ST. JOHN VII. 37 327
I.
Christ's View of Humanity.
1. " If any man thirsC — 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. Toil- ing under the hot sun, trudging along the dusty road — the pain- ful 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.
328 LIVING WATER
(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 mean- ing 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 Fronde'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 over- whelmed with the deep sense which possessed him of yearning which nothing could satisfy and of the unsatisfying nature of all things.' "1
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. " 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
* Dean Church, T}u Oxford Movement^ 55.
* Desmond Mountjoy, The Hills of Hell, 15.
ST. JOHN VII. 37 329
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.