You have surely seen such persons—­if you have not, I have, thank God, full many a time;—­but if you have seen them, did you not see this?—­That it was not riches which gave them this Life, if they were rich; or intellect, if they were clever; or science, if they were learned; or rank, if they were cultivated; or bodily organization, if they were beautiful and strong:  that this noble and gentle life of theirs was independent of their body, of their mind, of their circumstances?  Nay, have you not seen this,—­I have, thank God, full many a time,—­That not many rich, not many mighty, not many noble are called:  but that God’s strength is rather made perfect in man’s weakness,—­that in foul garrets, in lonely sick-beds, in dark places of the earth, you find ignorant people, sickly people, ugly people, stupid people, in spite of, in defiance of, every opposing circumstance, leading heroic lives,—­a blessing, a comfort, an example, a very Fount of Life to all around them; and dying heroic deaths, because they know they have Eternal Life?

And what was that which had made them different from the mean, the savage, the drunken, the profligate beings around them?  This at least.  That they were of those of whom it is written, ’Let him that is athirst come.’  They had been athirst for Life.  They had had instincts and longings; very simple and humble, but very pure and noble.  At times, it may be, they had been unfaithful to those instincts.  At times, it may be, they had fallen.  They had said ’Why should I not do like the rest, and be a savage?  Let me eat and drink, for to-morrow I die;’ and they had cast themselves down into sin, for very weariness and heaviness, and were for a while as the beasts which have no law.

But the thirst after The noble Life was too deep to be quenched in that foul puddle.  It endured, and it conquered; and they became more and more true to it, till it was satisfied at last, though never quenched, that thirst of theirs, in Him who alone can satisfy it—­the God who gave it; for in them were fulfilled the Lord’s own words:  ’Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled.’

There are those, I fear, in this church—­there are too many in all churches—­who have not felt, as yet, this divine thirst after a higher Life; who wish not for an Eternal, but for a merely endless life, and who would not care greatly what sort of life that endless life might be, if only it was not too unlike the life which they live now; who would be glad enough to continue as they are, in their selfish pleasure, selfish gain, selfish content, for ever; who look on death as an unpleasant necessity, the end of all which they really prize; and who have taken up religion chiefly as a means for escaping still more unpleasant necessities after death.  To them, as to all, it is said, ‘Come, and drink of the water of life freely.’  But The Life of goodness which Christ offers, is not the life they