Gospel Of John. 123

This incident furnishes a notable illustration of our Lord’s love for human souls, and of His skill, tact, and firmness in dealing with moral degradation and ignorant bigotry. He con- ciliates the woman by asking a favor. Her hesitation arises less from prejudice of race than from surprise at being asked for drink by a Jew (compare the story of Zaccheus). He seizes upon a near and familiar object as the key-note of His great lesson. He does not overwhelm her with new knowledge, but stimulates question and thought. He treats her sin frank- ly, but not harshly. He is content with letting her see that He is aware of it, knowing that through Him, as the Déscerner, she will by and by reach Him as the Forgiver. Even from her ignorance and coarse superstition He does not withhold the sublimest truth. He knows her imperfect understanding, but He assumes the germinative power of the truth itself. He is not deterred from the effort to plant His truth and to rescue a soul, either by His own weariness or by the conventional senti- ment which frowned upon His conversation with a woman in a public place. Godet contrasts Jesus’ method in this case with that employed in the interview with Nicodemus. ‘ With Nicodemus He started from the idea which filled every Phari- see’s heart, that of the kingdom of God, and deduced therefrom the most rigorous practical consequences. He knew that He had to do with a man accustomed to the discipline of the law. Then He unveiled to him the most elevated truths of the king- dom of heaven, by connecting them with a striking Old Testa- ment type, and contrasting them with the corresponding feat- ures of the Pharisaic programme. Jere, on the contrary, with a woman destitute of all scriptural training, He takes His point of departure from the commonest thing imaginable, the water of the well. He suddenly exalts it, by a bold antithesis, to the idea of that eternal life which quenches forever the thirst of the human heart. Spiritual aspiration thus awakened in her becomes the internal prophecy to which He attaches His new revelations, and thus reaches that teaching on true worship which corresponds as directly to the peculiar prepossessions of the woman, as the revelation of heavenly things corresponded to the inmost thoughts of Nicodemus. Before the latter He un-