Living Water

Now on the last day, the great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried, saying, If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink.—John 7:37.

1. The occasion and date of this great saying are carefully given by the Evangelist, because they throw much light on its significance and importance. It was “on the last day, the great day of the feast,” that “Jesus stood and cried.” The Feast was that of Tabernacles, which was instituted in order to keep in mind the incidents of the desert wandering. The peculiar greatness of the eighth day lay in the fact that it was the close of the whole festival and was kept as a Sabbath (Leviticus 23:36). It has been conjectured that it was observed in memory of the entrance into Canaan. At present it is treated as a separate Festival.

Part of the ceremonial was that on each morning of the seven, a procession of white-robed priests wound down the rocky footpath from the Temple to Siloam, and there in a golden vase drew water from the spring, chanting, as they ascended and re-entered the Temple gates, where they poured out the water as a libation, the words of the prophet, “With joy shall ye draw water out of the wells of salvation.” It is uncertain whether the libations were made on the eighth day. If they were not, the significant cessation of the striking rite on this one day of the feast would give a still more fitting occasion for the words of the text.

2. The true worshippers among these Israelites had been seeing a spiritual meaning in the water, and had been conscious of an uneasy feeling of thirst still in the midst of these Temple services, an uneasy questioning whether even yet Israel had passed the thirsty desert, and had received the full gift God had meant to give. There were thinking men and thirsty souls then as there are now; and to these, who stood perhaps a little aside, and looked half in compassion, half in envy, at the merry-making of the rest, it seemed a significant fact that, in the Temple itself, with all its grandeur and skilful appliances, there was yet no living fountain to quench the thirst of men—a significant fact that to find water the priest had to go outside the gorgeous Temple to the modest “waters of Siloah that go softly.” All through the feast these men wondered morning by morning when the words of Joel were to come true, when it should come to pass that a fountain should “come forth of the house of the Lord,” or when that great and deep river should begin to flow which Ezekiel saw in vision issuing from the threshold of the Lord’s house, and waxing deeper and wider as it flowed. And now once more the last day of the feast had come; the water was no longer drawn, and yet no fountain had burst up in the Temple itself; their souls were yet perplexed, unsatisfied, craving, athirst, when suddenly, as if in answer to their half-formed thoughts and longings, a clear, assured, authoritative voice passed through their ear to their inmost soul: “If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink. He that believeth on me, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.”

3. Strange words to say anywhere, daring words to say in the Temple court! For there they could mean nothing less than Christ’s laying His hand on that old miracle, which was pointed to by the rite, when the rock yielded the water, and asserting that all which it did and typified was repeated, fulfilled, and transcended in Himself, and that not for a handful of nomads in the wilderness, but for all the world, in all its generations. So here is one more occasion on which, in this Gospel, we find Christ claiming to be the fulfilment of incidents and events in that ancient covenant,—Jacob’s ladder, the brazen serpent, the manna, and now the rock that yielded the water. He says of them all that they are the shadow, and the substance is in Him. Let us consider, as they are set forth in the text, these three things—

  I.  Christ’s View of Humanity.

  II.  Christ’s View of Himself.

  III.  Christ’s Invitation to Humanity.

I

Christ’s View of Humanity

1. “If any man thirst.”—Christ confronts man’s deepest need. He sees humanity “thirsting.” No metaphor could be more intense in a dry and thirsty land like Palestine. It fittingly pictures the deepest want of the human soul.

(1) It is characteristic of the teaching of Christ that He always speaks of man’s chief spiritual needs in the terms of his greatest physical necessities. The words by which He describes the need of the soul for God are such words as “hunger” and “thirst.” We all know what it is to have physical thirst. Toiling under the hot sun, trudging along the dusty road—the painful sensation is familiar enough to us. But more real and intense would be the figure to an Eastern. Ask him who has crossed the desert, “What is thirst?” and he will tell you of the bones of men and beasts all bleached and white that mark its highway. Smitten with thirst on its burning sands, what will a man not give for water? The fine sand entering into every pore of his skin, choking and blinding him, the scorching wind drying up the very marrow of his bones, his tongue cleaving to his mouth, his eyes bloodshot, the desert reels around him, and he is willing to fill the cup with pearls in exchange for a cupful of water. Water is always an attractive word in the East. But at the time when Jesus uttered this saying it would have an effect that was almost magical. It was in the autumn weather, when the sun had been shining in fierceness for months, and the barren ground was crying out for rain.

(2) We need not go over all the dominant desires that surge up in men’s souls, the mind craving for knowledge, the heart calling out for love, the whole nature feeling blindly and often desperately after something external to itself, which it can grasp, and in which it can feel satisfied. We all know them. Like some plant growing in a cellar, and with feeble and blanched tendrils feeling towards the light which is so far away, every man carries about within himself a whole host of longing desires, which need to find something round which they may twine, and in which they can be at rest.

(3) The misery of man is great upon him, because, having these desires, he misreads so many of them, and stifles, ignores, atrophies to so large an extent the noblest of them. There is no sadder tragedy than the way in which we misinterpret the meaning of these inarticulate cries that rise from the depths of our hearts, and misunderstand what it is that we are groping after, when we put out empty, and, alas! too often unclean, hands, to lay hold on our true good. We do not know what we want, many of us, and there is something pathetic in the endless effort to fill up the heart by a multitude of diverse and small things, when all the while the deepest meaning of aspirations, yearnings, longings, unrest, discontent, is, “My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God.”

“Isaac Williams,” wrote Mr. Copeland, “mentioned to me a remark made on Hurrell Froude by S. Wilberforce in his early days: ‘They talk of Froude’s fun, but somehow I cannot be in a room with him alone for ten minutes without feeling so intensely melancholy, that I do not know what to do with myself. At Brighstone, in my Eden days, he was with me, and I was overwhelmed with the deep sense which possessed him of yearning which nothing could satisfy and of the unsatisfying nature of all things.’ ”1 [Note: Dean Church, The Oxford Movement, 55.]

Its warping winds swept thro’ my soul:

Its fires scorched all my arc of life:

Of joy it gave a trivial dole—

Then brought me anguish, shame and strife:

An hour of pulsing feverish joy,

Framed in a flame of blazing red;

Then, rotting in its own rank soil,

The swift-born flower lay swiftly dead.2 [Note: Desmond Mountjoy, The Hills of Hell, 15.]

2. “If any man thirst.”—Christ speaks as if that thirst was by no means universal, and, alas! it is not. “If any man thirst”; there are some of us that do not, for we are all so constituted that, unless we use continual self-discipline, and self-suppression, and self-evolution, the lower desires will overgrow the loftier ones, and kill them, as weeds kill the precious crop. And some of us are so much taken up with gratifying the lowest necessities and longings of our nature, that we leave the highest all uncared for, and the effect of that is that the unsatisfied longing avenges itself, for our neglect of it, by infusing unrest and dissatisfaction into what else would satisfy the lowest. “He that loveth silver shall not be satisfied with silver, nor he that loveth abundance with increase,” but he that loves God will be satisfied with less than silver, and will continue satisfied when decrease comes. If we would suck the last drop of sweetness out of the luscious purple grapes that grow on earth, we must have the appetite for the best things, recognized, and ministered to, and satisfied. And when we are satisfied with God, we shall have learnt in whatsoever state we are, therewith to be self-sufficing.

The late Sir James Stephen in a lecture to young men once said that he could put his suggestions in one word—Aspire. That was very good advice. But what should the aspiration be?1 [Note: Lord Avebury, Peace and Happiness, 77.]

On the morning of January 7, 1900, Bishop Creighton, a few days before he died, seemed particularly well. His chaplain, Mr. Percival, was with him for a long while, and they spoke of various answers which had been given to the question, What is the greatest danger of the coming century? The Bishop said, “I have no doubt what is the greatest danger—it is the absence of high aspirations.”2 [Note: The Life and Letters of Mandell Creighton, ii. 463.]

The first, and last, and closest trial question to any living creature is, “What do you like?” Tell me what you like, and I’ll tell you what you are. Go out into the street, and ask the first man or woman you meet, what their “taste” is; and if they answer candidly, you know them, body and soul. “You, my friend in the rags, with the unsteady gait, what do you like?” “A pipe, and a quartern of gin.” I know you. “You, good woman, with the quick step and tidy bonnet, what do you like?” “A swept hearth, and a clean tea-table; and my husband opposite me, and a baby at my breast.” Good, I know you also. “You, little girl with the golden hair and the soft eyes, what do you like?” “My canary, and a run among the wood hyacinths.” “You, little boy with the dirty hands, and the low forehead, what do you like?” “A shy at the sparrows, and a game at pitch farthing.” Good; we know them all now. What more need we ask?3 [Note: Ruskin, The Crown of Wild Olive (Works, xviii. 434).]

3. It is only the thirsty whom Jesus Christ invites to come to Him as the source from which they can draw spirit and life. Those who have eaten and drunk to the full must become thirsty before they can understand, and certainly before they can take to heart, what it means when a man who has trod this earth bears witness to a whole people, and lastly to all mankind: “I am the inexhaustible well from which all man’s longing after life and spirit may be satisfied.”

I know not any pleasure of sense more exquisite than a draught of cool, clear water, when you are thirsty; but few things are more insipid than water when there is no thirst. It is thus that Christ and His salvation are very sweet to one, and very tasteless to another.1 [Note: W. Arnot, The Anchor of the Soul, 31.]

O Lord, the most Fair, the most tender,

My heart is adrift and alone;

My heart is a-weary and thirsty,

Athirst for a joy unknown.

From a child I followed it, chased it,

By wilderness, wold, and hill;

I never have reached it or seen it,

Yet must I follow it still.

In those olden years did I seek it,

In the sweet, fair things around;

But the more I sought and I thirsted,

The less, O my Lord, I found.

When nearest it seemed to my grasping,

It fled like a wandering thought;

I never have known what it is, Lord,

Too well know I what it is not.

“It is I, it is I, the Eternal,

Who chose thee Mine own to be—

Who chose thee before the ages,

Who chose thee eternally.

I stood in the way before thee,

In the ways thou wouldest have gone;

For this is the mark of My chosen,

That they shall be Mine alone.”

II

Christ’s View of Himself

“If any man thirst, let him come unto me.” Christ claims to satisfy man’s deepest need. The claim is a tremendous one. Other teachers have counselled a course of action or a mode of life. This Teacher claims to be Himself the source of good and the fountain of life. Truly never man spake like this Man.

1. The people’s thirst shall be quenched, if they will but come to Him: this is the first and obvious meaning of His words. That they had some thirst for spiritual blessing their very presence in Jerusalem proved; for, however mingled may have been their desires, however worldly in many respects their thoughts of the Kingdom of God, yet they did desire God and God’s Kingdom; and if the religious hopes of the nation could have been obliterated, their one distinguishing characteristic would have been gone. But they are seeking to satisfy their souls in ways that do not, that cannot, succeed. God’s true presence is lost in the very abundance and show of the paraphernalia and ceremony of worship, and the life of God is dried up in them by the endless elaboration of their minute and barren rules of living. The truth of their holy religion does little more for their actual satisfaction than the sweet, living water of Siloam did for the golden vessel that it filled; and it does no more through them for others than the water poured from such vessel on to the altar, and wasted, as it streamed and trickled away. Let the people come to Him, and God Himself shall live in them.

2. All the cravings after a settled and eternal state, all the longings for purity and fellowship with the Highest, which the Temple services rather quickened than satisfied, Christ says He will satisfy. The Temple service had been to them as a screen on which the shadows of things spiritual were thrown; but they longed to see the realities face to face, to have God revealed, to know the very truth of things, and set foot on eternal verity. This thirst is felt by all men whose whole nature is alive, whose experience has shaken them out of easy contentment with material prosperity; they thirst for a life which does not so upbraid and mock them as their own life does; they thirst to be able to live, so that the one-half of their life shall not be condemned by the other half; they thirst to be once for all in the “ampler ether” of happy and energetic existence, not looking through the bars and fumbling at the lock. This thirst and all legitimate cravings which we feel, Christ boldly and explicitly promises to satisfy; nay more, all illegitimate cravings, all foolish discontent, all vicious dissatisfaction with life, all morbid thirst that is rapidly becoming chronic disease in us, all weak and false views of life, He will rid us of, and give us entrance into the life that God lives and imparts—into pure, healthy, hopeful life.

It is on record that a visitor once ventured to ask Alfred Tennyson what he thought of our Saviour. They were walking in a garden. The poet was silent for a moment. Then he stopped by a beautiful flower, and pointing to it said: “What the sun is to that flower, Jesus Christ is to my soul.”1 [Note: Arthur W. Robinson, The Voice of Joy and Health, 49.]

Christ claims to be able to meet every aspiration, every spiritual want, every true desire in this complex nature of ours. He claims to be able to do this for one, and therefore for all. He claims to be able to do it for all the generations of mankind, right away down to the end. Who is He that thus plants Himself in the front of the race, knows their deep thirsts, takes account of the impotence of anything created to satisfy them, assumes the Divine prerogative, and says, “I come to satisfy every desire in every soul, to the end of time”?2 [Note: A. Maclaren.]

3. He claims to be separate altogether from those whose thirst He would satisfy. It is a claim which only Divinity can warrant Him in making, or can fulfil when it is made. And from that day when He stood in the Temple and cried these words, down to this day, there have been, and there are, millions who can say, “We have drawn water from this fountain of salvation, and it has never failed us.” Christ’s audacious presentation of Himself to the world as adequate to fill all its needs, and slake all its thirst, has been verified by nineteen centuries of experience, and there are many men and women all over the world to-day who would be ready to set to their seals that Christ is true, and that He, indeed, is all-sufficient for the soul.

Jesus Christ threw a totally new light upon the personality of man. He took love as His point of departure, the central principle in our nature, which gathers all its other faculties and functions into one; our absolutely fundamental and universal characteristic. He taught us that virtues and graces are thorough only when they flow from love; and further, that love alone can reconcile the opposite phases of our life—action and passion, doing and suffering, energy and pain,—since love inevitably leads to sacrifice, and sacrifice is perfect love. It may be granted that previous teachers had said somewhat kindred things. But Jesus Christ carried His precepts home by practice, as none had ever done before. He lived and died the life and death of love; and men saw, as they had never seen, what human nature meant. Here at last was its true ideal, and its true ideal realized.1 [Note: Illingworth, Personality, Human and Divine, 201.]

III

Christ’s Invitation to Humanity

1. “Jesus stood and cried.” The phrase used is singularly vivid: Jesus was standing, watching, it might be, the procession of the people from their booths to the Temple, and then, moved by some occasion, He cried. As Jesus stood and cried to the people, He was conscious of power to impart to them a freshly welling spring of life—a life that would overflow for the strengthening and gladdening of others besides themselves. He has the same consciousness to-day. The deep, living benefits He confers are as open to all ages as the sunshine and the air; there is no necessity binding any one soul to feel that life is a failure, an empty, disappointing husk, serving no good purpose, bringing daily fresh misery and deeper hopelessness, a thing perhaps manfully to fight our way through but certainly not to rejoice in. If any one has such views of life it is because he has not honestly, believingly, and humbly responded to Christ’s word and come to Him.

We all forget that Christ’s teaching is not a teaching like that of Moses, of Mohammed, and like all other human teachings, that is, a doctrine of rules to be executed. Christ’s teaching is a gospel, that is, a teaching of the good.

He who is thirsty, let him go and drink.

And so, according to this teaching it is impossible to prescribe to any one, to rebuke any one for anything, to condemn any one.

“Go and drink, if thou art thirsty,” that is, take the good which is revealed to us by the spirit of Truth.

Can one be ordered to drink?

Can one be ordered to be blessed?

Even so a man cannot be rebuked for not drinking, or for not being blessed, nor can he be condemned. The one thing that Christians can do, and always have done, is to feel themselves blessed and to wish to communicate the key of blessedness to other people.1 [Note: Tolstoy, Aphorisms (Complete Works, xix. 83).]

(1) The invitation was delivered with great earnestness. This is the world’s way turned upside down. We are accustomed to hear those crying who are ready to perish, while those who go out to save are calm and silent. Here this method is reversed. The lost whom He saves are silent and satisfied; the Saviour, who brings deliverance, cries. They act as if they were full, and He as if He were needy. Why did He cry? All things are His in heaven and on earth; what want is gnawing at the heart of Him in whom dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily? It is the longing of His soul, not to get, but to give, redemption. He has a more eager desire to give pardon than any awakened sinner has to get it.

(2) “If any man.” The invitation was universal. The Gospel is as free as the air or the sunshine. “Any”—the man may be atheist or deist or idolater; the man may be sceptical and unbelieving: the man may be broken-hearted, because all his cisterns are broken; the man may be disappointed with all the wells to which he has been accustomed to resort; the man may be an outcast, forbidden to come where men drink, or an apostate, one who has forsaken the fountain of living water; the man may be conscious that he deserves only to die of thirst; the man may be sad at his heart’s core, and weary in every limb, and dying of thirst; the thirst may be morbid and foul, the thirst may be varied and deep, the thirst may be refined and elevated, but to every man Jesus says, “Come unto me.” The thirsty one may have no apparel but rags and these filthy, no vessel but an earthen one and that broken, no money, no commendation; but Jesus says, “Come.” He may have nothing, and may need everything—life, knowledge, power, joy—still Jesus says, “Come.” He may be a most thirsty soul, with wide capacity and fiery eagerness, but Jesus says, “Come and drink.” And if those who hear Jesus say, “Come and drink,” do come and drink, they live satisfied, they die satisfied, and they abide satisfied for ever; but if they never come, they live thirsty, die thirsty, and abide madly thirsty for ever.

(3) “Let him come unto me.” The invitation is from a ceremony to a Person. Christ is a personal Saviour. The world had had enough of ritual. It had gone the weary round of form until life was almost extinct, and it seemed as if the smoke of sacrifice only darkened the skies and brought man no nearer vision of God. The Law increased the burden it professed to lift. Says Christ, It is not from Siloam’s stream, it is not from your silver songs and solemn litanies, not from your priests and altars and censers, that you can gain rest—“If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink.”

He that thirsts and wants relief must come to Christ Himself. He must not be content with coming to His Church and His ordinances, or to the assemblies of His people for prayer and praise. He must not stop short even at His holy table, or rest satisfied with privately opening his heart to His ordained ministers. He that is content with only drinking these waters “shall thirst again.” He must go higher, further, much further than this. He must have personal dealings with Christ Himself: all else in religion is worthless without Him. The King’s palace, the attendant servants, the richly furnished banqueting-house, the very banquet itself, all are nothing unless we speak with the King. His hand alone can take the burden off our backs and make us feel free. The hand of man may take the stone from the grave and show the dead; but none but Jesus can say to the dead, “Come forth, and live.” We must deal directly with Christ.1 [Note: Bishop J. C. Ryle, The Upper Room, 117.]

I remember a simple story that twined its clinging tendril fingers about my heart. It was of a woman whose long years had ripened her hair, and sapped her strength. She was a true saint in her long life of devotion to God. She knew the Bible by heart, and would repeat long passages from memory. But as the years came the strength went, and with it the memory gradually went too, to her grief. She seemed to have lost almost wholly the power to recall at will what had been stored away. But one precious bit still stayed. She would sit by the big sunny window of the sitting-room in her home, repeating over that one bit, as though chewing a delicious titbit, “I know whom I have believed and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day.” By and by part of that seemed to slip its hold, and she would quietly be repeating, “that which I have committed to him.” The last few weeks as the ripened old saint hovered about the borderland between this and the spirit world, her feebleness increased. Her loved ones would notice her lips moving, and thinking she might be needing some creature comfort, they would go over and bend down to listen for her request. And time and again they found the old saint repeating over to herself one word, over and over again, the same one word, “Him—Him—Him.” She had lost the whole Bible but one word. But she had the whole Bible in that one word.”1 [Note: S. D. Gordon, Quiet Talks on Service, 77.]

(4) “Let him come.” He that thirsts and wants relief from Christ must actually come to Him. It is not enough to wish, and talk, and mean, and intend, and resolve, and hope. The thirsty have to come. To come in inquiry and by knowledge, to come in thought and by faith, to come in prayer and by trust, to come in the surrender of themselves to the Saviour. The sole condition is coming, and the only limit to the ministrations of the Saviour is our receptivity. Simple as this remedy for thirst appears, it is the only cure for man’s spiritual disease, and the only bridge from earth to heaven. Kings and their subjects, preachers and hearers, masters and servants, high and low, rich and poor, learned and unlearned, all alike must drink of this water of life, and drink in the same way. For eighteen centuries men have laboured to find some other medicine for weary consciences; but they have laboured in vain. Thousands, after blistering their hands, and growing grey in hewing out “broken cisterns, which can hold no water,” have been obliged to come back at last to the old Fountain, and have confessed in their latest moment that here, in Christ alone, is true peace.

(5) “And drink.” Too many analyse, criticize, gather to the fountain and gaze on its waters; they do not drink. They do not live by Christ. When we drink of love we live on it, it enters into all our thoughts, colours all our hopes, gives strength to all our purposes; it is ourself. It must be even so with us and Christ. We must drink, must so draw His life and spirit into our souls that we shall be able to say, “For me to live is Christ.” So shall the thirst of the heart be satisfied, but only so.

How many seem to come to Jesus Christ, and yet do not drink! How few Christians are like a tree planted by the rivers of water! What would you have thought of the Jews, if, when Moses smote the rock, they had refused to drink? or what would you have thought if they had only put the water to their lips? Yet such is the way with most Christians. It pleased the Father that in Him should all fulness dwell. The Spirit was given to Him without measure. The command is given to us to draw out of His fulness; yet who obeys? Not one in a thousand. A Christian in our day is like a man who has got a great reservoir brimful of water. He is at liberty to drink as much as he pleases, for he never can drink it dry; but instead of drinking the full stream that flows from it, he dams it up, and is content to drink the few drops that trickle through. O that ye would draw out of His fulness, ye that have come to Christ! Do not be misers of grace. There is far more than you will use in eternity. The same waters are now in Christ that refreshed St. Paul, that gave St. Peter his boldness, that gave St. John his affectionate tenderness. Why is your soul less richly supplied than theirs? Because you will not drink: “If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink.”1 [Note: R. M. M‘Cheyne, Additional Remains, 308.]

2. Christ satisfies every thirst of the soul. Do we thirst for activity? Jesus says, “Come unto me, and drink.” Hear Jesus say, “He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father.” He opened the eyes of the blind, unstopped deaf ears, made the lame to walk, healed the sick, cleansed the leper, and raised the dead. We thirst for enjoyment, and still Jesus says, “Come unto me, and drink.” Christ gives joy in every gift, and promises it in every promise. There is joy in the eternal life He gives, joy in the rest He gives, and joy in the peace which He bequeaths. We thirst for power, and Christ continues to say, “Come unto me, and drink,” for He makes His disciples now the salt of the earth and the light of the world, and ultimately He makes them kings and priests unto God. We thirst for society, and still Jesus says, “Come unto me, and drink.” Our Saviour makes those who are strangers and foreigners and aliens fellow-citizens with the saints and of the household of God. We thirst for the love of others, and Christ says, “Come unto me, and drink”; for He directs streams of kindness to every one who comes to Him by means of His new commandment, “A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.” We thirst for knowledge, and Jesus says, “Come unto me, and drink.” “Learn of me.” Those who come to Jesus are instructed by Him in the highest subjects. To all such Jesus is Himself the truth, and the truth concerning all that it is essential we should know. We thirst for God, and Jesus says, “Come unto me, and drink.” He manifests God’s name to us, and shows us how He Himself is to us the brightness of the Father’s glory and the express image of His Person. Thus if any man thirst for life, activity, pleasure, social fellowship, knowledge, power, the love of others, or for God, He may come to Jesus Christ and drink.

3. No one who has not come thus to Christ and trusted Him has found perfect satisfaction in this world. Whatever good we have, we have not the highest good. Deep down in our hearts there is some want that has not been met, some secret thirst which yet torments us. We moralize, we philosophize about the discontent of man. We give little reasons for it; but the real reason of it all is this—that which everything lying behind it really signifies—that man is greater than his circumstances, and that God is always calling to him to come up to the fulness of his life. Dreadful will be the day when the world becomes contented, when one great universal satisfaction spreads itself over the world. Sad will be the day for every man when he becomes absolutely contented with the life that he is living, with the thoughts that he is thinking, with the deeds that he is doing, when there is not for ever beating at the doors of his soul some great desire to do something larger, which he knows that he was meant and made to do because he is the child of God.

I asked for Peace,—

My sins arose

And bound me close;

I could not find release.

I asked for Truth,—

My doubts came in,

And with their din

They wearied all my youth.

I asked for Love,—

My lovers failed,—

And griefs assailed

Around, beneath, above.

I asked for Thee,—

And Thou didst come

To take me home

Within Thy heart to be.1 [Note: Digby Mackworth Dolben.]

Living Water

Literature

Arnot (W.), The Anchor of the Soul, 23.

Dods (M.), Footsteps in the Path of Life, 61.

Gray (J. A.), Salvation from Start to Finish, 117.

Hamilton (J.), Faith in God, 284.

Howatt (J. R.), Jesus the Poet, 265.

McCheyne (R. M.), Additional Remains, 304.

Maclaren (A.), Expositions: John i.–viii., 310.

Martin (S.), Rain upon the Mown Grass, 254.

Price (A. C.), Fifty Sermons, iv. 1265.

Ryle (J. C.), The Upper Room, 110.

Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xxxi. (1885) No. 1875.

Westcott (B. F.), The Historic Faith, 228.

Zahn (T.), Bread and Salt from the Word of God, 203.

Christian World Pulpit, xxx. 91 (Hughes); xxxviii. 166 (Bramham); xlvi. 404 (Hall); lxvii. 251 (Body); lxxviii. 59 (Mrs. Dora Donaldson).

Homiletic Review, xxxviii. 320 (Meyer).