"Surely I Have Laid My Pipe Far Short of the Fountain"

Zaps I was reading James Fraser of Brae the other night, and for the fiftieth time, as Dr. Jowett once said about his Boswell — I came again on this characteristic and suggestive passage. ‘Surely,’ he says, ‘I have laid my pipe far short of the fountain, for Iam as blind, and as dead, and as unholy as ever I was.’ But as I read that I immediately remembered that Fraser had only borrowed both the figure and the fact of that from a great authority of his, even from our old friend Thomas Shepard of New England. And on looking up the parent passage, I found that these were Shepard’s exact words: ‘As it is with conduit pipes, so here,’ he says. ‘ Let the pipes be laid ever so well, and laid ever so far up, yet if they are not laid wholly and all the way up to the conduit head, no water will ever come down to that family.’

Now these two passages from those two masters in Israel were enough for my self-examination that pre-communion night. And accordingly I laid down my two teachers and fell athinking to myself. ‘A conduit-head, ‘a fountain-head,’ thought I. ‘A fountain-head, and a pipe running up, so far, toward that fountain-head.’ And as I looked and looked at that and made a mental picture of that I said to myself — No! No city corporation anywhere ever did such a stupid thing as that. No town council in all the land ever took the city taxes and ran a pipe half-way, or three-fourths of the way, up to a lake of sweet water in the far-off hills. And no householder was ever so insane as to have a fine spring rising in his high grounds and then to run a conduit pipe a certain way up in the direction of that spring and then to let the water take its chance of finding its way into the unfinished pipe and so its chance of ever watering his house and his garden and his grounds. No man out of an asylum ever perpetrated an act of insanity like that. No man but you and I. Only you and I are so far left to ourselves as to do a thing like that, and that only in the matter of our religion, in the supreme matter of the salvation of our own souls and the souls of our households. And as I sat alone with my own thoughts a succession of scenes and circumstances and instances arose before my eyes, some of which I shall now try to put before you for your profit, if you will attend to them.

‘ With Thee,’ sings the Psalmist in a fine psalm — ‘ With Thee is the fountain of life. Of all life, that is. For all life everywhere and of all kinds has its first fountain in God. All life, and of all kinds. But it is of the very Divine life itself that David here sings. And this great thing begins for us New Testament men in this wonderful and adorable way. When our Lord Himself was still down here, in this same thirsty land, He also ran His pipe up to the Divine fountain. As often as He felt athirst, or felt that He needed more life and more strength and more solace than He had in Himself, He again ran His pipe of prayer and of faith and of Sonship trust up to His Father in Heaven. He tells us that in some of His greatest sermons. And He lets us see Himself doing that in such wonderful words as these: ‘ As the Father hath life in Himself, so hath He given to the Son to have life in Himself’ And again: ‘ As the living Father hath sent me, and I live by the Father, even so He that eateth me, he shall live by me.’ In these wonderful words the Son of God offers Himself to us as a sort of subordinate and second Fountain, so to speak, up to which we are told to run the pipe of our faith and of all our spiritual life. And again: ‘ Because I live,’ he says, ‘ ye shall live also. And thus it was that He was able to say to the thirsty woman at the well of Samaria, ‘ Whosoever drinketh of the water of this well shall thirst again, but whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him, it shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life And then He has had it written concerning Himself on the last page of our New Testament: ‘I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last. And I will give to Him that is athirst of the water of life freely. And the Spirit and the Bride say come. And let him that heareth say come. And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him come and take of the water of life freely. The Son of God is set before us in these and in many more Scriptures as so to speak a second, and as so to speak a much nearer Fountain, bringing down the water of life toward us and inviting us to run up our pipe to Him. ‘There is a beneficent law of nature which is but a parable of a still more beneficent law of grace. And that beneficent and blessed law of grace is that the water of life rises in the Son as high as its first source in the Father. And it stands in all its fulness in the Son for us to draw it from Him. ‘ And,’ says one, speaking in this respect for all believers — ‘And of His fulness have all we received, and grace for grace.’

Now all that being so; the Father of all being the First Fountain of all life and all blessedness, and the Son being as it were the still nearer and the more accessible Fountain of the same life and the same blessedness, how do we do and how ought we to do in this matter of running our pipe up to Christ, and thus receiving continually out of His fulness?

In the great waterworks of New Testament times the aqueduct-builders erected great arches and great bridges and great piers and great pillars on which they laid the great stone channels which were intended to carry the water from the far-off hills to the thirsty cities. But in all my ancient reading I never once read of any Roman architect who ever ran his aqueduct up to this arch or to that pier or to that pillar and then left it standing there unfinished and utterly useless. Had any ill-intended or incompetent architect ever done such a criminal thing as that he would have been beheaded for his folly and for his cruelty to the parched people who had employed him. But what we never read of having once happened in all the Roman Empire, that is what we ourselves do every day in the Church of Christ. We run our pipe up so far in the direction of the living water. But for the most part we leave our pipe hanging idly in mid-air and wholly empty of the living water for the want of which we and our household are all dying of thirst. And thus it is that, as Fraser says, ‘ After we have done all we are as blind, and as dead, and as unholy as ever we were.’ As Shepard says, ‘ No water ever comes down to that family.’ For to come to instances and to examples, what is the very Bible itself but a high and a heavenward arch on which we are told to rest the pipe of our faith as we run our faith up to Him whose word of life our Bible is? And so is it with the pulpit. For what is the most evangelical pulpit when it is at its very best but another pier and pillar up to which we run our pipe, and thus pass above and beyond

the pulpit to Him who built it for our faith to rest on it so as to rise above it? And so is the very mercy-seat itself. We too often make our prayers an end and an object in themselves. We too often bow down before the throne of grace and rise up and come away without having once lifted up our hearts to Him who sits upon that throne. As Fraser says in another place, ‘We say our prayers, indeed, but we seldom ask ourselves whether we have had an audience of the heavenly king or no.’ We run our pipe on occasion up to all these great means of grace but we stop short at the means and we seldom if ever come close up to Him who has all the grace in Himself, and who waits to be gracious to all those who come up to His presence for His grace. And so it is with the Sabbath and with the Lord’s Supper itself. The Sabbath and the Supper are but another two additional arches and bridges and piers and pillars built for ‘our spiritual nourishment and growth in grace, by our Heavenly Architect. And on which He intends us to lay our pipes up and up and up to Himself, the Heavenly Fountain of all grace and all truth, and all eternal life. ‘I secretly rested,’ confesses Fraser, ‘on the act of faith, and did not rise, as I ought to have risen, to the Object of faith. I drew my life, and my strength, and my comfort more from my own believing than from Him on whom I believed.’ My brethren, you all see the situation, do you not? You all take to yourselves the reproof and the correction, do you not? You all read yourselves the lesson, do you not? And you resolve to be more sane, and more wise, and more merciful to yourselves in the future, do you not? and this very week, and this very communion season? That is to say, you will all this week of preparation run your pipe of repentance, and of prayer, and of faith, and of newness of life, not up to the penitential psalms only, nor up to pre-communion pulpit only, nor up to the Lord’s table only, but the whole way up to Him toward whom all these piers and pillars but help to lift you. Ever up and up and still up to Jesus Christ himself, the only true and sure and sufficient Fountain of all your salvation.

Yes, let us all begin aright and at once with our repentance and all the rest will follow — every other communion-week grace in its evangelical order. Let us begin with a deep and a true repentance. But let us look well to it that our repentance does not terminate upon ourselves. Let us not content ourselves with ‘ coming to ourselves,’ like the prodigal son in the parable. Let us be like him in that. But let us go on to be like him in this also, that he came back to his father. ‘They return, complained the prophet concerning repentant Israel, ‘they return, but not to the Most High.’ Let us all return, and at this season, all the way to the Most High. When we sing, as we every day shall sing, ‘ There is a fountain filled with blood,’ let us look at the blood as it is flowing down upon us every day from Immanuel’s veins. And as we sing and sob and sink out of sight in that fountain opened for — all our sins and for our uncleanness, let us all the time rise above the fountain and ascend up to Him, in whose sin-atoning blood that fountain is opened and is kept opened. Let us come up close to the Cross and to Christ Himself dying upon the Cross and say to Him with William Cowper:

Dear dying Lamb! Thy precious blood

Shall never lose its power!

And so on through all the soul-saving and God-glorifying exercises of the communion season; through all its private and public privileges; through all its reading and meditation at home; through all its preaching and all its hearing in the preparation services; and then through all our partaking of the Body and Blood of the Son of God at His table. Let us in all and always run our pipe up to the Fountain, even to the Son of God, our Saviour. For with Him is the Fountain of Life.