To our mind this is one of the most remarkable incidents in our Lord’s ministry. In the house of some sheltering friend, on the remote frontier of Galilee, He hoped to escape popular attention and to be relieved from the demands of the crowds, who had even deprived Him of the needed time to eat, but “He could not be hid.” A woman, a Syro-Phœnician, that is to say, one of the mixed race, in whom the blood of the Syrians and Phœnicians mingled, and for that reason doubly despised by the Jews, this woman had observed His presence, and was soon “at His feet.” From the fact that she was a Gentile, and of a mixed race at that, made her coming to Jesus an act of heroic faith. She came not only without invitation, or a single promise to warrant her coming, but in the face of heart-breaking discouragements. We have been trained to believe, from the clear teaching of Scripture, that when we come to Christ with our burdens of sorrow, be they ever so heavy, and ask for help, our prayers must always be subject to His will. And indeed He set us a beautiful object-lesson in His own great agony in Gethsemane. But here it would seem as if the process had been reversed, and as if this poor Syro-Phœnician woman had succeeded in imposing her will on the Son of God. Did He not say, “Be it unto thee even as thou wilt?” And is there not in this the appearance, at least, of the monarch abdicating in favor of the subject? Strange, indeed, that any one should get their own way and will with the Sovereign of all, for the sin that is in us so dyes the color of our will and deflects it, that we can seldom think of it as being other than a crooked piece of bent or twisted iron. It is very wonderful that this woman’s faith was able to get deliverance for her daughter possessed of an “unclean spirit.” Somehow she believed beforehand in His love to her, a poor Gentile mother, and this was great faith indeed. All the miracles of Christ were wrought in response to faith, either in the sufferers who besought His aid, or in their friends. There must be faith by which, as over a bridge, the divine help might pass into the nature of man. Faith is the unfurled petal, the opened door, the unshuttered lattice. And so, in this case, it was through the mother’s faith that God’s delivering help passed to the child. Upon a careful study of the secret of this woman’s faith, we shall discover that her faith was severely tested. Christ gave her four tests, each of which was necessary to complete her education; and by each, with agile foot, she climbed the difficult stairway, which some would say was of upward ascent, but which in point of fact was one of downward climbing, until she got low enough to catch the waters which issue from the threshold of the door of heaven’s mercy.