^ A. W. Robinson, The Voice of Joy and Health, 45.
112 THE WAY, THE TRUTH. THE LIFE
utter, in the Divine name, the promise of eternal life. He is the life.
^ In his Jottings from the Pacific (p. 83), Mr. Gill speaks of a native preacher in Earotonga who referred to the custom at a great wedding for the bride to walk to her new home over the prostrate bodies of her husband's clan, whilst the bridegroom made a similar progress over his wife's people. Then came the application : " Tread boldly, brethren, on the prostrate body of Jesus : for He is our only way to the Father. Trust your entire weight with all your burdens on Him; He will not wince or cry. Only thus shall we safely arrive at the home of the redeemed."
^ A beautiful story is told of Agassiz. When he was a boy his family lived on the edge of a lake in Switzerland. One day the father was on the other side of the lake, and Louis and a younger brother set out on the ice to join him. The mother watched the boys from her window. They got along well till they came to a wide crack in the ice. The taller boy leaped over easily, but the other hesitated. " The little fellow will fall in," the mother said, " and drown." But as she watched a moment she saw Louis, the older boy, get down on the ice, lay himself across the crack, his hands on one side and his feet on the other, and make a bridge of his body. Then the little fellow climbed over him in safety to the other side, and both the boys ran on to find their father.^
II. Christ the Way.
" I am the way."
1. The necessity of a way. — (1) To be taught the way to God is man's supreme need. We instinctively use the figure, even though we know that it is but a figure. Moral distance is naturally represented by spacial distance. The sinner is pictured not only by Christ but by himself as in a far country ; and though God be not far from any of us, men feel after Him, like the blind who have lost their way, if haply they may find Him. To reach God is the confessed goal of human life. To know the way to Him is our chief necessity. So testifies the history of all religions » J. II. Miller Our New Mens 27.
ST. JOHN XIV. 6 113
that have ever held sway over humanity. So testify the longings and felt needs of every thoughtful heart. God is necessary for our happiness. Life is unfinished until it is in harmony with God. Only in God can we be satisfied and saved. And so the cry of all earnest, awakened souls the world over is for God.
^ Livingstone, who waded waist-deep through pestilential marshes for weeks, to die at last in a miserable hut by the lake shore ; the traveller, who has to cut his way for hundreds of miles through tangled forest and jungle at the rate of half a mile a day ; the emigrant, who has to cross the trackless alkali plain, and who may perish midway; the military commander, who has to carry his forces over mountains, some sections of which are almost perpendicular, — know how a well-engineered path is the first condition of successful movement.^
^ You remember the character of Calista in one of Cardinal Newman's finest tales, the story that contains the wonderful picture of the locust plague in northern Africa, and her cry, " Oh, that I could find Him ! On the right hand and on the left I grope and touch Him not. Why dost Thou fight against me, 0 First and only Fair?" And you remember the same longing expressed in one of Matthew Arnold's essays, in which he quotes — Mr. Hutton says he could not have been the first to use them — the words of Israel : " Thou, 0 Eternal, are the thing that I long for. Thou art my hope, even from my youth." And you remember the passionate expressions of this longing in the Psalms : " As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, 0 God. My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God." " 0 God, thou art my God ; early will I seek thee ; my soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee, in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is." And nothing appeals to us quite so much, I think, as we read the lives of good men as those great experiences in which they have entered at last into the fulness of the consciousness of God.^
(2) If, then, man is so desirous of coming to God, what stands in his way ? He is estranged by sin from filial fellowship with the Father. A few false and fatal steps have served to separate him from the fountain of eternal good. Every proud, unaided effort he may make to return only increases the intervening distance. Man and his Divine Father are lost to each other,
1 T. G. Selljy, The Iminrfect Angel, 248.
2 R. E. Speer, The Master 0/ the Heart, 211. ST. TOHN (2) — 8