pleasant to the self-conscious soul. When we can feel that we abide in Jesus, we shall not feel so much that we are passing away, as that the material world is passing away from around us, and leaving our souls upon the rock of ages to realize the saying that "he who doeth the will of God shall abide forever." No great way has that soul to go which has felt and found Jesus to be the way, for being in him, it is in the bosom of the Father, the infinite and omnipresent, even before yet the fetters of the flesh have fallen at the touch of death from their glorious prisoner.

We have thus seen something of what is meant - and yet after all how little!—when Christ declares himself the way. But before leaving this branch of the subject, there is one application of this announcement which ought to be made, and which will serve to make a natural transition and connexion between this and the second of the three topics which Jesus opens to us in the text. Let us then, for a moment, dwell upon the first words of the text in their reference not to another world merely, but to this. Jesus is the way not only out of this world, but through it. Amidst the multitude and variety of ways in which men walk as regards their form of faith and worship, how many a skeptical, and how many a despairing inquirer stands halting and asks for the way. When you can agree among yourselves, says the worldly caviller, (ready enough to seize an occasion of giving respectability to his indifference,) when you can agree what is the way, we will begin to consider the duty of adopting it. While the sincere, yet too sensitive mind, perplexed by so many conflicting cries of "lo, here! and lo, there!" sighs to itself; would there were but one way which be

lievers could take. Now, amidst all these cavillings of skeptics, and conflicts of sectarians, at every point where these divine paths cross each other, and above all, and in sight of all, rises the form of Jesus, saying to this man for admonition, and to that man for encouragement, "Know ye that there is but one way, I am the way, and the truth. All who are found in me are in the way, and none, by whatever earthly name known, who obey my precepts and study my example, and bring all doctrines to the test of my entire revelation, can fail of the essential truth. He that doeth the will, the manifest will of God, shall know of the doctrine. There is but one way, Oh, doubting! Oh, despairing soul! Thine is the opportunity, thine is the obligation of following that way, which is as plain as the character and career of the Son of God. Whatever else men may differ about, surely there can be no dispute as to the relation in which we stand to that holy messenger and mediator between God and man. There can be no dispute that our first and great business is to learn these great practical lessons in the school of him who was meek and lowly, without which all doctrinal disputation is but as sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal, and with which all our further inquiries into speculative truth become safe and sure and profitable.

Jesus, then, is the way he is the way to the truth, he is the truth itself. He says, "I am the truth." We pass on to this second division of our theme. Here is indicated that second great want, or form of the great want of man, of which we spoke. Man wants to know the truth. His soul craves the truth as the bread of life; nor can all the resistance of his lower nature against the spirit of truth, all its strugglings to evade the truth,

amount to any thing more than a testimony to the power of truth, and of that sense of its necessity, which is so near and so strong that it requires a constant, a restless, a sort of desperate vigilance to elude it, when once the mind has caught a glimpse of the fact, that the means of knowing the truth are at hand.

Men may be tempted, and successfully tempted, by a weak worldliness, to ask, like Pilate, when the claims of truth are urged upon them, "What is truth?" as if it were, forsooth, a vain thing for a man, and not his life; but no enviable state of mind does he bear about with him, a miserable victory has he achieved, and he knows it and feels it, however he may try to hide it by forced gaiety or gravity, who has so far succeeded in triumphing over "the struggling pangs of conscious truth" within him, as to have become the slave of those passions which he had flattered himself he was only using as the instruments of his own short-sighted purposes. Man is born with a yearning to know the truth, and although too soon and too often the love of the world and the fear of the world, the love of its gold or its golden opinions, the fear of its cold reproach or its colder neglect, quench the spirit of truth, and leave man with no nobler principle of action than a cunning carnal policy, or with no principle but only a chameleon-like susceptibility to the hue of any popular sentiment; yet whoso will look, with the searching eye of a spiritual sympathy into such cases of degeneracy, will see in the real uneasiness, the dreary sense of emptiness which it has brought with it into the heart, proof enough that man was made for nobler things, and that he himself feels he is not fulfilling his destiny.

Jesus, Christ, then, speaks to a want of man when he NO. 205.

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says, "I am the truth." And how gloriously does he meet that want! Not only does he by word and miracle prove the truth, which of all we needed to know, and show that it exists, but his life, his character, his whole being shows it existing. The truth lives in his life, breathes on his lips, beams from his countenance, and invests him as an atmosphere. Was there ever a being before, partaking of human nature, has there ever been since, who could say of himself" I am the truth?" Was there ever one other, who, while he could say with perfect truth, "I am meek and lowly," was yet so completely imbued and identified with the spirit of truth as to be able to say, with perfect humility, and without exciting in us the slightest repulsion of feeling, "I am the truth?" Was there ever another so entirely self-conscious and yet so transparently pure and simple? He lived not for himself, he lived only for his Father's glory. He rejoiced to be as the light of the Father's countenance, like the natural light, revealing every thing, itself not revealed, but only a medium of glorifying God among men. So he said, "I am

the truth."

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And he was the truth. And as such he was, in an eminent degree, "the desire of the nations." The truth which the heart craved, as a rock to rest upon,—in the shadow of which to seek refuge, the truth which it needed as a sufficient support of faith, and impulse to action, needed to be something more than that truth which reason attains as the last result of a chain of abstract demonstration. It must needs be a revelation. It must be in the world of thought what the discovery of a continent is in the natural world. The learned men of Europe might have proved, in one sense of the word, ever so

surance

clearly and conclusively to their own minds, that there must exist a great continent in the far western sea; but when Columbus came back, bringing word of the fact, with the very glory and glitter, as it were, of the newly discovered wealth in his eyes and countenance, Europe had evidence of an entirely different kind, to the long mooted point. And even so, Cicero, and Seneca, and all the sages and saints of all times, might have speculated ever so finely about the future state of man, and brought it ever so near to a demonstration, that man must live again, but that one single step wanting toward entire aswhat a vast step it was! That step he alone has taken who comes from the Father · comes from an actual intuition of spiritual realities, and with the light of heaven reflected from his countenance, and breathing the very atmosphere of heaven, and speaking the very vernacular tongue of conscience, oracularly (and yet so simply, calmly, humbly) assures us of the truth respecting God, and heaven, and hell, so confidently that he can say, "I am the truth." This phenomenon presents argument to the whole nature of man, argument which needs not to be drawn out by any logical process, gument upon which the soul can rest in faith, and from which it can start forward in progress. Here is truth, not such that when we have attained it, the mind is so exhausted as to have no energy left for acting upon it, as would seem to be often the case with mere human theories, — but truth upon which we can begin freshly to build as upon a settled foundation.

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I had almost asked Is there another such saying on record as this-"I am the truth"? How full of composing, of elevating, inspiring influence are these words!