when you get there. It is not to dodge away

up the hillside; it is not even to get through as best you can; it is to discover the interior secret and gift of the experience, as one who digs into its soil. There is not a single experience which you are called to meet that has not within itself some fertilizing power; and there is not a greater joy than to discover the signs of water in the heart of what seems a desolate and thirsty land. For the well, once dug, is not for yourself alone; the experience once interpreted helps the next traveller that comes that way. It becomes a green and restful spot in many a weary journey.

Nor is this all. The heavens above conspire with the effort of your will. "The rain," the psalm goes on to sing, "filleth the pools." The Rain-Sender comes to reinforce the well-digger. God works with man when man is a laborer together with God; and the man in the valley sings, as he digs his well:

"It is better to sit at the fountain's birth
Than a sea of waves to win,

To live in the love that floweth forth,
Than the love that cometh in."

The promise of Jesus is fulfilled in such a life: "The water that I shall give him shall be in him, a well of water springing up into everlasting life;" and many a tired traveller, all unknown to the well-digger, pauses at that spot and drinks, and goes away with this psalm in his heart: "Blessed is the man who, passing through this valley of trouble, made it a well; the rain also filleth the pools."

25

IV

THE END AND THE WAY

Lord, we know not whither thou goest; and how can we know the way?— John xiv. 5.

ERTAINLY that seems a reasonable difficulty. Jesus is about to die, and is bidding farewell to his friends and charging them to follow him into his Father's presence, and they say to him: "We do not know whither you are going, and how then can we know the way?" Surely, that seems reasonable. What is a way unless it leads to some end? How can you have a road until you have somewhere for the road to go? And how can you enter on a way of life until the end of life has become clear? This seems the very beginning of human wisdom. You meet a youth who is looking forward into life and say to him: "Direct your studies and interests, my young friend, along the line of the calling which you are soon to enter. When you have determined the end you want to reach, the way will determine itself." Here is the burden of the preacher: "Determine,

O man, first of all, the end of life. Fix the port which shall justify your voyage. Consider the incidents of life in the light of the end of life." This was the sermon that the disciples expected from Jesus on that last night of their Master's life. Jesus, they thought, before he goes away, must tell us whither he is going and illuminate by that knowledge our way, which, without him, is to be so dark. "Lord, we know not whither thou goest, and how can we know the way?"

Yet Jesus knows that this apparently reasonable demand for assurance of the end of life lies on the surface of a much profounder truth. It is, indeed, quite true that when the end is made clear it gives direction to the way. It is true that one secret of an effective life is to gather up all its incidents into the service of one compelling end. Ah, but how many incidents there are in life where the end is necessarily undisclosed! Before a very large part of each man's future there hangs a veil of mist into which he has to feel his way; and even if he cannot sing with Newman the psalm of willing resignation: "I do not ask to see the distant scene," still, whatever he may desire, he has to say: "One step enough

for me." This is the most solemn region of experience, the world where round all that is known stretches an inexorable mystery,

a horizon line which moves only as we ad

vance.

And here enters the teaching of Jesus. He is thinking of experiences where the way is given but the end is hid. He does not answer his disciples by telling them even in that supreme moment whither he is going. He answers, as he so often does, the principle behind their question. It is possible, he says, without knowing whither you are going, still to know the way. There is a way which opens, as you follow it, toward its own end. Indeed, as you follow the way you may come to a better end than that which you had set out to reach. The way, as it were, creates its own end. It is quite true that the perception of the end often determines the way, but it is also true, and in an infinitely larger number of cases it is true, that the wise determination of the way guides one to an unanticipated and satisfying end. Answering, then, their desire for certainty about the future, Jesus tells his friends that he is not first of all an interpreter of these mysteries,