact that blindness is a disease much more common in the East than in. the lands of tho West, while several causes have b~en assigned for that prevalence, such as the small particles of dust and sand impinging on the eye, and persons sleeping in the open e.ir at night. II. THE CONDITION OF THIS MAN. This man was blind, but, as we shall see, he had not been born blind-he was not blind from birth. He had become blind from accident or disease. At all events, he was destitute of that most valuable sense, the sense of sight. He had been long a stranger to the beauties of nature. "The light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to see the sun;" but that sun, that light, those beauties, those bright colours, those lovely forms that appear in the heaven above, in the earth beneath, in the waters round the earth-all, all had long been to him a blank. He was in that state which Milton, in the days of his blindness, so poetically e.nd pathetically deplores- "Thus with the year Seasons return: but not to me returns De.y, or the sweet approach of ev'n or morn, Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer's roije, Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine; But cloud instead ancl ever-during dark Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men Cut off I and, for the book of knowledge fair, Presented with a universal blank Of nature's works, to me expunged and rased., And wisdom e.t one entrance quite shut out." We know not whether this blind man had wife or child. It is probable he had; and, if so, when he rose in the morning his wife ministered unto him, his children clung to his knees and kissed him while he blessed them. They led him forth to the street or elsewhere out of doors. He could feel them, but could not behold them. Their smiles, their tears, their bright eyes, and sweet faces were to him unknown and by him unseen. All the region round Bethsaida was charming-the glancing waters of the lake, the lovely flowers of the Galilean hills, were a sight worth seeing ; but what were all these to this blind man? The district might as well have been dark and dismal, bleak and black; at any rate, a blank, a night without moon or star, midnight with its darkness visible, even "darkness that might be felt." UL PEcULIARITY IN THE MODE OF CURE. Here the peculiarity is twofold: I. Jesus took him by the hand and led him out of the town. 2. The cure was effected progressively, or at twice. What reason can we assign for the/armer pecu- liarity ? Why did he conduct him outside the town? Several reasons have been assigned. Some say that our Lord thereby meant to intimate the unworthiness, through nnbelief, of the inhabitants of this town, or rather village (,cwµ.71), and his consequent dissatisfaction with them; this, of course, is a mere conjecture. Others suppose, with more apparent reason, that, as the process of cure in this case was more than usually protracted, our Lord led the man out of the town in order to be free from interruption or any obstruction on the part of the crowd, just as in the preceding chapter he is said to have taken the deaf mute aside from the multitude. Bengel, with bis usual inge- nuity, conjectures the cause to be the Saviour's intention that, when the blind recovered sight, his eyes might rest on the more cheerful aspect of the sky and of the works of God in nature-that is, in the country-than of the works of man in the town. The thought is a beautiful one, but only the product of a fertile imagination. Of two remaining reasons, which have been suggested with considerable plausibility, one is the avoidance of witnesses on account of the somewhat disagreeable application of spittle, or saliva, to the pirson of the invalid, exactly as in the case of the deaf mute already refernd to; and the other is that our Lord, by varying the mode of cure, "sometimes doinl!, more, sometimes less, and sometimes nothing," signified his freedom from any fixed form of gesture or manipulation. Some, again, reject with regard to the saliva all these. holding that our Lord meant to grafL the supernatural on the natural, the saliva being e.n -364 THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MIARK. [on. vm. 1-38