45. What do you say again, oh you3324—? Is He then a man, is He one of us, at whose command, at whose voice, raised in the utterance of audible and intelligible words,3325 infirmities, diseases, fevers, and other ailments of the body fled away? Was He one of us, whose presence, whose very sight, that race of demons which took possession of men was unable to bear, and terrified by the strange power, fled away? Was He one of us, to whose order the foul leprosy, at once checked, was obedient, and left sameness of colour to bodies formerly spotted? Was He one of us, at whose light touch the issues of blood were stanched, and stopped their excessive flow?3326 Was He one of us, whose hands the waters of the lethargic dropsy fled from, and that searching3327 fluid avoided; and did the swelling body, assuming a healthy dryness, find relief? Was He one of us, who bade the lame run? Was it His work, too, that the maimed stretched forth their hands, and the joints relaxed the rigidity3328 acquired even at birth; that the paralytic rose to their feet, and persons now carried home their beds who a little before were borne on the shoulders of others; the blind were restored to sight, and men born without eyes now looked on the heaven and the day?
Footnotes
- 3324
In the height of his indignation and contempt, the writer stops short and does not apply to his opponents any new epithet.
- 3325
This is contrasted with the mutterings and strange words used by the magicians.
- 3326
So the ms. according to Oehler, and seemingly Heraldus; but according to Orelli, the ms. reads immoderati (instead of—os) cohibebant fluores, which Meursius received as equivalent to “the excessive flow stayed itself.”
- 3327
Penetrabilis, “searching,” i.e., finding its way to all parts of the body.
- 3328
So Orelli, LB., Elmenhorst, and Stewechius, adopting a marginal reading of Ursinus, which prefixes im—to the ms. mobilitates—“looseness”—retained by the other edd.