HOM. xix. 22. JOHN ix. 1‐3. “Our Master replied to those “And as Jesus passed by, he who asked him concerning him saw a man which was blind from that was born blind, and to his birth. And his disciples whom he restored sight, if it asked him, saying, Master, who was he or his parents who had did sin, this man, or his sinned, in that he was born parents, that he was born blind. _It is not that he hath blind? Jesus answered, Neither sinned in anywise, nor his hath this man sinned, nor his parents; but in order that the parents: but that the works of power of God may be God should be made manifest in manifested, who healeth sins him.” of ignorance._”(370) The resemblance is striking. Nevertheless I do not think we have a right to conclude that this passage in the Clementine Homilies is necessarily a citation from St. John. The text is quoted in connection with the peculiar Ebionite doctrine of seasons and days already alluded to. When our Lord says that he heals the sins of ignorance, he is made in the Clementine Gospel to assert that the blindness of the man was the result of disregard by his parents of the new moons and sabbaths, not wilfully, but through ignorance. “The afflictions you mentioned,” says St. Peter in connection with this quotation, “are the result of ignorance, but assuredly not of wickedness. Give me the man who sins not, and I will show you the man who suffers not.” But though this is the interpretation put on the words of our Lord by the Clementine Ebionite, it by no means flows naturally from them; it is rather wrung out of them. The words, I think, mean that the blindness of the man is symbolical; its mystical meaning is ignorance. Our Lord by opening the eyes of the blind exhibits himself as the spiritual enlightener of mankind. He is come to unclose men’s eyes to the true light that he sheds abroad in the world. In St. John’s Gospel, after having declared that blindness was not the punishment of sin in the man or his parents, our Lord continues, “I must work the works of Him that sent me, while it is day; the night cometh, when no man can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” Put this last declaration in connection with the saying, “I am come to heal the sins of ignorance,” and the connection of ideas is at once apparent. The blindness of the man is symbolical of the ignorance of the world. “I am the light of the world, and I have come to dispel the darkness of the ignorance of the world.” And so saying, “he spat on the ground, and made clay of the spittle, and he anointed the eyes of the blind man with the clay.” A few important words in Christ’s teaching had escaped the memory of St. John. But they had been noted down by some other apostle, and the recollections of the latter were embodied in the Gospel in use among the Ebionites.