wliicli you seem totally blind : and that is, man's need of God's grace in order to believe on me. You are never likely to believe until you acknowledge your ovrn corruption, and ask for grace to draw your souls to me. I am aware that it needs something more than argument and reasoning to make any one believe in me. Your unbelief and murmuring do not surprise me or dis- courage me. I neither expect to see you or any one else believe until you are drawn by my Father." — This, or something like it seems to me the connecting link. One thing at any rate is cer- tain. Our Lord did not mean to excuse the unbehef of His hearers. He rather desired to magnify their danger and guilt, and to make them see that faith in Him was not so easy an affair as they supposed. It was not knowledge of His origin alone, but the drawing grace of God the Father which they needed. Let them awake to see that, and cry for grace before it was too late.
The general lesson of the sentence, apart from the connection, is one of vast importance. Our Lord lays down the great prin- ciple,— " That no man whatsoever can come to Christ by faith, and really believe in Him, unless God the Father draws him so to come, and inclines his will to believe." The nature of man since the fall is so corrupt and depraved, that even when Christ is made known and preached to him, he will not come to Him and believe in Him without the special grace of God inclining his will, and giving him a disposition to come. Moral suasion and advice alone will not bring him. He must be " drawn."
This is no doubt a very humbling truth, and one which in every age has called forth the hatred and opposition of man. The favourite notion of man is that he can do what he likes, re- pent or not repent, believe or not believe, come to Christ or not come, — entirely at his own discretion. Li fact man likes to think that his salvation is in his own power. Such notions are flatly contradictory to the text before us. The words of our Lord here are clear and unmi^takeable, and cannot be explained away.
(a.) This doctrine of human impotence, whether man likes it or not, is the uniform teaching of the Bible. The natural man is dead, and must be born again, and brought to life. (Ephesians ii. 1.) He has neither knowledge, nor faith, nor inclination toward Christ, until grace comes into his heart, Man never of himself begins with God. God must first begin with man. And this beginning is just the " drawing " of the text.
(&.) It is the doctrine of the Church of England, as shown in the 10th Article, and of every Protestant confession of faith which dates from the 16th and 17th centuries.
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