I. The Fact — that we need some one to go to. II. The Question — To whom shall we go ?
III. The Answer — that only Christ can satisfy our wants, because He alone has " the words of eternal life."
We need Some One to go to.
1. St. Peter grasped the situation at once. He saw that they must go to some one. It may be that there flashed before his eyes certain possible masters — such as Moses the lawgiver, or John the Baptist, or perhaps some of the Gentile leaders; but in the light of Jesus Christ all these seemed absolutely impossible, and so he cried, " Lord, to whom shall we go ? thou hast the words of eternal life." ' Underlying this question, there is the same feehng which pervaded that saying of Amiel's, " Men think they can do without religion ; they do not know that religion is
ST. JOHN VI. 68 277
indestructible, and that the question simply is, Which will you X, have ? " The only question possible for men is, " To lohom shall we go ? "
^ There is a deep law of our nature in virtue of which men are ever haunted with a sense of need, a consciousness of depend- ence. In every age, in every country, this is what manias keenly felt. The instinct is irresistible, because it is set deep in the very roots of our being. There is no want more real, more imperative than this — we must have leaders whom we can follow, else nothing is done, no progress is made; there is no upward tendency, but, on the contrary, w^e fall back into loss and ruin. We must have our ideals, and from them alone can we draw the inspiration for better things. To put it in a well-known phrase, though one which has a heathenish smack about it, " Man must swear by his gods." "No man liveth to himself" is a text which is fertile in its significance, and which among other meanings carries this, that we all of us — the best and wisest — want a stronger and a wiser to whom we can look, who shall be our highest example, whom we can follow, reverence, obey, exalt.^
2. It is not a question of choice between Christ and some thing else, but between Christ and some one else. For, singularly enough, since the world was, man has never been able, amid ten thousand forms of faith, to have a religion without a personality enshrined in the very heart of it. The disciples did not ask : " What shall we take up with if we leave Jesus ; what system shall we believe in ? " but : " To whom shall we go ? " Ask not what the hundreds of millions of the human race believe in to-day. If you speak of abstract things, abstract principles, they believe in ten thousand things, or they believe in nothing. But ask in whom they believe, and the reply will be definite enough : Christ, Mohammed, Sakyamuni, Confucius, Zoroaster ! ' It may be questioned if to an abstract principle men have ever yet, since the world was, built one solitary temple, reared a single altar, offered a single sacrifice, or breathed a single prayer. Where there is worship the demand J^ for a person is quite inexorable. So when the Greeks created their sun-myths and worshipped the god of day, they had first to personify it and make it Apollo, the youth with golden locks and radiant countenance.
(l)'What Peter wanted — and what we want — is, first of all,
* G. T. Candlin, On Service with the King, 53.
278 TO WHOM SHALL WE GO?
J^ome One who can raise us above Circumstance. A vast multitude of the mighty family are so placed as to be in perpetual depression. Circumstances, we say, are against them. Poverty, or its twin sister anxiety — the perpetual question of the day's or the morrow's bodily supplies— this is one case. Sickness, or its more trying and yet commoner likeness, ill-health — this is another. Dis- appointment— a perpetual experience, the bitterness of which is never quite lost, that the honours and distinctions of an academical or professional career are always for another, never for me — this is another depressing influence; and we might multiply them without limit. The sense of inferiority, physical or mental — the dulness of life's routine — the dreary unmarked round of duties, scarcely worth calling by so grave a name — the seeing no end, the having no prospect, the being placed where we would not be, and the hopelessness of change from it^ — the presence of uncongenial, unamiable, or unfriendly kinsfolk — the denial, in some definite point, of the wish of the heart, the final irreversible defeating of the life's hope — all these are common experiences. And it is a want, a primal necessity, of our being, that we should find One — for a thing it cannot be — to lift us above circumstance. '
^ When thou hast been compelled by circumstances to be disturbed in a manner, quickly return to thyself and do not continue out of tune longer than the compulsion lasts ; for thou wilt have more mastery over the harmony by continually recurring to it.i