John 4

1. WHEN therefore the Lord knew how the Pharisees had heard that Jesus made and 2 baptized more disciples than John, (though Jesus himself baptized not, but his disciples,) 3, 4 he left Judea, and departed again into Galilee. And he must needs go through Sama- 5 ria. Then cometh he to a city of Samaria, which is called Sychar, near to the parcel 6 of ground that Jacob gave to his son Joseph. Now Jacob’s well was there. Jesus therefore being wearied with his journey, sat thus on the well: and it was about the sixth hour. 7 There cometh a woman of Samaria to draw water: Jesus saith unto her, Give me to 8, 9 drink. (For his disciples were gone away unto the city to buy meat.) Then saith the woman of Samaria unto him, How is it that thou, being a Jew, askest drink of me, which am a woman of Samaria? for the Jews have no dealings with the Samaritans. 10 Jesus answered and said unto her, If thou knewest the gift of God, and who it is that saith unto thee, Give me to drink; thou wouldest have asked of him, and he would 11 have given thee living water. The woman saith unto him, Sir, thou hast nothing to 12 draw with, and the well is deep: from whence then hast thou that living water? Art thou greater than our father Jacob, which gave us the well, and drank thereof himself, 13 and his children, and his cattle? Jesus answered and said unto her, Whosoever drink- 14 eth of this water, shall thirst again: but whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him, shall never thirst: but the water that I shall give him, shall be in him a well 15 of water springing up into everlasting life. The woman saith unto him, Sir, give me this water, that I thirst not, neither come hither to draw. 16, 17 Jesus saith unto her, Go call thy husband, and come hither. The woman answered and said, I have no husband. Jesus said unto her, Thou hast well said, I have no hus- 18 band: for thou hast had five husbands, and he whom thou now hast, is not thy hus- 19 band: in that saidst thou truly. The woman saith unto him, Sir, I perceive that thou 20 art a prophet. Our fathers worshipped in this mountain; and ye say, that in Jerusalem 21 is the place where men ought to worship. Jesus saith unto her, Woman, believe me, the hour cometh, when ye shall neither in this mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem, worship 22 the Father. Ye worship ye know not what: we know what we worship: for salvation 23 is of the Jews. But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth: for the Father seeketh such to worship him. 24 God is a Spirit: and they that worship him, must worship him in spirit and in truth. 25 The woman saith unto him, I know that Messias cometh, which is called Christ: 26 when he is come, he will tell us all things. Jesus saith unto her, I that speak unto thee am he.

This ridge or mountainous tract extends from the plain of Esdraelon to a line drawn between the south end of the Dead Sea and the southeastern corner of the Mediterranean. This tract, which is everywhere not less than 20 to 25 geographical miles in breadth, is in fact high uneven table-land. It everywhere forms the precipitous western wall of the great valley of the Jordan and the Dead Sea, while toward the west it sinks down by an offset into a range of lower hills, which lie between it and the great plain along the coast of the Mediterranean. The surface of this upper region is everywhere rocky, uneven, and mountainous; and is everywhere cut up by deep valleys which run on either side, east toward the Jordan, or west toward the Mediterranean. R.

CHRIST speaks, not as a Jew, but as the Son of man; the representative of the whole race. The bitter controversy between race and race is only touched, in passing, with a divine mildness. Rising high, not only above his own age, but even above the prejudices of all ages since, he gives mankind their charter of spiritual liberty for evermore. Jerusalem and Gerizim are only local and subordinate considerations. The true worship has its temple in the inmost soul, in the spirit and heart. It is the life of the soul; it is communion with God; the espousal of our nature to truth. It is spiritual and moral, not outward and ritual, springing from the great truth which Jesus had first uttered, that God is a Spirit. The revelation of this, in the wide application now given it, was the foundation of the new religion of all humanity. Religion was henceforth no tribal privilege jealously kept within the narrow bounds of mere nationality. The universal presence of a spiritual God made the whole world alike his shrine. The veil of the temple was first rent at Jacob’s well, and he who had, as men thought, dwelt only in the narrow limits of the chamber it shrouded, went forth from that hour to consecrate all the earth as one great Holy of Holies. G.

THE first eight months of our Lord’s ministry were spent in Judea. By the sign from heaven, by the Baptist’s proclamation, by Christ’s own words and deeds, he was presented to the rulers and to the people as the Son of God, the Messiah. His character was misunderstood; his claims were rejected. At Jerusalem a plot against his life was formed; it was no longer safe for him to reside where the Jewish authorities had power. Jesus retired to Galilee. H.—It was his policy to evade for a time, and so postpone, the outburst of this storm until he had trained his disciples, and laid the foundations for great gospel work by his example and his preaching. Here we have the reason why so large a portion of his miracles and teaching were in Galilee rather than in Judea. H. C.

1,2. It would seem to have been a sudden impulse of zeal in their Master’s cause which led those first disciples to engage so eagerly in baptizing. By his own removal to Galilee, an entirely new state of things was ushered in, and by John’s imprisonment his baptism ceased; nor do we read anywhere of a Galilean baptism by the disciples of Jesus. H.

4. He must. Not only because Samaria lay between Judea and Galilee, but he must also in that sense in which he said he must abide at Zaccheus’s house. This day salvation was to come to Samaria; and while people generally were fain to go all the way round by Perea, merely to avoid Samaria, so much was it hated, that friend of all that is lost hastened with joy to journey to Galilee by the direct way through Samaria. R. B.

5. Shechem, or Sychar, is midway between Hebron and Kadesh-Naphtali—between Jerusalem and Nazareth—and between the Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea. N. C. B.—Geographically and historically we are here in the centre spot of the Holy Land. The long backbone of Palestine—its central mountain-range—is here suddenly cleft in twain, and a deep valley, in places scarcely more than 500 yards wide, is sunk 800 feet below the inclosing mountains of Ebal to the north, and Gerizim to the south. H. B. T.—At Nablus the range of hills which traverses Palestine from north to south is pierced by a remarkable pass running nearly east and west; on the north the pass is flanked by the range of Mount Ebal, rising at its highest point to 3,029 feet above the sea, or 1,200 feet above the level of the valley; on the south by the range of Mount Gerizim, rising to 2,898 feet. Between these two mountains the valley rises gently toward the east, to the water-parting between the waters of the Mediterranean and the Jordan, at which point there is a remarkable topographical feature which is not often met with—a recess on either side of the valley, forming a grand natural amphitheatre, the scene in all probability of the ratification of the law. From this point the ground falls gradually to the rich plain of El-Mukhna, which runs north and south, and is bounded westward by the steep eastern declivities of Ebal and Gerizim. Where the valley merges into the plain there are two sites of great interest—Joseph’s tomb, and Jacob’s well. Amid this wealth of verdure, clinging as it were to the slopes of Gerizim, the mount of blessings, lies Nablus, the ancient Shechem; its situation, with easy access to the Mediterranean on the one hand, and to the Jordan valley and Trans-Jordanic district on the other, marking it as a place of importance from the earliest period. Wilson.

A valley green with grass, gray with olive-gardens sloping down on each side; fresh springs rushing down in all directions; at the end, a white town with dome-shaped roofs, embosomed in all this verdure, lodged between the high mountains which extend on each side of the valley—that on the north, Ebal; that on the south, Gerizim—this is the aspect of Shechem, or Nablus. A. P. S.—Here there is no wilderness, no wild thicket; yet there is always shade of the olive-grove, so soft in color, so picturesque in form that, for its sake, we can willingly dispense with all other wood. Here there are no impetuous mountain-torrents, yet there is water in more copious supplies than anywhere else

Jacob’s Well.—On the left is Mount Gerizim, and on the right, Mount Ebal; between the two, the Vale of Shechem.

in the land; and it is to its many fountains, rills, and water-courses, that the valley owes its exquisite beauty. Vandebilde.

In Shechem, Abraham first pitched his tent before the oaks of Moreh, and it became the favorite pasture-ground of Jacob. When the Israelites had crossed the Jordan, the neighboring mountains of Ebal and Gerizim became a second Sinai, where the law was solemnly republished to the assembled tribes. A. Thomson.—It is hardly too much to

Nablus, Vale of Shechem.

say of this natural amphitheatre that there is no other place in Palestine so suitable for the assembly of an immense body of men within the limits to which a human voice could reach, and where at the same time each individual would be able to see what was being done. The recesses in the two mountains, which form the amphitheatre, are exactly opposite to each other; and the limestone strata running up to the very summits in a succession of ledges present the appearance of a series of regular benches. A grander sight can scarcely be imagined than that which the reading of the law must have presented: the ark borne by the Levites, on the gentle elevation which separates the waters of the Mediterranean from those of the Dead Sea, and “all Israel and their elders, and officers, and their judges,” on this side and that, “half of them over against Mount Gerizim, and half of them over against Mount Ebal,” covering the bare hill-sides from head to foot. Wilson.

6. Jacob’s well. Close under the eastern foot of Gerizim, at the opening of the side valley [the vale of Shechem] from the wide plain of Mukhna, on a slight knoll, a mile and a half from the town, surrounded now by stones and broken pillars, is Jacob’s well. G.—The existence of a well sunk to a great depth in a place where water-springs on the surface are abundant, is sufficiently remarkable to give this well a peculiar history. The interior presents the appearance of being lined throughout with rough masonry. When examined in 1866, it was only seventy-five feet deep; but there can be no doubt that the original depth was much greater. The well was undoubtedly sunk to a great depth for the purpose of securing, even in exceptionally dry seasons, a supply of water. Kitchener.

There is no doubt that the well still shown to travellers near Nablus is the well of Jacob. Its position near to Sychar, its importance as inferred from its dimensions, go far, of themselves, to determine its identity; and the conclusion is confirmed by an undivided, unbroken tradition—Jewish, Samaritan, Arabian, Turkish, Christian. Besides the absence of all doubt as to its identity, there is another circumstance which surrounds it with a peculiar sacredness. It is the one only locality in Palestine that you can connect with the presence of the Redeemer. You cannot in all Palestine draw another circle of limited diameter within whose circumference you can be absolutely certain that Jesus once stood, except round Jacob’s well. H.—The framework of life, of customs, of manners, even of dress and speech, is still substantially the same as it was ages ago. The vineyards, the cornfields, the houses, the wells of Syria still retain the outward imagery of the teaching of Christ and the apostles. A. P. S.—Let a person take his seat on that fragment of granite pillar which lies near the mouth of the well, and read the fourth chapter of John’s gospel, and he will be struck with the fact that all the great features of the scene are here very much as our Lord left them, and that imagination has little more to do than introduce again into the picture the living characters. A. Thomson.

7. A woman of Samaria. The labors and the life of the Great Master of Israel began, not with a vast congregation, but with a single individual; not upon a set appointment, but in a merely incidental, casual meeting, when the Master was weary and hungry with a six hours’ walk. And this one was an unknown woman, not moving in the higher plane of social life, but apparently in the lowest; not a woman of previously unblemished reputation, but one whose record was at least doubtful. The only point of attractiveness apparent to us in her case was that she was human—a soul to be saved or lost. H. C.—This is perhaps the most human of all the scenes of our Lord’s earthly history. We seem to be beside him, overhearing all that is here recorded; nor could any painting of the scene on canvas, however perfect, do other than lower the conception which this exquisite narrative conveys to the devout and intelligent reader. But with all that is human, how much also of the divine have we here, both blended in one glorious manifestation of the majesty, grace, pity, patience with which “the Lord” imparts light and life to this unlikeliest of strangers, standing midway between Jews and heathens! B.—There are just four instances recorded in the Saviour’s life—that of the woman of Samaria, of the Roman centurion, of the Canaanitish woman, and of the Greeks who came up to Jerusalem—of our Lord’s dealings with those who stood without the pale of Judaism, and as we come upon them in the narrative, we shall be struck with the singular interest which Jesus took in each; the singular care that he bestowed in testing and bringing out to view the simplicity and strength of the desire toward him, and faith in him, that were displayed; the fulness of the revelations of himself that he made, and of that satisfaction and delight with which he contemplated the issue. It was the great and good Shepherd gathering in a lamb or two from the outfields, in token that there were other sheep out of the Jewish fold, whom also he was to bring in, so that there should be one fold and one shepherd. H.

10. She belonged to a people with whom any other Jew would have scorned to hold intercourse; but he opened to her mind some of the divinest ideas which have ever been put into the language of men. Y.—Having asked for water he sets forth this “gift” under the image of water; as at John 6:48–51, where men are waiting on him for the bread that perishes, he sets forth the same under

that of bread. T.—The water is, in this first part of the discourse, the subject, and serves as a point of connection, whereby the woman’s thoughts may be elevated and her desire aroused. From recognizing this water as the gift of God, in its imitation, verse 13, and its parabolic import, verse 14, her view is directed to him who was speaking with her, and the gift which he should bestow—the gift of the

Holy Spirit. Who it is. These pregnant words form the second step in our Lord’s declaration. He who is speaking with thee is no ordinary Jew, nor any ordinary man, but one who can give thee the gift of God: one sent from God, and God himself. All this lies in the words, which, however, only serve to arouse in the woman’s mind the question of verse 12. Living water. Designedly used in a double sense by our Lord, that the woman may lay hold of the material meaning, and by it be awakened to the higher one. A.

11. The well is deep.** The digging of it must have been a work of enormous labor. Maundrell, who visited it in 1697, gives this account: “It is dug in a firm rock, and contains about nine feet in diameter, and a hundred and five in depth, with fifteen feet of water.” The rock has since crumbled, or in other ways the well has been in part filled in, and recent measurements give a depth of seventy-five feet only, the spring at the bottom being choked. T.

13,14. Thirst again . . . never thirst.** The contrast here is fundamental and all-comprehensive. “This water” plainly means “this natural water and all satisfactions of a like earthly and perishable nature.” Coming to us from without, and reaching only the superficial parts of our nature, they are soon spent, and need to be anew supplied as much as if we had never experienced them before, while the deeper wants of our being are not reached by them at all; whereas the “water” that Christ gives—spiritual life—is struck out of the very depths of our being, making the soul not a cistern, for holding water poured into it from without, but a fountain springing, gushing, and flowing forth from within us, ever fresh, ever living. The indwelling of the Holy Ghost as the Spirit of Christ is the secret of this life with all its enduring energies and satisfactions, as is expressly said (7 : 37-39). B.

16. Hitherto, he had attempted to reach the heart directly, and, consequently, spoke of the water of life of which the heart stands in need. She felt no wants of the heart, and therefore did not understand the offer to supply them. Jesus now takes a more circuitous way, partly to quicken her conscience, in order by her conscience to reach her heart, and partly to manifest himself to her as the searcher of the heart. C. B.—Call thy husband. The first step toward granting her request. The first work of the Spirit of God, and of him who spake in the fulness of that Spirit, is to convince of sin. A.—The words can only be taken as spoken with the intention of calling out that very answer which they did call out; of bringing her, in this way, to a wholesome shame, to attain the object for which they were uttered. 18. This she has “said well,” inasmuch as she had spoken the truth; for a true confession is always well made, however ill it may be that the making of such a confession should be required. He proceeds, with firm and gentle hand, to draw her from the hiding-places in which she may still have hoped to lie hid; to unroll before her the blurred and blotted scroll of her past existence. T.

19,20. She saw that a prophet was before her, but from the facts of her own history—on which she is naturally anxious to linger as little as possible—her eager mind flies to the one great question which was daily agitated with such passion between her race and that of him to whom she spake, and which lay at the root of the animosity with which they treated each other. F.—There may have been an attempt to parry conviction, and to turn aside the hand of the convincer, by raising questions about places and forms of worship; but I cannot think, had this been the spirit and motive of this woman’s inquiries, that Jesus would have dealt with them as he did, treating them evidently as the earnest inquiries of one wishing to be instructed. H.

One Manasses, brother of Joiada the high-priest, about the year B. C. 332, was chased from Jerusalem on account of a marriage which he had contracted with the daughter of Sanballat, the Persian governor of Samaria, and which, when required, he refused to dissolve. He was received with open arms by his father-in-law, who undertook to rear for him on Mount Gerizim, the highest mountain in Samaria, a temple more magnificent than that from which he had been driven; where he should himself exercise the office of high-priest. The secession was reinforced by other fugitives and apostates, many of them priests. The temple thus reared was destroyed by John Hyrcanus B. C. 129; but the worship continued on Mount Gerizim, which by this time the Samaritans had learned to regard as the holiest mountain in the world, some sort of edifice no doubt occupying the place of the temple which had disappeared. Everything in fact may have been there—except the presence of God. T.

21. To the question which agitated her soul, “Gerizim or Jerusalem?” and which she sought to have decided by this “prophet,” the Lord replies with a “Woman, believe me!” which at once entreats and awakens confidence. This is the only time that we hear this form of expression. R. B.

—Neither in this mountain. A strange vividness is given to the words when, looking up, we see the eastern extremity of that Gerizim to which the Saviour must have pointed when he spoke, rising sheer up eight hundred feet, and when we know that yon white tomb, which seems almost to bend over the summit, stands on the site of the old rival temple of Samaritan worship! . . . This memorable sentence was the death-knell of all local religions, and swept away all sacred places from the earth by making every place sacred. A. Thomson.

—Worship the Father. You inquire concerning the place of worshipping. But a far more important question is at issue between us, the Being to be worshipped, respecting whom you are ignorant. Mede.

22. Ye know not: we know.** The Samaritans are ignorant of the true worship of God, because they reject the prophets, the several stages of revelation that have prepared the way for that which is the aim of all, the manifestation of the Redeemer; the Jews, on the other hand, do worship God intelligently, since they have recognized his successive revelations, and are thus fitted to be the medium through which salvation may come forth for men; to lead to which salvation is the end and aim of all God’s revelations. Jerusalem, meanwhile, had to be the seat of worship, because from Jerusalem the redemption, which was to raise worship to a higher sphere, was to spring up. N.—Salvation is of the Jews. This wonderful people was chosen by sovereign grace to stand amid the surrounding idolatry as the bearer of the knowledge of Jehovah, the only true God, of his holy law, and of his comforting promise, and thus to become the cradle of the Messiah. P. S.

23. The hour cometh when, stripped of all restraints to a single people, a single town; relieved of all supports required in its weak childhood—the spirit of a true piety shall go forth in freedom over the globe, seeking for those—whatever the places they choose, the outward forms they adopt—who will adore and serve him in spirit and in truth, and wherever it finds them, owning them as true worshippers of the Father. H.—The existence of a Supreme Eternal Cause is assumed in the New Testament, as a first principle; and, as in the case of the soul, a direct and fearless appeal is made here, also, to the consciousness of the human mind. He teaches her that the true God is not a local or national divinity, but a universal presence, and that true worship is always and only spiritual for the simple reason that the object of worship is a spirit. Y.—God being pure “spirit” (his essence not his personality being here spoken of) cannot dwell in particular temples; but is to be approached in that part of our being which is spirit; and even there, inasmuch as he is pure and holy, with no by-ends nor hypocritical regards, but in truth and earnestness. A.—Because God is spirit men must worship him, and not any material representation of him; must worship him, and not any place where he is supposed to be. Not hands but hearts must worship God; not wood and stone but living souls must furnish his abode. . . . This Spirit, though infinite in his own nature, is not at an infinite remove from us in space nor in feeling; but is a loving Father, who thinks upon us, cares for us, and seeks us, desiring the communion of our spirits with himself. J. P. T.

As worship in spirit is opposed to that which is confined wholly, or chiefly, to isolated outward acts, so worship in the truth is opposed to that which adheres to sensuous types and images that only veil the truth. And this true spiritual worship can only flow from those who are in communion of life with God, as Father. Only in proportion as men partake of the divine life, by appropriating Christ’s revealed truth, can they succeed in worshipping God in spirit and in truth. Christ used the words, “the time cometh, and is now,” because the true, spiritual worship was realized, in its perfection, in himself; and because he had planted seeds in the hearts of his disciples, from which it was to develop itself in them, and through them in all mankind. N.—True religion is not external worship in any place or any form; it is the approach of the soul to God, spirit to spirit, in the way which God himself has revealed through Jesus Christ. Christ is the Way, the Truth, the Life; and through him the soul of any man, whenever, wherever he lives, may have the knowledge and fellowship of the Eternal Spirit. The true Holy Place is the soul itself. Here, as in all New Testament teachings, the essential thing is the one Person, the Messiah, the Saviour of the world. As he began with a reference to himself as one that would bestow living waters to every thirsty soul, so he ends by disclosing himself as the only true salvation, the restorer of the guilty soul to God. W. A.

25,26. The newness, the breadth, the sublimity, if not also the truth of his teaching, at once suggested to the mind of the listener the thought of that Messiah for whom Samaritan and Jew alike were looking. H.—Her honest wish to know the truth; her interest in the standing of her people to God and the law, and her anxious yearning for the coming of the Messiah, revealed a frame of mind fitted to receive further light. The first great revelation of the Saviour was to humble shepherds. The first direct disclosure of himself as the Messiah was to an humble Samaritan woman! G.—Her Scriptures—the five books of Moses—have told her of a prophet whom God would raise up, even the Messiah; and doubtingly, yet with wistful desire, she suggests that if she but knew that Jesus was indeed he, she would trust him. And, now that she is prepared for the explicit announcement of the Messiahship of Jesus, he makes it, drawing her full faith upon himself and sealing her as his disciple: I that speak unto thee am he! N. C. B.—At last the woman obtained an answer to one of her first questions, “Art thou greater than our father Jacob?” The answer converted her soul. J. C. R.—The Samaritan expectation of a Messiah, if in some respects weaker, was mingled with fewer disturbing elements; not to say that the acceptance of a Jewish Messiah upon their parts could arouse no worldly hopes or expectations in their hearts. To them, to this woman, and afterward to her fellow-countrymen, he could declare himself without fear of the consequences, and he did so. T.

JESUS knew and testified to his Messiahship from the beginning, from his first public appearance until his last declaration, made before the high-priests in the very face of death; although he did not always proclaim it with equal openness, especially when there was risk of popular commotions from false and temporal conceptions of the Messiah on the part of the people; but rather gradually led them, from the acknowledgment of his prophetic character (by which, indeed, they were bound to believe in his words), to recognize him as the Messiah, a prophet also, but in the highest sense. N.

Perhaps no Christian scholar ever attentively read the fourth chapter of John, without being struck with the numerous internal evidences of truth which crowd upon the mind in its perusal. Within so small a compass it is impossible to find, in other writings, so many sources of reflection, and of interest. A volume might be filled with the illustration it reflects upon the history of the Jews, and upon the geography of their country. All that can be gathered on these subjects from Josephus seems but as a comment to illustrate this chapter. The journey of our Lord from Judea into Galilee; the cause of it; his passage through the territory of Samaria; his approach to the metropolis of that country; its name; his arrival at the Amorite field which terminates the narrow valley of Sichem; the ancient custom of halting at a well; the female employment of drawing water; the disciples sent into the city for food, by which its situation out of the town is so obviously implied; the question of the woman referring to existing prejudices which separated the Jews from the Samaritans; the depth of the well; the Oriental allusion contained in the expression, “living water;” the history of the well, and the customs thereby illustrated; the worship upon Mount Gerizim: all these occur within the space of twenty verses. E. D. Clarke.

Section 23.—Visits the Samaritans.

Sychar, or Shechem.

27. And upon this came his disciples, and marvelled that he talked with the woman: 28 yet no man said, What seekest thou? or, Why talkest thou with her? The woman 29 then left her water-pot, and went her way into the city, and saith to the men, Come, 30 see a man which told me all things that ever I did: is not this the Christ? Then they went out of the city, and came unto him.31, 32 In the mean while his disciples prayed him, saying, Master, eat. But he said unto 33 them, I have meat to eat that ye know not of. Therefore said the disciples one to another, Hath any man brought him aught to eat?34 Jesus saith unto them, My meat is to do the will of him that sent me, and to finish 35 his work. Say not ye, There are yet four months, and then cometh harvest? Behold, I say unto you, Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields; for they are white already to 36 harvest. And he that reapeth receiveth wages, and gathereth fruit unto life eternal: 37 that both he that soweth, and he that reapeth, may rejoice together. And herein is 38 that saying true, One soweth, and another reapeth. I sent you to reap that whereon ye bestowed no labour: other men laboured, and ye are entered into their labours.39 And many of the Samaritans of that city believed on him for the saying of the 40 woman, which testified, He told me all that ever I did. So when the Samaritans were come unto him, they besought him that he would tarry with them: and he abode there 41, 42 two days. And many more believed, because of his own word; and said unto the woman, Now we believe, not because of thy saying: for we have heard him ourselves, and know that this is indeed the Christ, the Saviour of the world.

THE height from which Jesus stooped, the moral glory of his nature, the exquisite purity and serenity of that atmosphere in which he had been accustomed to breathe, render it all the more astonishing that he should submit to descend so low, and so long for our sakes to dwell in the foul region of this world’s ungodliness and evil. He came, love on his lips, and gifts of benignity in his hands. He went forth among men to heal and comfort and bless. Wherever he went, beneficence streamed out from him on every side. No toil, or hardship, or weariness, or want, could damp his ardor, or interrupt his ministry of love—the self-forgetting, self-devoted, universal benefactor. And for all this the only return he asked was—love. For food, healing, life—for pardon, purity, peace—for countless earthly blessings, and for a blessing transcending them far as heaven transcends earth—eternal mercy laid at every guilty, dying sinner’s feet—for all this, all he wanted, or asked, or cared for, was only that men would love him, open their hearts, yield up their affections to him, their divinest friend. C.

27. His disciples. Probably the two pairs of brothers whom he had called among the earliest, and with them the friends Philip and Bartholomew, had left him, to buy in the neighboring city what was necessary for their wants. F.—The woman. Rather, with a woman. They are surprised that he should break through the conventional restraints imposed by rabbinical authority, and be seen speaking to one of the other sex in public. L.—No man said, Why talkest thou? The expression shows the deep reverence and respect with which the disciples regarded our Lord and all his actions, even at this early period of his ministry. It also shows that they sometimes thought things about him to which they dared not give expression, and saw deeds of his which they could not understand, but at which they were content silently to wonder. There is a lesson for us in their conduct. J. C. R.

28. In the forgetfulness of a great joy, she left her water-pot, as apostles before had left their nets; so soon has she learned to prefer the water which Christ gives to the fountain which Jacob gave. T.—29. Is this the Christ? The number of questions in the New Testament is an instructive fact. Their value is well illustrated here. Had the woman said, “This is the Christ!” she might have excited prejudice and dislike. By asking, Is this he? she got the men to inquire and judge for themselves. J. C. R.—Out of the fulness of an overflowing heart she cries: “Come and see! See a man which told me all things that ever I did.” Thus we see, that of all the words which the Saviour spoke to her, his call to repentance had entered the deepest into her heart; in the one word that he had said respecting her sinful life she had heard everything. R. B.

32. I have meat that ye know not. And of what does he speak thus? Of the condescension, pity, patience, wisdom he had been laying out upon one soul—a very humble woman, and in some respects repulsive too! But he had gained her, and through her was going to gain more, and lay perhaps the foundations of a great work in the country of Samaria; and this filled his whole soul, and raised him above the sense of natural hunger. B.—As his thirst had been not so much after the water of Jacob’s well as after her conversion who had come to draw water thence, so now his hunger is not for the food which they have prepared, but for those whom he beholds already hastening from the neighboring city, that they may hear and receive his word. T.

34,35. They wondered that he did not touch the provisions they had brought. His corporeal wants are forgotten in the higher thoughts that occupy him; the work of his life is before him, the planting of the seeds of divine truth in a human soul, and through it in many others, even beyond the limits of the Jewish people. The Samaritan woman is an exponent of this new progress of the kingdom of God. Her countrymen are approaching; the seed is already germinating. He replies, therefore, to his disciples, “I have meat to eat which ye know not of. (The nourishment of the body is forgotten in that of the Spirit.) My meat is to do the will of him that sent me, and to finish his work (to sow the seed for the general diffusion of the kingdom of God among men).” He then illustrates the work of God, which he had just begun among the Samaritans, by a similitude from the face of nature before them. Glancing, on the one side, at the peasants scattered over the fertile valley, busily sowing their seed, and, on the other, at the Samaritans, thronging from the town in answer to the woman’s call, he says to the disciples, “Are ye not wont to say, at this season of the year, ‘There are yet four months, and then cometh harvest?’ So it is, indeed, in the natural, but not in the spiritual world. The seed is just sown, and already the harvest appears. ‘Lift up your eyes’ (pointing to the approaching Samaritans), ‘and see how the fields are already whitening to the harvest.’” N.—But Samaria did certainly not bound nor fill up the longing gaze of the heavenly Sower; the field upon which he called his disciples to look with eyes of joy, stretches itself far away even to the end of the earth. R. B.

36. “How rich the reward for you, my disciples, who will be the reapers! You will gather fruit, not like the harvest of earth, but fruit unto life eternal. You and I, the Sower and the reapers, may well rejoice together in the parts assigned us by God. Think of the final harvest home, when Heaven, the great garner, shall have the last sheaf carried thither!” G.—Receiveth wages and gathereth fruit. Here is a twofold magnifying of the spiritual reaper’s office; he has his own reward, in part upon earth, and in full fruition in heaven; and, in addition to this, he ministers salvation to others. T.

37. Other men laboured. The prophets of the Old Testament and John the Baptist had sown the seed. The minds of men were prepared to expect the Messiah, and the apostles had only to go forth and proclaim that Messiah was come. J. C. R.—In the divine economy there is a wise arrangement of succession; everything earlier is the sowing out of a harvest to follow. Every man is a sower with reference to his successor, and a reaper with reference to his predecessors. Beng.—The servants of Jesus Christ in a body reap and gather into life eternal only that which has been sown by him. Yet among themselves, the laborers in the Lord’s harvest are joined together into one chain, in which the last link feels the sustaining power of all the preceding ones. R. B.—It seems to be God’s law never to suffer any man to do all a work. One soweth, and another reapeth. This man finishes what that man began. A. W. T.—The joy, therefore, of the great harvest festivity will be the common joy of all who have taken any part in the work from the first operation to the last. B.

40. While orthodox Jews besought him that he would depart from among them, poor heretical Samaritans make it their petition that he would tarry with them; so have the first become last, and the last first. Nor did they make this petition in vain. . . . This, as he has intimated already, was a sowing time and a reaping time all in one—the two drawn into marvellous nearness with one another. T.

Abode two days. Two precious days, surely, to the Redeemer himself! Unsought, he had come to his own, yet his own received him not; now those who were not his own had come to him, been won by him, and invited him to their town that others might share with them in the benefit of his wonderful ministry. Here, then, would he solace his already wounded spirit, and have in this outfield village triumph of his grace a sublime foretaste of the inbringing of the whole Gentile world into the Church. B.—It is peculiarly instructive that the first extensive success of the gospel message was manifested among those who witnessed no miracle. The message itself seems to have been to this people an evidence of its truth. They heard the words of our Lord, and in simple faith they believed. J. A.

42. This is the only occasion on which the phrase, “Saviour of the world,” appears in the gospels, as only once elsewhere in the New Testament. It occurs first on the lips of these Samaritan converts. Such language, with the mighty truth which was bound up with it, was still a long way off from Jewish thought, had not as yet risen above the horizon in the minds of apostles themselves; for these, even after the resurrection itself, demanded, “Wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel?” And the first half of the book of Acts gives evidence how slowly it broke upon their minds that theirs was a commission as wide as the world, that their risen Lord was not King of Israel only, but “Saviour of the world” as well. T.

THEY derived their name from the region of which Samaria had been the metropolis. Originally they were foreigners from beyond the Euphrates, settled here by the King of Assyria, after he had sent the ten tribes into captivity, in order to keep the country from utter desolation. They were of course idolaters; but finding that the beasts of prey increased rapidly in a country now so depopulated, they ascribed this to the wrath of the gods of the country for neglected rites; and they petitioned the imperial court to send them an Israelitish priest, who might teach them how to worship these gods, so as to avert their anger. Having obtained what they sought, they combined the worship of their native idols with the worship of Jehovah. The idolatrous taint eventually disappeared; and the Samaritans became good Jews, professing, in those latter times in which our Lord appeared, a more primitive and better form of Judaism than generally prevailed among the Jews themselves. For they retained the Judaism which they had been taught in a comparatively early age, and adhered with scrupulous exactness to the simple sense of the law of Moses; and the dislike and contempt of the Jews toward them was enhanced by their disregard for the learned rubbish which in the Jewish view constituted the perfection of the law. They had largely intermarried with the Jews. At first with scattered remnants of the ten tribes that remained in the land of Israel; then with the like remnant of the kingdom of Judah; and later with the captives who returned from Babylon. This, in process of time, threw a strong infusion of Jewish blood into the Samaritan body; and in the admixture, there is reason to suppose that the Jewish predominated over the foreign element. Such intermarriages had, however, long since ceased, and nothing could be more abhorrent either to Jew or Samaritan, for the latter, repelled at every point by the Jews, learned to repay their dislike in full measure. K.

Such were the Samaritans of our Lord’s day: a people distinct from the Jews, though lying in the very midst of the Jews; a people preserving their identity, though seven centuries had rolled away since they had been brought from Assyria by Esarhaddon, and though they had abandoned their polytheism for a sort of ultra Mosaicism; a people who—though their limits had been gradually contracted, and the rallying place of their religion on Mount Gerizim had been destroyed 140 years before by John Hyrcanus, and though Samaria (the city) had been again and again destroyed, and though their territory had been the battle-field of Syria and Egypt—still preserved nationality, still worshipped from Shechem and their other impoverished settlements toward their sacred hill; still retained their separation, and could not coalesce with the Jews. Not indeed that we must suppose that the whole of the country called in our Lord’s time Samaria was in the possession of the Cuthean Samaritans, or that it had ever been so. They possessed only a few towns and villages of this large area, and these lay almost together in the centre of the district. Shechem, or Sychar (as it was contemptuously designated), was their chief settlement, even before Alexander the Great destroyed Samaria, probably because it lay almost close to Mount Gerizim. S.

After the lapse of 2,500 years from their origin, the Samaritans, who have been scattered over the civilized world through a great part of their history, now exist nowhere on earth, except at the seat of their ancient worship. Turning to Mount Gerizim “as the only sacred spot in the universe, theirs is the strongest example of local worship now existing in the world, in the very face of the declaration there uttered, that all local worship should cease.” Although now reduced to a pitiful remnant, numbering only 135 persons, the community is as sternly uncompromising as ever in its Samaritan prejudices and practices. The last fragment is as hard as the original rock. N. C. B.—Though the daily sacrifice and the paschal lamb have ceased to be offered by the Jews since the fall of Jerusalem, the Samaritans, or Cuthites, as the Jews call them, have maintained to the present day their annual Passover and its sacrifice. Every year the little community gathers on Mount Gerizim, and with imperfect and mutilated rites, three or four lambs are slain and eaten: the last remaining vestige of Mosaic sacrifice. H. B. T.

In the afternoon we climbed to the top of Gerizim, eager to look on the site of the old Samaritan temple. We wound our way up a rich valley, gorgeous with a splendidly varied foliage, and musical with the voice of bright streams and with the songs of innumerable birds. Patches of corn-fields succeeded as the road grew steeper; and in less than an hour we were on the broad plateau on the summit. The foundations of the old schismatic structure can still be so distinctly traced as to give us the ground-plan of the whole building. Parts of the walls are a good many feet above the surface. We were shown the place where the lambs are slain on the great day of the Passover, and the oven of stone in which their carcasses are roasted whole: the calcined bones and ashes of last year’s sacrifice lay in a little heap before us. A conspicuous object the Samaritan temple must have been when it shone from the lofty summit of this mountain. The view from this summit was glorious. We could see across the Jordan to the mountain-walls of Gilead in the far east; we could look down into many a valley, and upon many a village embosomed in its gardens of olive; we could see shepherds tending their flocks as they may have done in Jacob’s days; and now and then far-off Hermon would look through his veil of clouds and show us his sparkling diadem of snow. How soon will this Samaritan church, on whose fading glories we were now treading, be a mere thing of history? A. Thomson.

Section 24.—Heals a Jewish Nobleman’s Son.

Cana.