This miracle has been called a miracle of coincidence, meaning that the marvel lay in the passing of the shoal at the moment when the net was cast; it might not be a miracle at all, because the chances against its being a natural phenomenon, though enormous, are not absolutely infinite. It is not one which would appal ordinary beholders: the boatmen, we may suppose, thought chiefly of securing the fish. Our Lord is now testing the capacity of men for discerning God, and He therefore performs miracles of a less striking order first; these impress those only who have their eyes open for the manifestation of what is spiritual; and those who are found to possess this “vision and faculty Divine” are afterwards shewn “greater things than these.” Simon had no doubt seen our Lord work cures, but this mastery of our Lord over the creation comes more home to him than His power over disease, and his feelings break forth. It is characteristic of him, that what is in him _must come out_ at once; whether it be an objection that occurs to him, or a motion of indignation or of elation, or of the panic to which Orientals are subject—out it must come; this is the point in which the identity of his character is most visibly preserved in all our narratives. Here he is mastered by the emotions of the moment and must give them outward show; and along with his gush of feeling comes the sense of his unworthiness, the impression of his being wholly unequal to the duty and position thrust upon him; an impression not uncommon with men in such junctures; though biographies abundantly show that those who feel it most very often acquit themselves admirably when the trial comes. Touched by this, Simon throws himself at his Master’s feet and says, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.”(145) We go back now to the course of the narrative in St Mark’s Gospel, and there we find that the first thing which struck the hearers of our Lord was the _authority_ with which He spoke. “And they were astonished at his teaching: for he taught them as having authority, and not as the scribes.”(146) We saw in the last chapter, that men bowed to the authority in the air of our Lord when He purged the Temple of Jerusalem: this authority now passed into His words, and it swayed the hearts of men. It is the special instinct of a crowd that it quickly discerns those whom it must hear, and this multitude saw that our Lord had something to tell them and that, not of tradition, but out of His own very self. Here was a genuine authority coming of nature or of God, by the side of which the stated legal authority of the officiating scribes paled away out of sight.