every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters; and e that hath no money, come ye buy and eat. Wherefore do you spend money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which satisfieth not? Hearken diligently unto me, and eat ye that which is good, and let your soul delight itself in fatness. In the same way, an apostle speaks of them that have tasted the good word of God, and the powers of the world to come; and another, of them that have tasted that the Lord is gracious, and therefore desire the sincere milk of the word, that they may grow thereby.

True these are all figures of speech, transferred from the feeding of the body to that of the soul. But they are transferred because they have a fitness to be transferred. The analogy of the soul is so close to that of the body, that it speaks of its hunger, its food, its fullness, and growth, and fatness, under the images it derives from the body.

Hence you will observe that our blessed Lord appears to have always the feeling, that he has come down into a realm of hungry, famishing souls. You see this in the parable of the prodigal son, and that of the feast or sup per. Hence also that very remarkable discourse in the 6th chapter of John, where he declares himself as the liv ing bread that came down from heaven-that a man may eat thereof and not die. Whoso eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath eternal life. My flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me and I in him. As the living Father hath sent me, and I live by the Father, so he that eateth me, even he shall live by me.

Many, I believe, are not able to read this language,

without a kind of revolted feeling. What can it mean that they are to live by eating Christ? There is no difficulty, I answer, in the language, save in getting at the rational and true sense of the figure employed, and, when this is done, it becomes language strikingly significant. Suppose it were said that a tree can live, only as it eats the air and the light; the meaning, of course, would not be that it takes these elements by mastication, but that it has such a nature that it takes them into itself and gets a nutriment of growth out of them, and that without them, so appropriated, it would die. So, when Christ says,-I will manifest myself unto him,—we will come and make our abode with him, he means that he will be so received and appropriated by the soul as to be its light, the breathing of its life, that which feeds it internally. He assumes, in all that he says, that as the tree has a nature requiring to be fed by air and light, so the soul has a nature inherently related to God, the Infinite Spirit. Hence the deep hunger of the world in sin; because the sin is its attempt to live without God and apart from God.

Accordingly, it is the grand endeavor of the gospel to communicate God to men. They have undertaken to live without him, and do not see that they are starving in the bit erness of their experiment. It is not, as with bodily hunger, where they have a sure instinct compelling them to seek their food, but they go after the husks, and wou'd fain be filled with these, not even so much as conceiving what is their real want, or how it comes. For it is a remarkable fact that so few men, living in the flesh, have any conception that God is the necessary supply and nutri ment of their spiritual nature, without which they famish and die. It has an extravagant sound, when they hear it

They do not believe it. How can it be that they have any such high relation to the Eternal God, or he to them? It is as if the tree were to say,-what can I, a mere trunk of wood, all dark and solid within, standing fast in my rod of ground,-what can I have to do with the free moving air, and the boundless sea of light that fills the world? And yet it is a nature made to feed on these, taking them into its body to supply, and vitalize, and color every fibre of its substance. Just so it is that every finite spirit is inherently related to the infinite, in him to live, and move, and have its being. It wants the knowledge of God, the society of God, the approbation of God, the internal manifestation of God, a consciousness lighted up by his presence, to receive of his fullness, to be strong in his might, to rest in his love, and be centered everlastingly in his glory. Apart from Him, it is an incomplete creature, a poor blank fragment of existence, hungry, dry and cold. And still, alas! it can not think so. Therefore Christ comes into the world to incarnate the divine nature, otherwise unrecognized, before it; so to reveal God to its knowledge, enter him into its faith and feeling, make him its living bread, the food of its eternity. Therefore of his fullness we are called to feed, receiving of him freely grace for grace. When he is received, he restores the consciousness of God, fills the soul with the divine light, and sets it in that con nection with God which is life,-eternal life.

Holding this view of the inherent relation between created souls and God as their nourishing principle, we pass

II. To a consideration of the necessary hunger of a state of sin, and the tokens by which it is indicated. A hungry herd of animals, waiting for the time of their feeding, do

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not show their hunger more convincingly, by their impatient cries and eager looks and motions, than the human race do theirs, in the works, and ways, and tempers of their selfish life.

I can only point you to a few of these demonstrations. And a very impressive and remarkable one you have in this; viz., the common endeavor to make the body receive double, so as to satisfy both itself and the soul too with its pleasures. The effort is, how continually, to stimulate the body by delicacies, and condiments, and sparkling bowls, and licentious pleasures of all kinds, and so to make the body do double service. Hence too, the drunkenness, and high feasting, and other vices of excess. The animals have no such vices; because they have no hunger save simply that of the body; but man has a hunger also of the mind or soul, when separated from God by his sin, and therefore he must somehow try to pacify that. And he does it by a work of double feeding put upon the body. We call it sensuality. But the body asks not for it. The body is satisfied by simply that which allows it to grow and maintain its vigor. It is the unsatisfied, hungry mind that flies to the body for some stimulus of sensation, compelling it to devour so many more of the husks, or carobs, as will feed the hungry prodigal within. Thus it is that so many dissipated youth are seen plunging into pleasures of excess,―midnight feastings and surfeitings, debaucheries of lust and impiety; it is because they are hungry, because their soul, separated from God and the true bread of life in Him, aches for the hunger it suffers. And so it is the world over; men are hungry everywhere, and they compel the body to make a swine's heaven for the comfort of the godlike soul.

Again we see the hunger of sin, by the immense number of drudges there are in the world. It makes little difference, generally, whether men are poor or rich. Some terrible hunger is upon them, and it drives them madly forward, through burdens, and sacrifices, and toils, that would be rank oppression put upon a slave. It is not simply that they are industrious-industry is a virtue-but they are drudges, instigated by such a passion of want that they are wholly unable to moderate their plans by any terms of reason.

You see too what indicates the uneasiness of this hunger, in the constant shifting of their plans and arrangements. Even the more constant, stable characters, such as hold most firmly to their pursuits, are yet seen to be uneasy in them; comforting their uneasiness by one change or another; a new kind of crop, a new partner, a new stand, a wheeling about of counters, or a change of shelves, or a different way of transportation, or another place of banking,-nothing is ever quite right, because they are too uneasy in their hunger to be quiet long in any thing.

Others show their hunger by their closeness; the very look of their face is hungry, the gripe of their hand is hungry, the answer of their charity is the answer of hunger, the prices they pay for service are the grudged allowance of a heart that is pinched by its own stringent destitution.

Observe again the quarrels of debt and credit, the false weights, the fraudulent charges, the habitual lies of false recommendation, the arts, stratagems, oppressions, of trade, how hungry do they look.

Notice again how men contrive, in one way or another, to get, if possible, some food of content for the soul that