If the nobleman might have understood the remark the Lord made, he was in no mood for principles, and respectfully he expostulates with our Lord for spending time in words when the need was so urgent. The sun of his life was going down into the darkness. He might deserve reproof, but even reproof has its season. "Sir, come down ere my child die." Whatever the Lord meant by the words he urged it no farther. He sends him home with the assurance of the boy's recovery, showing him none of the signs or wonders of which he had spoken. Had the man been of unbelieving kind he would, when he returned and found that all had occurred in the most natural fashion, that neither here had there been sign or wonder, have gradually reverted to his old carelessness as to a higher will and its ordering of things below. But instead of this, when he heard that the boy began to get better the very hour when Jesus spoke the word--a fact quite easy to set down as a remarkable coincidence--he believed, and all his people with him. Probably he was in ideal reality the head of his house, the main source of household influences--if such, then a man of faith, for, where a man does not himself look up to the higher, the lower will hardly look faithfully up to him--surely a fit man to intercede for his son, with all his house ready to believe with him. It may be said they too shared in the evidence--such as it was--not much of a sign or wonder to them. True; but people are not ready to believe the best evidence except they are predisposed in the direction of that evidence. If it be said, "they should have thought for themselves," I answer--To think with their head was no bad sign that they did think for themselves. A great deal of what is called freedom of thought is merely the self-assertion which would persuade itself of a freedom it would possess but cannot without an effort too painful for ignorance and self-indulgence. The man would _feel_ free without being free. To assert one's individuality is not necessarily to be free: it _may_ indeed be but the outcome of absolute slavery.