to the gulfy blackness underneath, then he began to sink, and in an accent of despair-how unlike his former confidence!-he faintly cried, "Lord, save me!" Nor did Jesus fail. Instantly, with a smile of pity, He stretched out His hand, and grasped the hand of His drowning disciple with the gentle rebuke, "O thou of little faith, why didst thou doubt?" And so, his love satisfied, but his over-confidence rebuked, they climbed-the Lord and His abashed Apostle-into the boat; and the wind lulled, and amid the ripple of waves upon a moonlit shore, they were at the haven where they would be; and all -the crew as well as His disciples were filled with deeper and deeper amazement, and some of them, addressing Him by a title which Nathanael alone had applied to Him before, exclaimed, "Truly Thou art the Son of God."

Let us pause a moment longer over this wonderful narrative, perhaps of all others the most difficult for our feeble faith to believe or understand. Some have tried in various methods to explain away its miraculous character; they have laboured to show that eπÌ TÝV Dáλaoσav may mean no more than that Jesus walked along the shore parallel to the vessel; or even that, in the darkness, the Apostles may have thought at first that He was, or had been, walking upon the sea. Such subterfuges are idle and superfluous. If any man find himself unable to believe in miracles-if he even think it wrong to try and acquire the faith which accepts them-then let him be thoroughly convinced in his own mind, and cling honestly to the truth as he conceives it.

It is not for us, or for any man, to judge another: to his own Master he standeth or falleth. But let him not attempt to foist such disbelief into the plain narrative of the Evangelists. That they intended to describe an amazing miracle is indisputable to any one who carefully reads their words; and, as I have said before, if, believing in God, we believe in a Divine Providence over the lives of men—and, believing in that Divine Providence, believe in the miraculous-and, believing in the miraculous, accept as truth the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ-and, believing that resurrection, believe that He was indeed the Son of God-then, however deeply we may realise the beanty and the wonder and the power of natural laws, we realise yet more deeply the power of Him who holds those laws, and all which they have evolved, in the hollow of His hand; and to us the miraculous, when thus attested, will be in no way more stupendous than the natural, nor shall we find it an impossible conception that He who

sent His Son to earth to die for us should have put all authority into His hand.

So then if, like Peter, we fix our eyes on Jesus, we too may walk triumphantly over the swelling waves of disbelief, and unterrified amid the rising winds of doubt; but if we turn away our eyes from Him in whom we have believed-if, as it is so easy to do, and as we are so much tempted to do, we look rather at the power and fury of those terrible and destructive elements than at Him who can help and save -then we too shall inevitably sink. Oh, if we feel, often and often, that the water-floods threaten to drown us, and the deep to swallow up the tossed vessel of our Church and Faith, may it again and again be granted us to hear amid the storm and the darkness, and the voices prophesying war, those two sweetest of the Saviour's utterances—

"Fear not. Only believe."

THE dawn of that day broke on one of the saddest episodes of our Saviour's life. It was the day in the synagogue at Capernaum on which he deliberately scattered the mists and exhalations of such spurious popularity as the Miracle of the Loaves had gathered about His person and His work, and put not only His idle followers, but some even of His nearer disciples, to a test under which their love for Him entirely failed. That discourse in the synagogue forms a marked crisis in His career. It was followed by manifestations of surprised dislike, which were as the first muttering of that storm of hatred and persecution which was henceforth to burst over His head.

We have seen already that some of the multitude, filled with vague wonder and insatiable curiosity, had lingered on the little plain by Bethsaida Julias that they might follow the movements of Jesus, and share in the blessings of triumphs of which they expected an immediate manifestation. They had seen Him dismiss His disciples, and had perphaps caught glimpses of Him as He climbed the hill alone;

they had observed that the wind was contrary, and that no other boat but that of the Apostles had left the shore; they made sure, therefore, of finding Him somewhere on the hills above the plain. Yet when the morning dawned they saw no trace of Him either on plain or hill. Meanwhile some little boats-perhaps driven across by the same gale which had retarded the opposite course of the disciples-had arrived from Tiberias. They availed themselves of these to cross over to Capernaum; and there, already in the early morning, they found Him, after all the fatigues and agitations of yesterday-after the day of sad tidings and ceaseless toil, after the night of stormy solitude and ceaseless prayer-calmly seated, and calmly teaching, in the familiar synagogue.

"Rabbi, when didst thou get hither?" is the expression of their natural surprise; but it is met with perfect silence. The miracle of walking on the water was one of necessity and mercy; it in no way concerned them; it was not in any way intended for them; nor was it mainly or essentially as a worker of miracles that Christ wished to claim their allegiance or convince their minds. And, therefore, reading their hearts, knowing that they were seeking Him in the very spirit which He most disliked, He quietly drew aside the veil of perdaps half-unconscious hypocrisy which hid them from themselves, and reproached them for seeking Him only for what they could get from Him-" not because ye saw signs, but because ye ate of the loaves and were satisfied." He who never rejected the cry of the sufferer, or refused to answer the question of the faithful-He who would never break the bruised reed, or quench the smoking flax—at once rejected the false eye-service of mean self-interest and vulgar curiosity. Yet He added for their sakes the eternal lesson, "Labour ye not for the meat which perisheth, but for the meat which remaineth to eternal life, which the Son of Man shall give you; for Him the Father-even God-hath sealed."

It seems as if at first they were touched and ashamed. He had read their hearts aright, and they ask Him, "What are we to do that we may work the works of God ?"

"This is the work of God, that ye believe on Him whom He hath sent." "But what sign would Jesus give them that they should believe in Him? Their fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, which David had called bread from heaven." The inference was obvious. Moses had given them manna from heaven. Jesus as yet— they hinted-had only given them barley loaves of earth. But if He

were the true Messiah, was He not, according to all the legends of their nation, to enrich and crown them, and to banquet them on pomegranates from Eden, and "a vineyard of red wine," and upon the flesh of Behemoth and Leviathan, and the great bird Bar Juchne? Might not the very psalm which they had quoted have taught them how worse than useless it would have been if Jesus had given them manna, which, in their coarse literalism, they supposed to be in reality angels' food? Is not David in that psalm expressly showing that to grant them one such blessing was only to make them ask greedily for more, and that if God had given their fathers more, it was only because " they believed not in God, and put not their trust in His help; but "while the meat was yet in their mouths, the heavy wrath of God came upon them, and slew the mightiest of them, and smote down the chosen men that were in Israel." And does not David show that in spite of, and before, and after, this wrathful granting to them to the full of their own hearts' lusts, so far from believing and being humble, they only sinned yet more and more against Him, and provoked Him more and more? Had not all the past history of their nation proved decisively that faith must rest on deeper foundations than signs and miracles, and that the evil heart of unbelief must be stirred by nobler emotions than astonishment at the outstretched hand and the mighty arm?

But Jesus led them at once to loftier regions than those of historical conviction. He tells them that He who had given them the manna was not Moses, but God; and that the manna was only in poetic metaphor bread from heaven; but that His Father, the true giver, was giving them the true bread from heaven even now—even the bread of God which came down from heaven, and was giving life to the world.

Their minds still fastened to mere material images-their hopes still running on mere material benefits-they ask for this bread from heaven as eagerly as the woman of Samaria had asked for the water which quenches all thirst. "Lord, now and always give us this bread."

Jesus said to them, "I am the bread of life. He that cometh to me shall never hunger, and he that believeth on me shall never thirst;" and He proceeds to point out to them that He came to do the Father's will, and that His will was that all who came to His Son should have eternal life.

Then the old angry murmurs burst out again not this time from

the vulgar-minded multitude, but from His old opponents the leading Jews—“How could He say that He came down from heaven? How could He call Himself the bread of life? Was He not Jesus, the son of Joseph, the carpenter of Nazareth ? "

Jesus never met these murmurs about His supposed parentage and place of birth by revealing to the common crowds the high mystery of His earthly origin. He thought not equality with God a thing to be seized by Him. He was in no hurry to claim His own Divinity, or demand the homage which was its due. He would let the splendour of His Divine nature dawn on men gradually, not at first in all its noonday brightness, but gently as the light of morning through His word and works. In the fullest and deepest sense "He emptied

Himself of His glory.”

But He met the murmurers, as He always did, by a stronger, fuller, clearer declaration of the very truth which they rejected. It was thus that He had dealt with Nicodemus; it was thus that He had taught the woman of Samaria; it was thus also that He answered the Temple doctors who arraigned His infringement of their sabbatic rules. But the timid Rabbi and the erring woman had been faithful enough and earnest enough to look deeper into His words and humbly seek their meaning, and so to be guided into truth. Not so with these listeners. God had drawn them to Christ, and they had rejected His gracious drawing without which they could not come. When Jesus reminded them that the manna was no life-giving substance, since their fathers had eaten thereof and were dead, but that He was Himself the bread of life, of which all who eat should live for ever; and when, in language yet more startling, He added that the bread was His flesh which He would give for the life of the world-then, instead of seeking the true significance of that deep metaphor, they made it a matter of mere verbal criticism, and only wrangled together about the idle question, "How can this man give us His flesh to eat?"

Thus they were carnally-minded, and to be carnally-minded is death. They did not seek the truth, and it was more and more taken from them. They had nothing, and therefore from them was taken even what they had. In language yet more emphatic, under figures yet more startling, in their paradox, Jesus said to them, "Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of Man, and drink His blood, ye have no life in you;" and again, as a still further enforcement and expansion of the same great truths-" He that eateth of this bread shall live for ever."