What is the object of such a church as this?  Why, buried among your buildings, in the midst of this great, powerful, sinful city,—­why has it a mission for eternity?  Why is it good that you should do your best?  Why is it praiseworthy and beautiful that your rector and churchwardens should have exerted themselves to the utmost to make this church what it ought to be?  Why?  Because there is not a man or woman in London, not one in this bustling crowd, not one in this confusion of commerce, not one in this sink of sin, but might say “Yes”—­ought to say, and must ultimately feel, and should now be taught to realize that the soul has one satisfaction, one only—­“My soul is athirst for God, for the living God.”  Well, if that be so, can we be wrong, dear friends, can we waste our time, if we ask ourselves this morning something quite practical about this thirst of the soul?

And, first of all, I submit that in such a verse as this, and in such a work as this, we are face to face with one of those great governed contrasts that are found throughout Scripture and throughout human life.  I may say, par parenthese, that that is one of the great proofs of sacred Scripture.  When your shallow thinker, when your wild and profound philosopher, kicks the sacred Book with the toe of his boot, and denounces it because he does not like the measure of Noah’s Ark or the exact activity of Jonah’s whale, the moment you begin to think beneath those mere sharpnesses of speech and those mere quicknesses of the thought, you say this:  “There may be this or that about the surface of Scripture which I do not and cannot explain, and cannot entirely understand; but at least there is no book—­no, not excepting Milton; no, not even excepting Dante; no, for us English people, making no reserve for Shakespeare—­there is no book that, after all, expresses that deep, inner, serious fact of my being, of my soul, of myself; the fact that lives when our facts are dying; the fact that persists in asserting itself when the noise of the world is still; the fact that does not care about daylight only, but comes up in the dark; the fact that whispers low when I am in the crowd, but speaks loud in the darkest night, when the clock is ticking on the stairs, and conscience has stalked out and stood before me, asserting facts that I cannot contradict—­there is no look that can speak that fact of facts, that thirst, that longing, that desolation, that desire, that hope, that activity, that possibility of supreme contention and final victory, there is nothing like the Bible that does that.”  And so wise men, while they admit difficulties, thoughtful men, while they do not controvert the fact that that which is divine needs larger explanation, fall back upon such great governed truths as that text to support the Bible.  The Bible says, asserts, determines, and insists upon the truth which the Church is insisting upon, which you and I, in our better moments, emphasize and say “Amen” to—­the soul is athirst for God.  The Bible brings home the great contrast that is present to us all.