must be in the inmost spirit. Outward forms are nothing unless they be phenomena produced by the motions of

the noumenon, the expression of spirit through Basis of religion. matter. God is without material form. The spirit that is in man is that which is most like God, and that which touches God. The worship God seeks is down below all organism that makes utterances and gestures. The worship offered him must also be perfectly sincere. It can only escape totally all the sinister influence of mixed motives when offered directly from the scrl to God. Every discussion of ceremonials and topographies lies outside all true religion. The outward modes and the visible placer are insignificant. Ritualism is thoroughly worthless. The Holiest of Holies is in the soul of man. There the man is to find and worship God. Then each continent and island is a Holy Land, and each soul the Temple of Jehovah.

Such was the teaching of Jesus. The woman replied, "These matters I do not quite comprehend, but I know that Jehovah's Anointed is coming, and upon his arrival he Jesus deares will expound all these things." Jesus said, "I am himself the MesHe, now speaking to you." Here is a direct and siah.

unequivocal declaration of his Messiahship. He

had not declared it in Jerusalem, but in Samaria; not to the learned Nicodemus, nor to his own disciples, but to an ignorant stranger; not to any man, but to a woman; not to a pure and cultivated lady, but to a prostitute! It seems marvellous, and, as a policy, wholly inexplicable.

Hereupon his disciples arrived with the provisions they had gone to purchase, and were amazed to see him talking familiarly with a woman, yet did not venture to question him. In the mean time the woman had left her

Return of the disciples.

water-pot, forgetting her errand, and had returned to the town and roused her neighbors, exciting them by the statement that out by Jacob's Well was sitting a man who had told her all her life. Was not this the Messiah, the Christ? ller earnestness brought forth a crowd.

In the mean time the disciples requested him to eat. But he had become so rapt by lofty thought, and so engaged in his earnest effort to plant the principles of his religion in one soul that all physical appetite failed him. "I have meat to eat that ye know not of. My meat is to do the will of Him that sent me." Look

ing up, he saw the field in the beautiful valley, just sown with the seed it would require four months to ripen, and he saw at the same time the people pouring out, perhaps from their mid-day meal, at the invitation of a woman whom they knew to have been wicked but now see to be happy. Jesus called their attention to these two facts and declared a great spiritual law: "You say that now the seed is in the ground men must wait four months for the harvest.* That is so in the physical world. But in the spiritual world there is more rapid ripening. An hour ago I dropped a seed of spiritual truth into the heart of a base woman. See how it springs to maturity! Look on the spiritual fields. They whiten already to the harvest, as the crowd coming across the valley from Sychar demonstrates. That shows that the laborers in spiritual fields reap rewards as laborers in other fields. You have a proverb which is true, 'One sows and another reaps.' I am sending you forth to gather a harvest for which you have not toiled."

Upon this the inhabitants of the town arrived. They besought him to remain with them, which he did for the space of two days, many believing at first from what the woman said, and many afterwards from

Arrivals from

the city.

hearing the doctrines of Jesus directly from his own lips.

Samaritan ideas

of the Messiah.

The Samaritans were in expectation of a Messiah, and while their ideas were not those of the Jews upon this subject, they were much more definite than the general vague Oriental expectation of the coming of a Great One. The Samaritans rejected the prophets but held to the law, and seem to have rested their expectations upon some vague intimation in the books of Moses, such as the prediction that Jehovah would raise up a prophet like unto Moses.† The fact of the indefiniteness of their grounds of belief left them free from the secular notions and rigid pride of the Jews. It really seems to have prepared them to look for the Messiah in a Moral Reformer rather than in a conquering hero, who should

* It is proper to say that this may allude to some proverbial expression among the people, preserved only in this place; a proverb appropriate to some religious anniversary perhaps connected with sowing, when it would be appro

priate to say, "We must now wait six months for the harvest."

Modern Samaritans refer to such passages as Chron. xlix. 10; Numb. xxiv. 17, and Deut. xviii, 15.

beat all nations under his feet, themselves included. The Messiah the Jews longed for is precisely the Messiah the Samaritans would reject. They hailed Jesus not as the Saviour of the Jews, or of any particular people, but as the Saviour of the world.

Milman, in a note, refers to Ber- | tan Deliverer was to be Husch-hab, or tholdt, chap. vii., which contains ex- Hat-hab, which he translates "Converttracts from the celebrated Samaritan er," one who is to convert the people letters and references to the modern to a higher state of religion. Dr. Robwriters who have discussed them. Ge- inson says that even to this day the enius, in a note to the curious Samari- Samaritans are looking for the coming tan poems which he has published, says of the Messiah, under the title of that the name of the expected Samari-el-Muhdy, the Guide

CHAPTER IV.

FROM SAMARIA TO GALILEE.

On the third day after his interview with the Samaritan woman, Jesus went on his way to Galilee. The Galilæans gave him a hearty welcome, because of the miracles which

Matt. iv.; Mark
i.; Luke iv.,
V.;
John iv.

of them had seen him perform. Some many have supposed that the fact that he had had no reputation among his own people until he had made a sensation in the metropolis, and the contrast between the treatment he had formerly received in Galilee and that which had just been bestowed upon him by the Samaritans, led him to quote the proverb, "A prophet hath no honor in his own country." But John seems to have meant that Jesus went into Galilee to avoid notoriety, because a prophet has little ado made over him by his own people. He had moved from his place on the Jordan for this very reason, and he had refused to stay among the Samaritans, where he was creating a great sensation. He went among his own people feeling perfectly certain that the divine power which resided in his teaching would cause it to grow, and he preferred to sow the seed where there was no storm of popular applause, or even excitement. It was not the utterance of disappointed pride, so far as we can discern, but a wise action based on a well-known principle. If popularity was what he sought, why did he leave Samaria?

But many of the Galilæans had witnessed his works at the feast in Jerusalem, and learned that he had a metropolitan fame. They now received him as a miracle-worker, not as a prophet.

Then Jesus began to preach. (Matt. iv. 17; Mark i. 14, 15.) He declared that the time for the fulfilling of the ancient prophe cies had arrived, that the reign of the Messiah, the kingdom of God, had begun, and that it was proper that they should prepare to enjoy that kingdom by an abandonment of their sins. He repeated these

Jesus begins to preach.

sayings, presenting them privately in his intercourse with the people, and urging them publicly in the Jewish chapels of that region. John and Jesus equally urged repentance, the former by threatenings of wrath and the latter by the attractive persuasiveness of promise. The manner of Jesus won the admiration of the people, and his fame grew. (Luke iv. 15.)

In his circuit of preaching he went to Cana, where he had made the water wine, reviving by his presence the remembrance of that first and very remarkable miracle.

While in Cana he received a visit from a nobleman, who was a functionary in the court of Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee. or a high military officer. This person was a Jew by birth or by conversion. He may have been Chuza, Herod's steward (Luke viii. 3), but of this iv. 46-54. we can have no certain knowledge. His resi

Heals the nobleman's son.

John

dence was at Capernaum, on the lake shore, twenty-five miles distant from Cana. Learning that the great teacher had returned to Galilee, he came to Jesus with the request that he would heal his sick son, who was at the point of death. The very name of Cana probably reminded him of the wonderful power which Jesus had exerted in that town before his departure for Jerusalem. To his request Jesus said: "Except ye see signs and miracles ye will not believe."

The words seem merely to indicate a contrast between the readiness with which the Samaritans believed because of his words, and received him as a prophet, and the obstinacy of the Jews in refusing to believe without a miracle, and not always yielding even to such evidence. He may have also alluded to the fact that this nobleman had been brought to him not by any necessities of his spiritual nature, but because of the sickness of his son. Jesus neither made parade of his power to work miracles, nor undervalued their weight as credentials to his character as a great religious reformer. As in other cases (Matt. xv. 27), he may have been testing the sincerity of the applicant; not for any knowledge he might gain, for no other person ever read character as Jesus did, but that the nobleman might discover what was in his own heart.

The distressed parent implores him: "Sir, do come down before my boy die." His faith was sound as far as it went, but it was narrow. He never had dreamed of any man having power