"Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of

the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you." It is the law of life. There is no explanation of it. It is too simple to explain. The only way to prove it is to do it. Experience is the only teacher of first principles. This truth cannot be denied, any more than it can be denied that food is essential for the life of the body. That seems to be the attitude of Jesus toward the men who questioned him. The divine satisfaction for the hunger of the soul is here. Food must be taken, if hunger is to be allayed and life made vigorous. Jesus had a way of answering such questions by appeal to experience. If you want to know, go and do. The organ of spiritual knowledge is obedience. The method of spiritual life is incarnation of Christ within man. Only as he gains dominion over souls are they part of his kingdom. Only as he lives, a moral force within them, can they do his will. The appropriation of God's provision for our souls is simple. It cannot be accomplished by process of logic, but by the grasp of our whole nature upon him, as the amoeba envelops and digests its food. Face Jesus in his most characteristic moment, when he hangs upon the cross, and learn of him there what our life ought to be. It is not by chance that the most sacred rite of our faith recalls the height of the suffering of our Lord. We must receive into our own selves not only the memory of him, not only the symbolic bread and wine, but by these, and beyond them, the life that makes sacrifice its law and love its motive power. The aid to faith in the supper of our Lord is not only by a mystic influence, but by a plain and very practical operation of our human nature. For if we feel the love he bore in his agony for us, although our hunger after his salvation may be little, it will grow as we look upon our Saviour. We shall find our heart enlarging, and our entire nature opening to him who gave his life a ransom for us, whose body broken on the tree is the fit

ting food for eternal life. And then, gathering up into ourselves his life, his love, his character, we shall become partakers of the divine nature, through the inworking of his grace.

Albert Wellman Hitchcock.

CHRIST AT THE FEAST

JOHN 7: 14, 28-37

"If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink."

"The Feast" is that of the Tabernacles, in which the journey of the tribes through the desert is kept vivid in the memory of their descendants. "Its significance was twofold. It was a harvest-home festival and hence was called the Feast of Ingathering, and it commemorated the dwelling of Israel in tents or booths in the wilderness. Hence the name-Feast of Booths or Tabernacles." It lasted a week, and in picnic fashion they lived in leafy tents of palm and olive and myrtle, upon the housetops and hillsides of Jerusalem. In the great courts of the temple the sacrifices were offered, the thanksgiving psalms were sung, the law of Jehovah was recited, and the trumpets were sounded in frequent and joyous summons to the great convocations of worship and fellowship.

This feast was the popular assembly of the year, whither the tribes went up, from Galilee and Judæa and beyond the Jordan. A time of relaxation, of visiting and gossip, of national revival in patriotism and religion. Everybody went, and the straggling caravans of pilgrims which converged upon Jerusalem were like the zigzag affluents of some great river system.

The occasion was ideal for propagandism in matters political and religious-for hearing and telling some new thing. Therefore, it was unexplainable to the worldlyminded brethren of Jesus that he seemed indifferent to this

great holiday opportunity for revealing himself and his powers to the friendly multitudes of the provinces.

But "in quietness and in confidence" was the strength of the Son of man. The curious wonder and the boisterous homage of the crowd are shunned, lest the physical and political should overshadow the spiritual errand of his life— a trait of health in the character of all men, for self-advertising is the bane of much good service. Publicity has its use in Christian enterprise, and thereby the credentials of power and the methods of work are lifted into popular recognition, but it easily distracts the eye and the heart, provoking comparisons which are invidious, and withal nurtures a temptation to self-consciousness and pride.

So Jesus shrinks from the spectacular journey and the eager eyes of the gossiping travelers, as uncongenial to the high, serious mood of his soul and those deepening thoughts of sacrifice and sorrow. Therefore he remains behind, sending on his officious brethren without him, and later, in some unheralded way, he, too, goes up to the great feast, where he is found in the midst of the temple-multitudes proclaiming the truths of the coming kingdom—the truth that obedience is the great organ of spiritual enlightenment, as the great working principle of the religious life; the truth of Sabbath keeping, not in cast-iron formulas of tradition but in the winsome spirit of service to fallen men; the truth of martyrdom by daily and unselfish witness to righteousness in an unspiritual world-truths which raised the question of credentials and also widened the cleavage between the classes and the masses of Jerusalem. For, now as before, the common people are his safeguard, and in their murmuring loyalty the officers sent to arrest him are warned away, and the question of the street becomes the great crucial question of the ages, "When the Christ shall come, will he do more signs than those which this man hath done?" The wealth of prophecy and imagination

could suggest to their unbiased minds no trait of character, or deed of power, or grace of disposition which Jesus lacked -upon their near-sighted eyes already the later glory of the Christian faith was shining, viz.: that our Christian standards of truth and duty are set so far into the clear that we cannot see beyond these ideals of the man of Galilee. And even with the accumulated inheritances of knowledge and civilization, after nineteen centuries, we still ask the old question of Jerusalem: What more of truth and grace can we have to live by and to die by than the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ? And there comes no answer, save a deeper homage in the rested hearts of men. And when they stumbled, as they did, over the whereabouts of his threatened departure, lest they could not find him, we catch, as the great closing word of the feast, the companion truth that he could always be found and only by those who needed him. These truths of spiritual fulness and spiritual need crown the last "day of the great Hosanna." On this day the people marched about the altars, waving their boughs of palm and willow, and followed the priests to the fountain of Siloam for the filling of the golden pitcher with the water of the morning sacrifice, and amid the music of trumpet and song they shouted, "With joy shall ye draw water out of the wells of salvation." Hinged upon the ceremony of the drawing of water, Jesus sends out his proclamation of Messiahship in the evangel which embodied the gospel, “If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink."

The proclamation is as simple as a cup of water to a thirsty soul, but, as in the vision of Sir Launfal, the cup is the grail of the last supper, and the water

"His blood, that died on the tree."

It makes thirst the "open sesame" of the kingdom of God, and Christ the water of everlasting life!

This is the simple and sweet truth of the gospel. It had