That our blessed Lord might authenticate his mission, and enforce his doctrine, he took occasion, in the synagogue, to dispossess a demoniac. The unclean spirit that tormented him instantly yielded obedience to the word of Jesus, after having previously acknowledged him to be “the Holy One of God,” verse 24. A miracle, performed upon such an occasion, and attested by a variety of circumstances of public notoriety, excited the amazement of all present; who said, “What thing is this? What new doctrine is this?” Two things were the object of their surprise; the miraculous cure of the demoniac, and the supposed novelty of our Lord’s doctrine. But had they been properly conversant in the writings of their favorite lawgiver Moses, they would have seen, that Jesus came not to reveal truths in their nature absolutely new, and altogether unknown; but only to place in a new light, to communicate by a new style of preaching, and to enforce by motives unfolded with clearer radiance, those original truths, which the divine legation and ritual economy of Moses, as well as the corroborating testimony of all the prophets, were intended to teach from the beginning. See Acts, x. 43, and John, v. 45. But St. Paul accounts for this ignorance in the Jews, and the prejudices which sprung from it, by observing, that “their minds were blinded: for, until this day, remaineth the same vail untaken away in the reading of the Old Testament; which vail is done away in Christ.” 2 Cor. iii. 14. Had not “a vail” of darkness and unbelief “been upon their hearts,” they would have both known and acknowledged, that the doctrines which Jesus preached, were of patriarchal as well as Mosaic antiquity; and that Jehovah himself “preached _that gospel_ unto Abraham,” Gal. iii. 8, which Jesus came to confirm and elucidate by a dispensation, superior in light and glory to any that had preceded it; and that what “God spake at sundry times and in divers manners unto the fathers by the prophets, he spake in the last days by his Son.” Heb. i. 1. Blindness in the Jews made them fix the charge of novelty on the doctrines of Christ, although so visibly inscribed with the marks of divine authenticity; and the effect of that presumptive and hasty imputation, was an unwillingness to receive his testimony or credit the truth of his mission; and the consequence, a stubborn opposition to truth and a fatal insensibility in sin, terminating, at last, in such judgments as render them now a hissing and a proverb to all the nations of the earth.