VI.

The Conference.

THERE COMETH A WOMAN OF SAMARIA TO DRAW WATER.

UNTO HER, GIVE ME TO DRINK."-JOHN IV. 7.

JESUS SAITH

THE CONFERENCE.

EACH one of us must come, at some time or other, to have a personal dealing with Christ. It may be at one of those crisis-hours of existence, of which few are ignorant, when the even flow of life's current is arrested; when, to use the suggestive simile of this narrative, the pitcher is drained and emptied, and we are summoned away from our Shechem-homes and broken cisterns to seek supplies of some better 'living water.' It may be at a dying hour: it must be on the Great Day of Judgment. Blessed for us if that solemn and all-momentous conference and interview has already taken place;-if we have already listened to His words of wondrous mercy,-let down our vessel for the draught in the deep well of His love, and drank of that perennial stream which quenches and satisfies the soul's thirst for ever!

The sinner who now confronted her unknown Saviour at Jacob's well, as we shall afterwards find, was not could not, with all her simulated lightness of soul, be happy. She had no part, and knew she had none, in the blessings of the true Gerizim. If she

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ever recalled, in her journeys to and from the fountain, Joshua's old rehearsal of promise and threatening, more than one curse must have thundered its anathema over her head; and although the many thousands of Israel were not there to respond, her own guilty conscience must have uttered its assenting 'Amen.' But, as at that same memorable scene of patriarchal days, the Ark of the Testimony was placed between the adjacent hills, so now did the true Ark stand between her and the Ebal of curses, directing and conducting her up to the Mountain of blessing, and saying, "Woman, thy sins are forgiven thee." Shechem, her ordinary dwelling-place, was one of the old cities of Refuge. She may possibly have seen with her own. eyes the manslayer hastening with fleet foot along the plain of Mokhna, up the narrow Valley she had just traversed, to be safe within the appointed walls from the avenger of blood. That Old Testament institution and type had, in the Adorable Person standing by her side, a nobler meaning and fulfilment. Though all unconscious at the moment of her peril and danger, He was to her the great antitypical Refuge from the avenging sword of that law which she had so flagrantly outraged in heart and life.

"Jesus saith unto her," briefly, abruptly, "Give me to drink." That request is preferred in the first instance for Himself-uttered as an introduction to the subsequent converse.

But it is evident He wishes to

put it in another and far more urgent form into her lips as well as into ours. It is the call of unsated humanity, in its unquenched longings after something more satisfying than perishable fountains can yield; a cry to which the world gives its ten thousand counterfeit and mocking answers, all, however, telling of a thirst which, with anything short of the true answer, cannot be met or assuaged. It is the cry of the spiritually wounded or dying soldier on earth's battle-field in the rage of his moral fever-Water! water! water! "Give me to drink."

Thus does the Saviour start the question. It is the keynote of the subsequent divine music. It regulates the strain throughout. It touches the chords of that tuneless soul, and wakes up its latent slumbering harmonies. These long-sealed and hardened lips come to sing, (and the strange music impels hundreds of her fellow-townsmen to sing too) "Give me to drink:" "As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God! My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God."

We may, in the present chapter, regard the interview unfolded to us in the narrative, as exhibiting several features which characterise those spiritual conferences to which we have just referred as still taking place at this hour between the Saviour and the sinner.

Christ often comes and speaks unexpectedly. When that woman of Sychar left her home, never did she dream of such an interview. No thought had she but of going to plenish her empty pitcher. If she had been a modern Romanist, she might, on reaching the "holy well," have perhaps counted her beads and muttered her pater, but only to return light-hearted as she went. All unlooked for was the advent of that Divine Stranger. Still more unexpected the mysterious converse which resulted in the change of heart and change of life.

Is it not so still? How often Jesus comes to the soul unexpectedly. Sickness has with appalling suddenness struck that strong man down. It was but yesterday when he was at his desk, or pacing the exchange, or conning his ledger, in the ardent pursuit of gain and engrossing earthliness,-strong in pulse and brawny in arm, no premonition of an arrest on all worldly schemings. By sudden accident, or fever, or disease, he is chained to a couch of pain and languishing; it may be a bed of death. For the first time the awful realities of eternity are projected on his sick pillow. He has been summoned in the twinkling of an eye from the Shechem of his earthly pursuits, secluded from the hum of busy life, the loud stunning tide of human care and crime,' the excitement of secular interests, the scramble of money-making, and he is lying by the Bethesda pool of affliction, with the hot, fevered sun

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