But now—­What are these strange words which St. Paul uses?  These old Jews drank of the spiritual Rock which followed them, and that Rock was Christ?  Where in the Old Testament do we read of the Rock following them?  We read of Moses striking the rock in Horeb, at the beginning of their wanderings in the wilderness; but not of its following them afterwards.

St. Paul is here using a beautiful old tradition of the Rabbis, that the rock which Moses struck in Horeb followed the Jews through all their forty years’ wanderings, and that on every Sabbath day when they stopped, it stopped also, and the elders called to it, ’Flow out, O fountain,’ and the water flowed.  A beautiful old story, which St. Paul turns into an allegory, to teach, as by a picture, the deepest and the highest truth.  Whether that rock followed them or not, he says, there was One who did follow them, from whom flowed living water; and that Rock is Christ.  Christ followed them.  Christ the creator, the preserver, the inspirer, the light, the life, the guide of men, and of all the universe.  It was to Christ they owed their deliverance from Egypt; to Christ they owed their knowledge of God, and of the law of God, to Christ they owed whatever reason, justice, righteousness, good government, there was among them.  And to Christ we owe the same.

The rock was a type of him from whom flows living water.  As he himself said on earth, ’Whosoever drinketh of the water which I shall give him, shall never thirst; but the water which I shall give him shall be in him a well of water, springing up to everlasting life.’  Just as the manna also was a type of him, as he himself declared, when the Jews talked to him of the manna; ’Our fathers did eat manna in the desert, as it is written, He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’  Then Jesus said to them, ’Verily, verily, I say unto you, Moses gave you not that bread from heaven.’  No:  but only a type and picture of it.  ’My Father giveth you the true bread from heaven.  For the bread of God is he which cometh down from heaven, and giveth life unto the world. . . .  I am that bread of life.’

My friends, herein is a great mystery.  Something of what it means, however, we may learn from that wise and good Jew, Philo, who was St. Paul’s teacher according to the flesh, before he became a Christian; and who himself was so near to the kingdom of God, that St. Paul often in his epistles uses Philo’s very words, putting into them a Christian meaning.  And what says he concerning the Rock of living waters?

The soul, he says, falls in with a scorpion in the wilderness; and then thirst, which is the thirst of the passions—­of the lusts which war in our members—­seizes on it; till God sends forth on it the stream of his own perfect wisdom, and causes the changed soul to drink of unchangeable health.  For the steep rock is the wisdom of God (by whom he means the Word of God, whom Philo knew not in the flesh, but whom we know, as the Lord Jesus Christ), which, being both sublime and the first of all things; he quarried out of his own powers; and of it he gives drink to the souls which love God; and they, when they have drunk, are filled with the most universal manna.