2. Even if it had been relaxed as public law, yet those traditionally bound to it would not have been released from the moral obligation of obedience, and all the particulars go to show that the keepers of the swine were thus bound.
3. In the enforcement of a law which bound the conscience, our Lord had an authority such as does not belong to the private individual.
4. That the Gadarenes should have deprecated any recurrence of this interference with unlawful gains, is no more wonderful than that the population of the maritime counties of Great Britain should, in the days of our protective tariff, have been favorable to smuggling, and should even have resented, as they did, the interference of conscientious clergymen whose duty it was to denounce the practice.
5. That they should have done no more than ask for our Saviour's departure, affords of itself the strongest presumption that the action in which He co-operated, and which was certainly detrimental, was not illegal.
I submit these observations upon an historical subject, complicated by several difficulties, with all respect to those who differ from me. I do not deny that the population of Decapolis was in some sense a mixed population, partially resembling that of Samaria.[1] But to suppose the swineherds to have been punished by Christ for pursuing a calling which to them was an innocent one, is to run counter to every law of reasonable historic interpretation. I will not assume that I have even now exhausted the subject, though I have not knowingly omitted anything material. But Prof. Huxley is so well pleased with his own contentions, that he thinks the occasion one suitable for pointing out the intellectual superiority to which he has been led up by scientific training. I believe that I have overthrown every one of them; but I do not think the achievement such as would warrant my concluding by paying myself a compliment.—Nineteenth Century.
- ↑ Bell. Jud., iii, 3, 2.
