The miracle in the country of the Gadarenes, into which our Lord went, brings out one point which belongs to my subject.(195) This miracle I regard as a practical illustration of the lesson of the parable of the Tares, inasmuch as both one and the other bear on the great puzzle of God’s tolerance of evil in the world. While the parable and interpretation are yet fresh in the minds of the Apostles, the case of this Demoniac comes before them. It may have struck them—as it must often have struck ourselves—how often after having learnt something one day we come, unaccountably, on an instance or illustration of it on the next. The circumstance was this, an evil agency was, so to say, taken prisoner by our Lord; should it be deprived of existence, or at any rate of activity at once? Men generally would answer “Yes.” They would regard it as something that had escaped God’s eye and which God’s servants ought to destroy whenever they could. This is not Christ’s view. Evil is not regarded by him as an oversight of God. God has allowed it to exist in the world, and so it has probably some function to perform. It is not to be extirpated with ruthless hand. The tares are to grow until the harvest. On the same principle our Lord will not send the Spirit into the pit. He is the Son of Man, and men he has come to deliver; of the man therefore this evil agency must loosen his hold; but, saving this, he may pursue the vocation he was following when Christ crossed the Lake. Our Lord rescues the _man_, because to do good unto men He was sent, but for property he is not concerned. If the Demon must be about some evil, but will be content with turning to the swine, to the swine he is at liberty to go; he is not sent to them, but neither is he interdicted. The plague on men is, as was observed above, turned into a murrain among swine.(196) The destruction of the swine was the act of the Divine government only in the same sense that the losses by the cattle plague are so now. As we go on we read: “And they began to beseech him to depart from their borders.”(197) It would be hard upon this people to say that they counted the deliverance of their brother a less matter than the loss of their swine; they were terror-stricken at the display of superhuman power, and they wished to be rid of their cause of fear. In the above verse we find the first instance of indifference or aversion among those to whom our Lord went. The schooling of the Apostles leads them steadily on; step by step they advance into the rougher ground of actual life, and one such step is noted here.