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that she hardly spied the dusty traveller till He spake. So do we stumble on life's greatest moments. So coming to the well a thousand times unaltered, we come one day and everything is changed. Life's crises often come unheralded. God is not pledged to warn of their approach. They wear the garments of the common hours, and come in the multitude of common duties, when lo! we are at the parting of the ways, and all things shall be different for ever.

Now

He

WOW what struck the writer of this story first was the disregard that Jesus showed for the most cherished prejudices of His day. Christ was a Jew after the flesh, and the woman with the pitcher was Samaritan, and for long centuries, and notably since the rebuilding of the Temple, Jew and Samaritan had been so ripening in mutual spite, that now they would not speak to one another. But Jesus sweeps these prejudices off. bids defiance to conventionality. Behind the sinner, and back of the Samaritan, He hears the cry of a soul that can be saved. Everything else becomes as threads of gossamer before His burning passion to redeem her. Now there are some men who scorn conventionalities just because they want to seem original. But there are other men so filled with a burning purpose, that in the heat of it common prejudices die. That is a right noble disregard, it is the disregard of Jesus by the well.

IT is remarkable that the first words of Christ are an

appeal. 'Give me to drink,' He said. It was the first time in all her life that she had ever been asked a favour by a Jew, and to be asked a favour by those whom we were certain would despise us, produces a strange revulsion in the heart. I do not know if even on the cross the humility of Christ is more apparent than in these humble pleadings that fell on this Samaritan's ears, and still are calling to our hearts to-day. We, too, may

We may think

Yet He is plead

feel certain that Jesus will despise us. ourselves very loathsome in His sight. ing with us as a brother pleads, and calling to us as a brother calls, and He is holding out His death to us, and offering us His pardon and His power. Nay, more, whenever we give a cup of water to a little one in Jesus' name, then like the woman of Samaria we are giving Christ to drink. And in every kindly deed we ever did, we are responding to this pleading of the Master. In every face of pain, every distorted limb, every moan and sigh, and all the sobbing of the helpless children, Christ still is saying, 'Give me to drink.' And we had better cease to worship Him as Lord, than fail to respond to such a pleading.

I NOTE, too, that what roused the compassion of Jesus for this woman was her ignorance. Ah! woman, if you only knew the gift of God: if you only knew who was speaking to you!' In Sychar the honest neighbours rather shunned this woman, not because she was ignorant, but because she knew too much. They hated her. They tattled of her. She was a bold and an unprincipled woman. Only Jesus in the whole wide world pitied her from the bottom of His heart. She was so ignorant for all she knew! She had so missed the prize for all her unhallowed grasping! O heart of Christ, so infinite in pity, teach us again the ignorance of passion, and make us pitiful to the men and women who have missed the mark, because they have not known God's gift of love!

So Jesus gently deals with the Samaritan, reading her

heart, and showing her what she was, and leading her upward from the well of Jacob to the well-springs that are found in Jacob's God. 'Whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst. But the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.' Two features

E

of this promised gift arrest us. (a) The first is that he that drinketh of the living stream shall never thirst again. But do we not find the Psalmist saying, 'My soul is thirsting for the living God?' Is every longing of the soul satisfied for ever when we have tasted of the wells of God? Nay, God forbid. The more we drink of holiness, the more we thirst for it. The more we drink of purity, the more we crave it. The more we taste of God, the more we long for Him. But under the power of this new affection, sinful affections gradually die; and baser cravings that dominated once, sink slowly in this newborn life in God; until at last the very craving is forgotten, and having tasted God we thirst no more. (b) And then this fountain is within our heart. This poor Samaritan had to take her pitcher, and run the gauntlet of the village street, whenever she wanted a draught of Jacob's well. But the gladness and the peace are within us, when we have truly met with Jesus Christ. There is a sense in which a Christian is dependent. There is another sense in which a Christian is the most independent man alive. He can go singing under the dullest skies, he can have royal fellowship in crowded streets, for he carries his heaven in his heart, and heaven in the heart is heaven on earth.

TENTH SUNDAY

Morning

THE OFFERING OF ISAAC

Passage to be read: Gen. xxii. 1-19.

EW scenes, in the whole compass of the Bible, are more familiar than the sacrifice of Isaac.

FE

We

knew the charm of it when we were children, and as we recur to it, time and again, amid the deepening experience of the years, we find that the story has not lost the power and beauty that so arrested us in bygone days. This indeed is one of the wonders of God's Word, that we never leave it behind us as we travel. With all our growth through activity and sorrow, it grows in richness of interpretation. There are books which we very speedily outstrip; we read them, and we lay them aside for a period, and then we come back to them and find them thin and inadequate. But with all our growth, the Bible seems to grow; coming back to it we do not find it empty; rather with the increasing knowledge of the years, and the crosses and burdens they inevitably bring, new depths of divine help and wisdom open themselves before us in God's Word. It is peculiarly so with such a passage as this. We can never exhaust its spiritual significance. To our childish ears it is a delightful story; it appeals as powerfully as any fairy-tale; but gradually we come to see beneath the surface, and to discern the mind of God within the picture, until at last we reach the sweet assurance that underneath are the everlasting

arms.

NOTE first then how the words of God may seem to

contradict each other.

Isaac was the child of pro

mise; the hopes of Abraham were crowned in him; it had been revealed to Abraham by God that in Isaac should his seed be called. Clearly, then, it was the will of God that Isaac should grow to manhood, and should rear a family; yet here comes the command of God to Abraham to offer up his boy as a burnt-offering. Did Abraham stay to argue out the matter? Did he charge God with this seeming contradiction? Nay, but without a single word of murmur he started to execute the will of Heaven; and we know now that through his instant action all seeming contradiction passed away. We are all of us in a like plight to Abraham-the voices we hear are so often contradictory. The duties we are called to often seem to clash; the tasks that are set us are apparently incompatible. Let us learn that our true course is that of Abraham, to go instantly forward in the track of present duty. How was it possible that Isaac should have heirs, and yet should be slain as a lad upon the altar? Had Abraham sat down to puzzle out the matter, it would have been confusion worse confounded. But he did not sit down, he rose up very early; he did exactly what God bade him do; and so for him, as for us, along the line of duty, the apparent antagonism was resolved.

NOTE again that we are educated by temptation. This

was an hour of testing for the patriarch; it was an hour of sore strain upon his faith; no greater demand could be made on him by Heaven than to sacrifice this lad he loved so well. But it was not merely a season of sharp testing, it was a time of the mightiest educative influence; it gave to Abraham such new conceptions of sacrifice as have left their impress on all history. There was not a chieftain in the country where Abraham dwelt but was familiar with the rites of human sacrifice. Many a time, as he sat by his tent door, Abraham had spied

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