Bread and Water
John vi. 35
O THAT this day we might see the Lord and have our whole mind filled with his light and joy! Lord, dost thou ask us what we would have at thine hands? Our answer is, Lord, that we might receive our sight! When men cry unto the Lord in their trouble, thou dost deliver them out of their distresses; in this hope we come now before the Lord, and even whilst we speak our hearts feel the burden rising. Sweet is the day of the Lord, quiet and tender in its sacred peacefulness, opening into the very heavens and showing us the New Jerusalem as the city in which we shall no more be threatened by fear and humbled by weariness. For every blessing we offer thee our praise. Thou didst lead us through the solitary way, and thou hast spared us from the shadow of death. Our souls are thine; our bodies are thy habitation. Thou are mindful of us with great care, and thy banner over usis love. O that we knew how to praise thee aright, that our hearts might not suffer pain because of the weariness of our worship. Thy judgments are vezy terrible, but thy mercies are greater still. Our life is full of the mercy of the Lord, and our days are made bright by his goodness. Lord, let not our feet stray from the path of thy will. Lord, comfort us, encourage our souls in the day of fear, and let our weakness hide itself in thy great power. We lay down our own wisdom as ignorance, and run away from our towers as from defences that will crush the life that built them. We come to Jesus. We stand beside the Saviour. We know the power of his blood. Lord, help us. Lord, send upon us the blessing of thine infinite pardon. Lord, show us the light of thy face. We daily see how great a gift is life; we know it not, we have not seen the divine secret, we feel the pulse beat, but we see not the power by which it is moved. We are our own mysteries. Life itself is a religion. Life is a continual prayer. How weak we are, yet how strong! We cannot just now bear the full daylight, yet we shall pass the sun on our upward way to the glory to come, and his great lustre shall be as a spark vanishing in the ever-enlarging vastness of thy universe. When we think thus of thy kingdom our light affliction is but for a moment. Thy kingdom, Lord, how great, how bright, how strong! May we one and all have a place in that everlasting house. Thy mercy is greater than our prayer, and therefore do we hope even where we cannot reason. Send the gospel to our losteones, and bring our wanderers home. Visit our sick chambers and whisper to our sick ones the messages of consolation, so that their very weakness may itself
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become a privilege, and their loneliness become the sanctuary within which thou wilt meet them. We put our own life into thy keeping. We lay aside our own poor help as a temptation, and we accept thy strength as our perfect ability. O thou God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when shall we be wholly swallowed up in thy great love! When will the devil leave us, and none but holy angels be at hand! How long the tempter tarries! He wears out our strength; he lures our fancy; he vexes our prayers; he tortures our very communion with thyself. Jesus of the wilderness, Jesus of Calvary, help us or the enemy will prevail. He is so strong, so swift, so wise; yet we can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth us, therefore do we pray — Jesus, save us, or we perish! Amen.
BREAD AND WATER.
‘‘T am the bread... I am the water.’’ — JOHN Vi. 35, etc.
HE subject is clearly, Bread and Water. You call these
common things, and my object will be to show that their commonness is not a defect, but an excellence; that their very excellence has occasioned their commonness; and that their commonness corresponds to a common want in the constitution of mankind. I will take the simple idea of bread and water, and apply it socially in the first place and trace it upward to its highest and divinest meaning.
Let us look in upon the greatest feast ever spread for the refreshment and delight of kings. All delicacies shall be there that can be found in wood and air and sea: the richest wines shall sparkle and foam and glow upon the sumptuous board; and the fragrances arising from this luxurious feast shall excite and regale the appetite of hungry men. Now what have we there? What is the fundamental idea? What is the nucleus of the abounding and tempting feast? Surprising as it may seem, the whole thing is but an adaptation of bread and water! It is bread and water decorated; bread and water more or less adulterated; bread and water supposed to be at their best as to refinement, and richness, and power of gastronomic temptation and satisfaction. And if you could follow the sated guests into their privacy you would hear them say, in effect, “‘ All this fine living is well enough now and then, but only now and then, after all; let us have something plain and substantial,’ in a word, let them have bread and water. What is this prodigious art of the high cook? He is bound, like other popular slaves, to produce something fresh; without novelty he sinks into a common baker; a new relish may mean a new fortune; a new gravy may give him a country house and a footman; a new adaptation of an omelette may enable him to start a shooting box, — but it is bread and water that he works upon; bread and water are the basis of his fortune; he lives by mystifying the public, and mightily laughs at the trick by which he has made men think that bread crumbs have some connection with far-off spice groves and Ceylon breezes. Offer your guests plain bread and water, and they will not often call your way; but dress up the bread and water, torture them, colour them, spice them, and they will praise the delicacy and excellence of the viands. But bread and water survive! These are the things that cannot be shaken. Empires of soups and entrees, wines and liqueurs, rise and fall, but the steady old friends bread and water remain as the unadorned and ever wholesome gifts of God. Ay, poor cook, clever trickster, half a creator, under all thy enchantments and wizardries there are the plain bread and water; disguise them, bribe them, paint them, and wreathe around them all manner of cunning ornamentation, they are but bread and water; the image and the superscription are the cook’s, but the bread and water themselves are God’s! Name the dishes that delighted Babylonian gluttons, and rehearse the menu which made the Egyptian gourmands smack their sensual lips; you cannot; these are forgotten delights, paste-boards that perished in the fire; but bread and water come steadily along the ages, over the graves of empires and the ashes of royalty, having escaped the tortures of the cruelest cooks and shown themselves to be the primary and necessary gifts of God.
Well, the application of this is obvious in higher spheres of life, such, for example, as the culture and satisfaction of the intellect. Reading and writing are the bread and water of the mind. Give a child the power of reading and writing and let him do the rest for himself; it is worth doing (at least some of it), and let him find it out and he will value it the more. Your duty is done in giving the reading and the writing, the intellectual bread and water. But fine cookery is imitated in fine intelligence and with like results in some cases, namely mental indigestion and ill-health. Hence, we have imperfect French, caricatured German, and murdered music, and the native tongue and the native history are passed by as quite secondary if not beneath contempt. It is better to chatter French in a way which nobody can understand than to speak good plain exact English, is it not? We must be fine at, all costs. We must have a few knick-knacks on the mantelpiece, even if we have not a bed to sleep on. We must be able to say, Parlez-vous Frangaise even if we cannot pay our debts. When will people learn to prize bread and water? When will they see that it is better to know a little well, than to know next to ‘nothing about a good deal? Owhen? This is nota little matter, it is a matter of great importance, from the fact that it is an index of character. I do not laugh at a man whose learn- ‘ing ends at the multiplication table, but I may laugh with grim amusement at a man who speaks hotel French and then spells October with an 4 Give your children intellectual bread and water without grudging, that is to say, give them a thorough grounding in the beginnings and elements of knowledge, and let them do the rest for themselves,
These illustrations prepare the way for the highest truth of all, namely, that Jesus Christ is the bread and water without which we cannot live. He never says he is a high delicacy, a rare luxury, a feast which the rich alone can afford; he says that he is bread and water, he likens himself not to the luxuries but to the necessaries of life, and in so doing he shows a wisdom, a reach of mind, a grasp of human nature, which should save him from the attacks of malignant men. An adventurer would not have seen in metaphors so humble a philosophy so profound. Adventurers like big words and glaring figures; they speak great swelling words of vanity; they search heaven and earth for effective figures; they disdain the sling and the stone. Not so with Jesus Christ; he is Bread, he is Water, he is Light, he is the Door, he is the Shepherd, and these words, so simple, stretch their meaning around the whole circle of human life, and by their choice alone is the supreme wisdom of Jesus Christ abundantly attested.
Let us go further into this matter by a little detailed inquiry and illustration,
1. Man needs Jesus Christ as a necessity and not as a luxury. You may be pleased to have flowers, but you must have bread,
Christ presents himself as exactly fulfilling this analogy. Our whole life is based on one or two simple but necessary lines; we must have food, we must have shelfer, we must have security. But into how many glorifications have all these simple necessaries passed! We have just spoken about food. Now look at shelter, how styles of architecture have grown out of that idea! We talk of Doric, and Grecian, and Gothic; of Norman arches and Corinthian capitals; and indeed we have a long and perplexing nomenclature, all coming out of the fact that man must have a place to go into when the weather is rough and when sleep is needed, Out of the need of shelter has come the science or art of architecture! Is this wrong? Most certainly not. It is a trait of civilisation. It is a sign of refinement and progress. But let an architect of high fancy be called in to build you a house, he gives you a fine elevation, a noble porch, a splendid dome; but in the fever of his fancy he has forgotten the foundations, overlooked the drainage, omitted the joists, and made no provision for the escape of the smoke. How then? Of what avail is it that there is much elaboration of cunning masonry on the front of the house? You could have done without the stone faces above the mullions, but you cannot do without the chimneys and the joists. It is exactly after the bearing of this analogy that Jesus Christ has often been presented in preaching and in books. He has been offered as an ornament merely. He has been preached as the most curious.and entertaining of all riddles. He has been treated as the successor of Plato, or Solon, or Seneca. In this way, generally indeed intended to be respectful, thé whole purpose of his coming into the world has been overlooked. He has not been presented as bread and water, or the very first and most indispensable necessity of life; he has been treated as a phenomenon; cabineted as a rarity in human history; labelled as a remarkable specimen; and in this way even some of his admirers have ignorantly betrayed and dishonoured the Lord, Jesus is’not a phenomenon, he is bread: Christ is not a curiosity, he is water. As surely as we cannot live without bread we cannot live truly without Christ; if we know not Christ we are not living, our movement is a mechanical flutter, our pulse is but the stirring of an animal life. It is in this way, then, that Jesus Christ is to be preached. It is even so I would preach him now. I would call him the water of
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life; I would speak of him as the true bread sent down from heaven; I would tell men that it is impossible to live without him; I would say, with heightening passion, with glowing and ineffable love, that he only, even the holy Christ of God, can satisfy the hunger and the thirst of the soul of man. In this way I claim a distinct vocation as a preacher. I am not one amongst many who try to do the world good; as a Christian preacher, or a preacher of Christ, I offer the ody thing that can vitally and sufficiently touch the world’s condition, and thus the position of the Christian preacher is absolutely without similitude or parallel, in that the choice he offers is life or death, salvation or ruin, heaven or hell.
2. What has been the effect of omitting to declare Christ simply as bread and water? Leaving the simplicity of Christ we have elaborated theological sciences, established and promulgated with solemn sanctions the most intricate creeds; we have worked out a very high and cunning symbolism; we have filled the church with incense, with garments of many colours and many significances, ceremony after ceremony we have contrived; we have called councils, synods, and congresses; we have constituted splendid hierarchies, with mitres and crooks, and clothing precious with gold and glaring with ardent colour. All this have we done, O Son of God, though thou didst call thyself bread and water! We have gathered around thee liturgies and suffrages and gowns and bands and surplices and chants and censers and albs and stoles and chasubles, though thou didst call thyself Bread and Water! We have drawn a long and often mutinous procession of reverends and most reverends and right reverends and very reverends, and doctors and deans and eminences and holinesses and suffragans and novices and licentiates, though thou didst call thyself bread and water! Horrible, indeed, and quite infinite is the contemptibleness of all this, and shall I not even say the sin? Suppose some inquiring stranger looking on and asking, What does all this mean? I should answer, not without sharpness and indignation, It means that man isa fool, and that he prefers vanity to truth. This is not the Saviour. This is not the way to God. This is not the door of heaven. ‘This is incubus and rubbish and abomination. Christ is bread; Christ is water; Christ is the one answer to thy difficulties, the one healer of thy wounds, the one Saviour of thy
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soul. Oh, but the curse of this mischief is terrible to contemplate! Poor souls are left to believe that they can only get to Christ by seeing ministers and priests and bishops, by learning catechisms, by swallowing dogmas they neither understand nor appreciate, and by listening to the mumbling and muttering of certain ecclesiastical men in livery. Oh the horribleness! Oh the blasphemy! Is not the devil laughing the while and filling his cruel hand with additional prey? My friend, man eager to know the truth, Christ is bread; Christ is water; he is nigh thee; take the pure Bible and read it for thyself, read it in solitude, read it with earnest desire to know its living claim upon thyself, and thou shalt see the Lord, and feel the Cross, and eat the heavenly bread.
3. History furnishes a most graphic confirmation of these views. John Stuart Mill says, ‘‘ Let rational criticism take from us what it may, it still leaves us the Christ.’’ Exactly so; it still leaves us the bread and water! It still leaves us all we want. It takes away all human conceits and decorations, and it leaves the living bread. It mortifies the theological cook, and confectioner, it humbles the decorator of tables, but it leaves the living water! Theological revolutions ‘have come and theological revolutions have gone; timid souls have trembled as if the sanctuary had been destroyed, but when the noise has passed and the cloud has rolled off, behold the bread and water remain, and Welcome is written on the tables of the Lord! Men cannot get rid of Christ simply because they cannot get rid of themselves. Marvellous is it to watch how the Lord allows the chaff to blow away, but saves every grain of the precious wheat; and quite marvellous, too, is it to» see how some nervous people think that the wheat is lost because the chaff has been scattered by the wind. The Lord will lose nothing. Society revolutionises itself, but society still lives.. Theologies, eastern and western, wear themselves out, but the bread and water are still there, incorruptible and unlimited. Do we fear the dissolution of the earth because an owl’s nest has fallen? Will the sun not rise to-morrow because a candle has been blown out? Bethink thee, faithless soul, they are but accidents that change, the essentials abide,
“Unhurt amid the war of elements,
The wreck of matter and the crash of worlds.’”’
I fancy we should change our standpoint in viewing all the revolutions and disasters that occurred within the limits of Christendom. Hitherto we have thought of them as the results of intellectual pride or spiritual insubordination. We have mourned over men as fallen creatures because they have risen against the. systems in which they were reared. But possibly we are wrong. It may be Christ himself who is at work. He is the great Revolutionist. This may be Christ’s own way of clearing off the rubbish which has been piled upon his holy name. Christ pulls down papacies and hierarchies and rituals, that he may show that these are not needful, that all human contrivances are departures from his Divine simplicity, and that he wishes to be known through all ages and amongst all men as the Bread and Water of human souls, He knows that our temptation is to make more of externals than of realities, hence he turns his providence against us, hurls down our cathedrals and temples and ministers, and says he will be known only as Bread and Water, not as a compound of coloured and poisonous confection. O the deceitfulness of the human heart’in this matter of serving Christ! We tell lies to ourselves about it. We talk about exriching our services, ennobling our architecture, educating our ministers, creating universities, founding endowments, originating retreats of elegant leisure for the production of technical literature. Rubbish, all of it! Christ asks nothing of the kind at our hands. He prefers his own Spzrit to our culture. ‘‘It is not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit,’’ saith the Lord. ‘* Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination unto me; the new moons and sabbaths, the
* calling of assemblies, I cannot away with; it is iniquity even the solemn meeting.’’ What, then, are we to do? ‘‘ Wash you, make you clean, put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.”’ Thus we are driven back to simplicity; our ‘‘ culture’ is thrown down and dashed to pieces as a potter’s vessel, and nothing stands but the bread and the water, the first verities, the essential graces, of the Lord’s Christ. I care not how rich our music, how noble our architecture, how imposing our method of worship, if all.this be kept strictly in its proper place. I love beauty; Iam moved to passion and heroism by inspiring. music; I would make the Lord’s house glad with every expression of love; but this done, 1 would write on the doorposts, on the roof, and on every panel, the words of Jesus: “Tn this place is one greater than the temple.’’’ I prefer knowl-. edge to ignorance, but I prefer holiness to either. Culture, when not a chattering and fussy prig, may be right noble and even majestic; but nothing is so cold as culture, and nothing so mean, when not inflamed and impassioned by the Spirit of Christ. To-day the pulpit is in danger of being killed by miscalled culture. Men think that because they have been to college five years they ought to be preachers, which is as logical as to say that a man who has driven an omnibus five years ought to be able to take a ship across the Atlantic. The Lord continually dashes these culturepots to pieces like a potter’s vessel, by making preachers of his own, and clothing them with mysterious but most beneficent power.
We must go back to bread and water Our dainties must be given up. Our habits are too luxurious; we are killing our souls with sweet poisons; we are, by our fabrications and masonries and fine fancies, exalting ourselves above the Lord; so I would call myself back to the simplicity of Christ, and find all I want in his grace and truth.