(with Isaiah 42:3)
The Survival of the Fittest and a Higher Law.
I. We see in this text, from Mark, the compassion of Christ for those who are, humanly speaking, incurable, as this woman was according to the medical knowledge of her age. Jesus did not say to her, "Go away; you are too weak and broken to hold your own in the world; best for you to be down and wait for the end, while others take your place who can do your work." That would have been a sorrowful word, not to her only, but to us also; for it would have set a limit, not to Christ's power merely, but to His very compassion; and therein also to ours. That, however, is not the law which human hearts acknowledge. Our power may easily have limits, but our pity must have none, and as we can help not a little even when we cannot heal, it is bound upon our conscience never to be inhuman. The bruised reed He would not break. But this, while it is the supreme law of man's nature, is by no means the law of Nature elsewhere. On the contrary, that law has been not unfairly expressed in the now familiar formula, "the survival of the fittest" that is to say, Nature allows those only to live who are able to hold their own, and the rest she ruthlessly dooms to destruction.
II. It seems clear that the natural law of a supreme struggle for existence and survival of the fittest could never, by any process of development, grow into the moral law of self-sacrifice and supreme compassion for the weak and suffering. The whole higher life of man whether seen in the noble magnanimity of the Gentile hero, or in the chivalry and meek suffering of the Christian, all those virtues of compassion, gentleness and mercy, which we justly call humanity, because he who has them not is unworthy of the name of man, are all alien and opposite to the mere law of nature, and could not possibly grow out of it. However it be with our bodies, our souls are not an evolution of the brute soul not a mere variety better fitted for the struggle.
III. I claim for man an exceptional position in God's universe, that he may be led to do the fitting works of an exceptional virtue. It is a great thing to live under a higher law than that of the brute creatures; but our guilt is only the greater if we live on like the brute. To allow the better and follow the worse is always base; but it is doubly bad when we claim superiority in virtue of the good we allow, and yet do not practise it.
W. C. Smith, Christian World Pulpit,vol. x., p. 177.
References: Mark 5:25. Homiletic Quarterly,vol. ii., p. 542.Mark 5:25; Mark 5:26. Ibid.,vol. i., p. 256. Mark 5:25-27. Three Hundred Outlines on the New Testament,p. 34.