I. Consider this Story of the Demoniac. A man who was wild and furious becomes calm and orderly. He sits at the feet of Jesus, clothed, and in his right mind. What has wrought this mighty change? Is it the announcement to him of some law which God has laid down for His creatures? Is it anything whatever which we comprehend under the ordinary notion of moral discipline? All these regulations were desirable, doubtless, for a man in the condition of the maniac. But common sense pronounced them ridiculous. It was obvious that they could take no effect; they must be wasted. Far more direct and simple methods were resorted to. He was chained. But that was as ineffectual a scheme of regulation as the other. The fetters were burst asunder, the chains were broken. It is just when all mere regulations, human and Divine, are found absolutely vain to restrain him from being the curse and plague of his fellowmen, that Christ is said to have met the man Himself, to have entered into colloquy with that which could hear no laws, could be restrained by no force, and to have emancipated and reformed that. And here is the result: Not a new excitement substituted for the old, not religious paroxysms taking the place of other paroxysms; but quietness and order: he is in his right mind.
II. It is not true of the Gospel of Christ, that if you take from it its original character, if you strip it of those claims which apostles and martyrs put forth on its behalf, it may challenge respect on a lower ground, it may claim a sort of useful and recognised position for itself among the other agents of civilisation. I know such an opinion prevails in many minds. They say that "'Reft of a crown, it still may share the feast." You will find it is not so. You will find that if we dare not proclaim Christ as the Deliverer of the spirit of man from its bondage, if we dare not say that He has come actually to reveal God's righteousness to men, we had better cease to speak of Him at all. For it is such a one that men want; it is for such a one that in their inmost hearts, even when their language against the Son of Man is loudest, they are crying. It was so in former ages; so it is now. It was so among the most miserable and the most respectable; it is so still. If preachers of the Gospel do not answer the cry if they only represent it as one of the regulative forces that are at work in society it will be felt to be the feeblest of all these processes; the chain and the prison-house will be found stronger.
F. D. Maurice, Sermons,vol. v., p. 145.
References: Luke 8:35. A. Ramsay, Christian World Pulpit,vol. x., p. 321; T. R. Stevenson, Ibid.,vol. xvi., p. 139: E. Blencowe, Plain Sermons to a Country Congregation,vol. i., p. 360; (Clerical Library) Expository Sermons on the New Testament,p. 80.