Page:Literature and Dogma (1883).djvu/173

 by giving it the sense of the Eternal Power, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness, so we shall get the best hold on many expressions of Jesus by referring them, though they include more, yet primarily and pointedly to his secret and to the happiness which this contained. Bread of life, living water, these are, in general, Jesus, Jesus in his whole being and in his total effect; but in especial they are Jesus as offering his secret. And when Jesus says: 'He that eateth me shall live by me!' we shall understand the words best if we think of his secret.

And so again with the famous words to the woman by the well in Samaria: 'Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again, but 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 spring of water welling up unto ever lasting life.' These words, how are we to take them, so as to reach their meaning best? What distinctly is this 'water that I shall give him'? Jesus himself and his word, no doubt; yet so we come but to that very notion, which Jeremy Taylor warns us against as vague, of getting Christ. The Bishop of Gloucester will tell us, perhaps, that it is 'the blessed truth that the Creator of the universe is a Person,' or the doctrine of the consubstantiality of the Eternal Son. But surely it would be a strong figure of speech to say of these doctrines, that a man, after receiving them, could never again feel thirsty? See, on the contrary, how the words suit the secret: 'He that loveth his life shall lose it, and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal.' This 'secret of Jesus,' as we call it, will be found applicable to all the thousand problems which the exercise of conduct daily offers; it alone can solve them all happily, and may indeed be called 'a spring of water welling up unto everlasting life.' And, in general, wherever the words life and