GIFT or 
 
 25^ 
 
 ^^ 
 
i^O' 
 
THE SHORT COURSE SERIES 
 
 THE SEVENFOLD / AM 
 
GENERAL PREFACE 
 
 The title of the present series is a sufficient 
 indication of its purpose. Few preachers, 
 or congregations, will face the long courses 
 of expository lectures which characterised 
 the preaching of the past, but there is a 
 growing conviction on the part of some 
 that an occasional short course, of six or 
 eight connected studies on one definite 
 theme, is a necessity of their mental and 
 ministerial life. It is at this point the pro- 
 jected series would strike in. It would 
 suggest to those who are mapping out a 
 scheme of work for the future a variety of 
 subjects which might possibly be utilised in 
 this way. 
 
 The appeal, however, will not be restricted 
 to ministers or preachers. The various 
 volumes will meet the needs of laymen and 
 ii 
 
General Preface 
 
 Sabbath-school teachers who are interested 
 in a scholarly but also practical exposition 
 of Bible history and doctrine. In the hands 
 of office-bearers and mission-workers the 
 " Short Course Series " may easily become 
 one of the most convenient and valuable 
 of Bible helps. 
 
 It need scarcely be added that while an 
 effort has been made to secure, as far as 
 possible, a general uniformity in the scope 
 and character of the series, the final re- 
 sponsibility for the special interpretations 
 and opinions introduced into the separate 
 volumes, rests entirely with the individual 
 contributors. 
 
 A detailed list of the authors and their 
 subjects will be found at the close of each 
 volume. 
 
Volumes Already Published 
 
 A Cry for Justice: A Study in Amos. 
 
 By Prof. John E. McFadyen, D.D. 
 
 The Beatitudes. 
 
 Rev. Robert H. Fisher, D.D. 
 
 The Lenten Psahns. 
 By the Editor. 
 
 The Psakn of Psalms. 
 
 By Prof. James Stalker, D.D. 
 
 The Song and the Soil. 
 
 By Prof. W. G. Jordan, D.D. 
 
 The Higher Powers of the Soul. 
 
 By Rev. George M'Hardy, D.D. 
 
 Jehovah-Jesus. 
 
 By Rev. Thomas Whitelaw, D.D. 
 
 The Sevenfold I Am. 
 
 By Rev. Thomas Marjoribanks, B.D. 
 
 The Man Among the Myrtles. 
 By the Editor. 
 
 Price 6o cents net per Volume 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
TLbc Sbort Courge Series 
 
 EDITED BY 
 
 Rev. JOHN ADAMS, B.D. 
 
 THE SEVENFOLD 
 I AM 
 
 BY THB 
 
 Rev. THOMAS MARJORIBANKS, B.D. 
 
 COLINTON 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 1913 
 
BT 30 (, 
 
 TO 
 
 MY PARISHIONERS 
 PAST AND PRESENT 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 VAOK 
 
 I. Christ and our Darkness • . i 
 
 «*/ am the Light of the World:* 
 
 II. Christ and our Homelessness . • 21 
 
 ** I am the Door" 
 
 III. Christ and our Waywardness . . 41 
 
 *'I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life:' 
 
 IV. Christ and our Helplessness . . 63 
 
 "/ am the Good Shepherd:' 
 
 V. Christ and our Faintness . . 83 
 
 ••/ am the Bread of Life:* 
 
 VI. Christ and our Barrenness . . loi 
 
 *'/ am the Vine, ye are the Branches,** 
 
 VII. Christ and our Deadness . . 121 
 
 " / am the Resurrection and the Life:* 
 
 Appendix . . • . .141 
 
 Index . • • • • • i45 
 
 vii 
 
"Not as one blind and deaf to our beseeching, 
 Neither forgetful that we are but dust, 
 
 Not as from heavens too high for our up-reaching, 
 Coldly sublime, intolerably just : 
 
 "Nay, but Thou knewest us, Lord Christ, Thou 
 knowest, 
 
 Well Thou rememberest our feeble frame; 
 Thou canst conceive our highest and our lowest, 
 
 Pulses of nobleness and aches of shame . . . 
 
 " Yea, thro' life, death, thro' sorrow and thro' sinning, 
 He shall suffice me, for He hath sufficed : 
 
 Christ is the end, for Christ was the beginning, 
 Christ the beginning, for the end is Christ." 
 
 F. W. H. Myers, Saint Paul 
 
I 
 
 CHRIST AND OUR DARKNESS 
 
CHRIST AND OUR DARKNESS 
 
 « I AM the Light of the world : he that followeth Me 
 shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the Light of life." 
 — St. John viii. 12. 
 
 Probably nothing in all nature has been 
 more constantly used to express spiritual 
 ideas than light. This is perhaps owing to 
 the fact that light, besides being a great 
 blessing in itself, is the indispensable pre- 
 liminary to a great many others. " Let there 
 /] be light " is the first word spoken on the day 
 of Creation ; not till that has been achieved 
 can anything else take shape or form. Light 
 is so indispensable to our work, so closely 
 associated with our knowledge, so necessary 
 to our happiness, that even when we use the 
 word figuratively we forget that it is a figure. 
 Darkness becomes inevitably associated with 
 
 3 
 
The Sevenfold I AM 
 
 ignorance, sorrow, sin ; light with know- 
 ledge, truth, happiness. All great religions, 
 notably that of ancient Persia, have symbol- 
 ised the conflict of good and evil as a strife 
 between the powers of light and those of 
 darkness. In the Bible, from Genesis to 
 Revelation, we find light employed to signify 
 the highest of blessings not only in the 
 natural but in the spiritual world. On its 
 very last page is the promise " There shall be 
 no night there." 
 
 It is interesting to trace what Scripture 
 says of light in relation to God Himself. 
 At first it might seem that there is little light 
 about Him ; He dwells in the thick darkness 
 and makes the clouds His chariot. Gradu- 
 ally, however, we are made to see that the 
 darkness is not in Himself, but in men's 
 conceptions of Him. More and more of His 
 nature is unfolded, more and more of His 
 light revealed. Till at last we reach the 
 emphatic testimony of St. John — "God is 
 light, and in Him is no darkness at all." 
 
 The coming of the Messiah was more than 
 once referred to as a light to illumine the 
 4 
 
Christ and Our Darkness 
 
 world's darkness. Isaiah had said, "The 
 people that walked In darkness have seen a 
 great light ; they that dwell in the land of 
 the shadow of death, upon them hath the 
 light shined." Zacharias, in the "BenedictuSy 
 speaks of Him as " the Dayspring from on 
 high," sent " to give light to them that sit 
 in darkness and in the shadow of death, to 
 guide our feet into the way of peace." St. 
 John says, " In Him was life ; and the life 
 was the light of men. And the light shineth 
 in darkness, and the darkness comprehended 
 it not. . . . That was the true Light, which 
 lighteth every man that cometh into the 
 world." These and other sayings prepare us 
 for the gracious yet lofty claim which our 
 Lord Himself makes here — " I am the Light 
 of the world : he that followeth Me shall not 
 walk in darkness, but shall have the Light of 
 life." 
 
 The Occasion. 
 
 The circumstances under which the words 
 were spoken are worthy of special notice. 
 Scholars are fairly well agreed that the pas- 
 
 5 
 
The Sevenfold I AM 
 
 sage, St. John vii. 53-viii. 11, immediately 
 preceding this verse, and containing the 
 account of the woman taken in adultery, is 
 an interpolation, and ought not to stand where 
 it does. This makes our text immediately 
 follow what is said in the previous chapter as 
 to the events which happened at the Feast of 
 Tabernacles. This feast was a sort of national 
 harvest-home, in which the people dwelt in 
 booths to remind them of those their fathers 
 had dwelt in when they first came out of 
 Egypt. Two customs, observed at this 
 festival, merit our attention in view of our 
 Lord's words. In one of them the element 
 used was water. The people went each 
 morning, after sacrifice, to the fountain of 
 Siloam. The priest filled a golden pitcher 
 from the fountain, and brought it back amid 
 general manifestations of rejoicing, after 
 which it was poured out beside the altar of 
 burnt offering. In the other ceremony the 
 symbol was fire, or light. On the evenings 
 of the festival the temple-courts were illu- 
 minated by four great candelabra erected in 
 the court of the women. There a sort of 
 6 
 
Christ and Our Darkness 
 
 sacred dance was held, to the accompaniment 
 of singing and playing on instruments. Both 
 of these strange ceremonies were full of sig- 
 nificance, as reminding the people of events 
 which had occurred in the wilderness. The 
 two chief terrors of the desert are its water- 
 lessness and its pathlessness. God had 
 supplied both of these wants. He had 
 given His people water from the smitten 
 rock, and He had given them a pillar of fire 
 to guide them on their way. The water 
 from the rock, then, was commemorated at 
 the Feast of Tabernacles by the pouring out 
 of water from the golden pitcher, while the 
 pillar of fire was recalled by the lighting of 
 the great lamps. In speaking of Himself 
 and His influence, our Lord makes use of 
 both symbols. Referring to the water. He 
 says, " If any man thirst, let him come unto 
 Me and drink," and adds, " He that believeth 
 on Me, as the Scripture hath said, out of his 
 bosom shall flow rivers of living water." 
 That is, If you come to Me, not only will 
 your own spiritual thirst be quenched, but 
 you will be the means, through Me, of satis- 
 7 
 
The Sevenfold I AM 
 
 fying the spiritual thirst of other men. 
 Then, referring to the light, He says, " I am 
 the Light of the world," and adds, " He that 
 foUoweth Me shall not walk in darkness, but 
 shall have the Light of life." That is. If you 
 come to Me, not only will your own spiritual 
 darkness be enlightened, but you will have 
 within yourself, through Me, that which 
 will make you in turn a light to yourself and 
 others. From the simple elements of water 
 and light, and from the associations which 
 these called up in the hearts of the people, 
 our Lord thus draws two lessons about His 
 own work for and through men. He 
 gives life to the thirsty and light to the 
 darkened. 
 
 The figures are both suggestive, and the 
 difference between them is no less striking 
 than their resemblance. Water and light 
 satisfy two great human needs, but they 
 satisfy them in different ways. Water can- 
 not affect a man's thirst till he comes and 
 drinks it Light, on the contrary, may flash 
 on a multitude all at once, and with no con- 
 scious effort on their part. The figure of 
 8 
 
Christ and Our Darkness 
 
 drinking the living water, then, is expressive 
 of a man's relation to Christ at a more 
 advanced stage. But the shining of the 
 light is better adapted to illustrate the first 
 contact of Christ with men — a contact uni- 
 versal and involuntary on their part. No 
 doubt the second part of the sentence is in 
 the singular — " he that foUoweth Me." But 
 the first part is of universal application. It 
 is not, I am the Light of this man, or 
 of that man, but "I am the Light of the 
 world." 
 
 Christ the Light. 
 
 In this saying our Lord makes two separ- 
 ate statements. He is at once the Light of 
 the world and the Light of life. First, He is 
 the Light for all — good and bad, friends 
 and enemies, followers and non-followers. 
 Secondly, and in a fuller though narrower 
 sense. He is the Light for a certain number 
 — those who follow Him, believe in Him, 
 possess Him. To these He is the Light of 
 life — a light shining within them as a source 
 of vitality and spiritual influence. 
 9 
 
The Sevenfold I AM 
 
 I. The Light of the World. 
 
 The character of Christ's influence — light. — 
 Just because Jesus Is to become so much more 
 to men than this, He must begin by being this 
 and no more. Light, as we saw at the out- 
 set, is the indispensable preliminary to every- 
 thing else. Its function is not so much to 
 make things diiFerent, as to show them in a 
 new and true aspect. We must beware of 
 unduly elaborating the metaphor of light, or 
 of reading into it meanings other than our 
 Lord intended. There was no thought in 
 His mind, for example, of the healing and 
 cleansing properties which light is now known 
 to possess. He used the word in the simple 
 sense of revelation and illumination. " What- 
 soever doth make manifest," says St. Paul, " is 
 light." It is in this sense that we apply the 
 word to Christ. Compare the Old Testa- 
 ment with the New, and you find the Old 
 like a dark room irradiated from time to time 
 with intermittent flashes, the New like a 
 room full of light, with only here and there 
 a dark corner. The difference lies in the 
 
 lO 
 
Christ and Our Darkness 
 
 fact that the New, unlike the Old, is written 
 in the full light of Christ. He sheds new 
 light on everything. He reveals God, show- 
 ing us His truth, wisdom, and power, and 
 especially His fatherly and forgiving love. 
 He reveals Himself, showing us in word and 
 deed the nature and purpose of His mission 
 to the world. He reveals sin, and its hues 
 blacken as they are brought into the radiance 
 of His light. He reveals the world, and 
 tells us of the enemies we must meet and 
 conquer, and of our brothers and our duties 
 toward them. On all subjects of the deepest 
 human interest — on the kingdom of God, on 
 man's character and chief end, on service and 
 sacrifice — He informs and enlightens us. 
 When He speaks on these things He gets to 
 the heart of them. He brushes aside the 
 non-essential and irrelevant, and takes us to 
 the root of the matter. Whatever He 
 touches He illumines. Nor can we confine 
 the name "light" to His teaching alone. 
 Even His significant words here were shortly 
 followed by as significant an act — the restora- 
 tion of sight to the blind. In His whole 
 II 
 
The Sevenfold I AM 
 
 personality, especially as interpreted in His 
 great sacrifice for man, there shines forth a 
 Light greater than any mere words can 
 express — a Light that may be rejected but 
 cannot be ignored. 
 
 From the power of light to reveal comes 
 \ its power to search, to test, to judge. It 
 throws good and evil into strong contrast 
 Even if Christ did nothing else, we should 
 value Him for the searchlight He throws 
 upon the world. Men must become better 
 or worse after having known Christ. " His 
 appearing separates the lovers of the day from 
 the lovers of the night, mingled till then in 
 the mass of mankind." He Himself spoke 
 of the light as a judge between good and 
 evil. " Light," He said, " is come into the 
 world, and men loved darkness rather than 
 light, because their deeds were evil. For 
 every one that doeth evil hateth the light, 
 neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds 
 should be reproved. But he that doeth truth 
 cometh to the light, that his deeds may be 
 made manifest, that they are wrought in 
 God." We see examples of this in the 
 
 12 
 
Christ and Our Darkness 
 
 effect which Christ produced on different 
 people. The Pharisee and hypocrite were 
 repelled by Him because He reproved their 
 deeds and showed them in their true colours. 
 On the other hand, those who "did the 
 truth," with whatever of imperfection and 
 frailty, came to the light. If Christ is the 
 great Unifier, He is first the great Separator. 
 With His revelation of the beauty of holiness 
 comes His revelation of the ugliness of evil. 
 The scope of Christ's influence — the world, 
 — His appeal is world-wide ; He makes 
 no distinctions ; He offers Himself to all. 
 His gospel is, " God so loved the world that 
 He gave His only -begotten Son." His 
 claim is, "I am the Light of the world '^ 
 His commission is, " Go ye into all the worlds 
 and preach the gospel to every creature." 
 Christianity, from its very nature, cannot 
 take its place as a local or partial religion. 
 It rests on the universal forgiving love of 
 God as shown forth in Jesus Christ, and 
 accordingly makes its appeal to the world. 
 There is that in Christianity which can appeal 
 to the educated and to the ignorant, to the 
 13 
 
The Sevenfold I AM 
 
 great and to the humble, to the mind of the 
 East and the mind of the West. Christ 
 speaks to men as men, caring little for what 
 they have, much for what they are. Look at 
 the history of Christianity, and you find it a 
 faith that has been responded to by the genius 
 of peoples so widely different as the Jew, the 
 Greek, the Roman, the Teuton, the Celt. 
 History is the basis of prophecy, and prophecy 
 is already being fulfilled. We are seeing to- 
 day how the Light of the world can shine 
 over the far Eastern lands — how He has a 
 message for India and Africa, for China and 
 Japan. We are giving these nations many 
 things. We are giving them the fruits of 
 our inventive genius; we are giving them 
 much that has enriched Western life and 
 added to our material well-being. We are 
 also giving them, it is to be feared, things 
 that will profit them less. It has been said 
 by competent observers that "when an 
 Eastern and a Western nation infringe upon 
 each other, the contact in some mysterious 
 way tends to bring out the worst there is in 
 each." Surely, then, it is of all the greater 
 
Christ and Our Darkness 
 
 importance that we should not fail to give 
 them, with whatever else, that which is the 
 best of all — the Light of the world. We 
 must be witnesses of Him " unto the utter- 
 most parts of the earth." 
 
 2. The Light of Life. 
 
 A guiding Light. — So far we have con- 
 sidered our Lord as the Light of all who see 
 Him — good and bad, saints and sinners. 
 But His work does not end there. To some 
 He is the Light in a fuller sense. " He that 
 foUoweth Me shall not walk in darkness." 
 Light can guide as well as reveal. Tenny- 
 son has told us, in " Merlin and the Gleam," 
 of the spirit of poetry which showed him his 
 power, and bade him follow a pure and high 
 ideal, in dark as In bright hours. 
 
 The light retreated, 
 The landskip darkened. 
 The melody deaden' d, 
 The Master whisper'd. 
 Follow the gleam. 
 
 " Follow the gleam " is the message of 
 
 Christ also. We have seen how He had in 
 
 15 
 
The Sevenfold I AM 
 
 His mind the guiding pillar in the wilderness 
 — a light amid surrounding darkness. This 
 same guiding office of light is recognised by 
 the Psalmist — " Thy Word is a lamp unto 
 my feet, and a light unto my path." 
 After the same manner, too, the Wise Men 
 were led on their way to Bethlehem by the 
 Star. In the Pilgrim^s Progress Evangelist 
 asks Christian if he can see the wicket gate, 
 and he answers, " No." He then asks, " Do 
 you see yonder shining light ? " and on 
 receiving the answer, " I think I do," adds, 
 "Keep that light in your eye, and go up 
 directly thereto, so shalt thou see the gate." 
 So, too, it was with Newman when he 
 sang — 
 
 Lead, kindly Light, amid th' encircling gloom, 
 Lead Thou me on ! 
 
 To those that follow Him, Christ is a guid- 
 ing Light. He leads us on from less to 
 more ; He warns us of hidden dangers ; He 
 sheds radiance on our path. *^He that 
 foUoweth Me shall not walk in darkness." 
 An indwelling Light. — The final words, 
 i6 
 
Christ and Our Darkness 
 
 "shall have the Light of life," transcend 
 even the figure of a guiding Light. Indeed, 
 we need not unduly press the idea oi follow- 
 ing ; elsewhere He speaks of coming to 
 the light, believing in the light, abiding in 
 the light. And here He seems to suggest 
 that His followers will have an experience 
 transcending that of the people of Israel. 
 They had but an external means of knowing 
 which way they were to go. His disciples, 
 on the other hand, are to have a light within 
 them, enabling them to choose what is right, 
 and to walk as children of light. To have the 
 Light of life implies that it is not merely in 
 front but within. As Milton puts the thought — 
 
 He that has light within his own clear breast 
 May sit i' the centre, and enjoy bright day; 
 But he that hides a dark soul and foul thoughts 
 Benighted walks under the mid-day sun ; 
 Himself is his own dungeon. 
 
 George Fox and the early Quakers insisted 
 strongly on this doctrine of the " inner light." 
 They believed that that same light which 
 revealed and made manifest would, if yielded 
 to, lead out of sin to life. The doctrine is 
 
 B 17 
 
The Sevenfold I AM 
 
 profoundly true. As St. John beautifully 
 shows in his first Epistle, walking in the 
 light and abiding in the light are connected 
 at once with fellowship with God and love of 
 our fellow-men. The man who obeys the 
 light becomes himself luminous. The same 
 Jesus who said, "I am the Light of the 
 world," said also, " Ye are the light of the 
 world " — a light which in its turn is meant 
 to reveal and to guide and to inspire. 
 
 Heaven doth with us as we with torches do ; 
 Not light them for themselves ; for if our virtues 
 Did not go forth of us, 'twere all alike 
 As if we had them not 
 
 And so the process goes on, each lighted 
 torch lighting another in turn. In all ages 
 and in all nations some men have been lights 
 in the world. They have shone before men, 
 and given light to them, passing on the 
 radiance received from Him whose life is 
 the Light of men. Every Christian can 
 shine. The influence of even the humblest 
 life may be incalculable. 
 
 How far that little candle throws his beams ! 
 So shines a good deed in a naughty world. 
 
 l8 
 
Christ and Our Darkness 
 
 Thus, though the image of light seem at 
 first to suggest a very elementary relation 
 between Christ and ourselves, it may carry 
 us farther than we think. Let us not be 
 satisfied with yielding homage to Him as the 
 Light of the world. Let each of us make 
 Him the Light for his or her individual soul. 
 To such He will become not merely a light 
 above, like the sun in the heavens ; nor 
 even a light in front, like a guiding lamp on 
 a winter's night ; but a light within. " The 
 spirit of man is the candle of the Lord/* 
 
 19 
 
n 
 
 CHRIST AND OUR HOMELESSNESS 
 
II 
 
 CHRIST AND OUR HOMELESSNESS 
 
 <* I AM the Door : by Me if any man enter in, he 
 shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and find pasture." 
 — St. John x. 9. 
 
 A Door forms an extremely significant 
 symbol. It may be open, or it may be 
 shut ; and, if it be shut, there is all the 
 difFerence in the world between being on one 
 side of it or on the other. The opening and 
 shutting of certain doors, such as those of 
 the Temple of Janus in Rome, have been 
 attended with great solemnity. Artists have 
 lavished their highest skill on doors, and 
 significant legends have been engraved over 
 them. The door is the crucial point ; pass 
 the door and you are all right ; be turned 
 back at the door and you are all wrong. On 
 the duty of keeping some doors open that 
 23 
 
f 
 
 The Sevenfold I AM 
 
 are too often shut, and also on the duty of 
 keeping some doors shut that are too often 
 open, much might be written. The subject 
 is a wide and a fascinating one. The idea 
 evidently appealed specially to the mind of 
 our Lord, for He makes no less than three 
 different uses of the symbol to express the 
 relation between Himself and His people. 
 Sometimes He is inside the door, as where 
 He says, " To him that knocketh it shall be 
 opened," or in the parable of the Virgins, 
 where " the door was shut." Sometimes He 
 is outside the door. "Behold, I stand at 
 the door, and knock ; if any man will hear 
 My voice, and open the door, I will come in 
 to him, and will sup with him, and he with 
 Me." But sometimes, as here. He is Him- 
 self the Door, and this is His most significant 
 use of the figure. " I am the Door : by Me 
 if any man enter in, he shall be saved, and 
 shall go in and out, and find pasture." 
 
 The Occasion, 
 
 As usual, the circumstances under which 
 the words were spoken shed considerable 
 24 
 
Christ and Our Homelessness 
 
 light on their meaning. In the previous 
 chapter we read of a work of healing per- 
 formed by our Lord — the restoration of 
 sight to a blind man. The gratitude which 
 this man showed towards his Healer brought 
 him into conflict with the authorities of the 
 synagogue, with the result that they "cast 
 him out" — shut their doors upon him. On 
 his meeting Jesus shortly afterwards, our 
 Lord asked him, " Dost thou believe on the 
 Son of God ? " It needs but a few words 
 to show him that Jesus is indeed that Son 
 of God ; he says, " Lord, I believe," and 
 worships Him. The words about the 
 sheepfold come almost immediately after- 
 wards, and probably refer in the first 
 instance to the case of this man. From 
 the religious point of view he is homeless, 
 outcast, excommunicate. What Jesus ofFers 
 him, accordingly, is a new and better home. 
 He invites this man who has been *^ turned 
 out of doors " to enter the Door of the 
 kingdom — to accept Himself. 
 
 Many have been comforted by the 
 assurance that Christ's doo£ is open to them 
 ~~2S 
 
The Sevenfold I AM 
 
 though other doors be shut. At the 
 degradation of Savonarola prior to his 
 execution, the Bishop of Vasona said, " I 
 separate thee from the Church militant and 
 triumphant." " From the Church militant," 
 corrected Savonarola, " not from the Church 
 triumphant. The latter is not in thy hands." 
 At the deposition of John Macleod Campbell 
 by the General Assembly of the Church of 
 Scotland, the young man's father said, " I 
 am not afraid for my son. Though his 
 brethren cast him out, the Master whom he 
 serves will not forsake him." 
 
 Christ the Door. 
 
 This figure of Christ the Door is apt to 
 be obscured by the still greater figure of 
 Christ the Good Shepherd. From His 
 picture of the sheepfold He selects these two 
 images, and applies them successively to 
 Himself. The relation of the two to each 
 other may indeed be closer than we are apt 
 to think. "Door" and "Shepherd" are 
 not such mutually exclusive words as they 
 appear to us. A well-known traveller in 
 26 
 
Christ and Our Homelessness 
 
 Palestine has told how he once entered Into 
 conversation with a shepherd at work near a 
 sheepfold. Many things he learned from 
 him, but the best of all came unexpectedly. 
 Every feature the traveller expected to see 
 was there, excepting one. "Here," he 
 said, " is the fold ; there are the sheep ; this 
 is the doorway ; but where is the door ? " 
 " Door ? " asked the shepherd. " / am the 
 door ! I lie across the entrance at night. No 
 sheep can pass out, no wolf come in, except 
 over my body." It is better for our present 
 purpose, however, to take the two figures 
 apart than to press them as the component 
 parts of a single parable. We do not, it is 
 true, find it easy to discover to which figure 
 some of the verses apply. None of the 
 attempts to divide the allegory sharply into 
 two have been quite successful, or need be 
 repeated here. It seems enough to observe 
 that Jesus saw the suggestiveness of both 
 the figures Door and Shepherd^ Door being 
 the more obvious and general figure. Shepherd 
 lending itself to greater elaboration. It is 
 therefore the Shepherd-figure rather than 
 27 
 
The Sevenfold I AM 
 
 the Door-figure that He treats in detail. 
 With regard to the Door He does not say 
 much, yet He says enough. The essence 
 of what He says is contained in this one 
 verse. 
 
 Its central lesson is that Christ is the one 
 Door, the one entrance into the kingdom of 
 heaven ; that it is by Him and by Him 
 alone that men can enter their Father's 
 honie. There is no room for the thief and 
 robber, the formalist or hypocrite, who climb 
 over the wall instead of entering by the gate. 
 If the one Door be open, it matters little 
 what others remain shut ; but, conversely, 
 if that Door be shut, it matters little what 
 others are open. Christianity must start 
 from Christ. It is impossible to teach it 
 apart from Him. Not without significance 
 was the temple-veil rent at His death, 
 opening forever a door into the Holiest of 
 all. The very panels of a common door are 
 often arranged so as to produce the figure 
 of a Cross. It is said that this originated 
 with a guild of Carpenters, who . took as 
 their emblem the Cross on the Door, with 
 28 
 
Christ and Our Homelessness 
 
 the words of our text as motto. The sym- 
 bolism, at all events, is a true one. Christ 
 and His Cross are inseparable. Whoso 
 enters by the Door must take up the Cross. 
 Dr. Elder Cumming's poem expresses the 
 same idea — 
 
 Hast thou ne'er seen the Cross upon the Door ? 
 
 Yes ! it is on thine own ! 
 Look, even now, across th' accustomed floor, 
 
 Thou deemest so well known ! 
 
 You have not noticed it ? The Cross unseen. 
 
 Though on the Door it stands? 
 Large, clear, in full relief, as it had been 
 
 Carved there by reverent hands? 
 • •••.•• 
 
 O Man ! could'st thou have thought it possible 
 
 That this thing could have been ? 
 The Cross so large, so plain, so close to thee, 
 
 And yet so long unseen? 
 
 Yes — the Door that we enter must be 
 the Door with the Cross upon it. We may 
 find it a strait gate ; we may have to leave 
 much behind as we go in. But it is the one 
 Door into the home of our Father. And 
 the Door is Christ Himself. 
 29 
 
The Sevenfold I AM 
 
 We have called this theme "Christ and 
 our homelessness " because what He offers 
 us here is neither more nor less than a 
 Home. The crossing of the threshold is an 
 entrance into life — life on a higher plane — 
 life hid with Christ in God. 
 
 The chief benefits of such a life, as 
 described here, we may define as Refuge, 
 Freedom, and Nurture. 
 
 I. A Home of Refuge. 
 
 " By Me if any man enter in, he shall be 
 saved.'* That is the first and most obvious 
 blessing. It is to a friendly door that we 
 look for refuge in a storm. Readers of The 
 Pirate will remember the anger of the hospit- 
 able Shetlanders at the bare idea of keeping 
 a door bolted against a stranger who sought 
 its protection from the tempest. The idea 
 of refuge or sanctuary is one of those most 
 deeply rooted in the feelings of mankind. 
 We find the rudiments of it even in savage 
 peoples, such as the natives of Central 
 Australia and the North American Indians. 
 Among more advanced nations certain places, 
 30 
 
Christ and Our Homelessness 
 
 such as the tombs of kings, were regarded 
 as asylums where a fugitive might find 
 safety. We find the erection of Cities of 
 Refuge commanded in the Mosaic law, and 
 we find something resembling them in both 
 Greece and Rome. But especially in the 
 Church of Christ has the idea of refuge 
 or sanctuary found favour. Churches were 
 long regarded as places where the offender 
 was safe, at least till his case could be fairly 
 tried. His capture or molestation within 
 the sacred walls was deemed an act of 
 impiety. No doubt the practice was often 
 abused. Criminals of the worst description 
 were sometimes harboured, who could 
 pursue their evil courses undeterred by the 
 fear of consequences. Yet, as Dean Milman 
 well remarks, " there is something sublime 
 in the first notion of asylum." We cannot 
 wonder at the association of refuge with 
 God Himself, as One who is at once strong, 
 just, and loving. " God is our refuge and 
 strength," says the 46th Psalm, **a very 
 present help in trouble." And when our 
 Saviour calls Himself the Door, He gives 
 
 31 
 
The Sevenfold I AM 
 
 refuge as one of the first benefits enjoyed by 
 those who enter. " By Me if any man enter 
 in, he shall be saved." Saved from what will 
 most harm him ; saved from the dangers out- 
 side ; saved from evil men and evil spirits ; 
 saved from himself and from his sins. Such 
 hymns as Charles Wesley's " Jesus, Lover of 
 my soul,'* and Toplady's "Rock of ages, cleft 
 for me," breathe the instinctive cry for refuge 
 and safety, for deliverance from peril, for 
 salvation from sin. This is what Jesus offers. 
 Whatever else He is. He is the Saviour — 
 the One who seeks and saves and rescues. 
 The primary idea of a home is that of a roof 
 to shelter us, a protection from danger. 
 These things we have in Christ. 
 
 O call Thy wanderer home ; 
 To that dear home, safe in Thy wounded side, 
 Where only broken hearts their sin and shame may hide. 
 
 2. A Home of Freedom. 
 
 " By Me if any man enter in, he shall . , . 
 
 go in and out." The allusion is in the first 
 
 place to the door of the sheepfold. But the 
 
 words may be used with a wider reference, 
 
 32 
 
Christ and Our Homelessness 
 
 and may remind us of the liberty wherewith 
 Christ makes us free. At first sight the 
 idea of " going in and out " may seem in- 
 consistent with what was said before. We 
 must be either inside or outside the gate 
 of mercy. But the inconsistency is only 
 apparent. When the door has once been 
 opened to the homeless, he is free to go out 
 as well as to come in. He does not need to 
 knock a second time ; he is made free of the 
 house and can enter it when he chooses ; 
 even when out he is no longer homeless. 
 The door is not shut to him on the inside, 
 any more than on the outside ; the home is 
 no prison. It is not to the cloister-life that 
 Christ calls His people. His service is 
 perfect freedom. " Where the Spirit of the 
 Lord is, there Is liberty." Jesus found 
 bondage and slavery everywhere. Not 
 merely was the country of His birth in 
 subjection to a foreign yoke ; but its citizens 
 were enslaved in bonds that they had forged 
 for themselves. No one was free. One 
 class was governed by its traditions and 
 prejudices; another had intolerable burdens 
 c 33 
 
The Sevenfold I AM 
 
 laid on it by priestcraft; another was in a 
 worse bondage through being cast off by the 
 rest of society : all were in that deeper 
 slavery that sin itself must cause, when no 
 way of escape from it is seen. From all this 
 Christ came to make men free. Not by 
 force, not by political agitation, not even by 
 schemes of social reform, but by His Spirit 
 working from within. He led men into the 
 free, fresh atmosphere of God's own truth. 
 This sense of freedom we find in all the 
 writers of the New Testament ; freedom 
 from the curse of the law ; freedom from the 
 burden of their sins ; freedom given them 
 by Christ. Ability to " go in and out," then, 
 is one of the chief privileges of the Christian 
 life. It is not inconsistent with this to say 
 that it may make that life harder to live. 
 To have our conversation on earth, yet in 
 heaven ; our affection set on things around, 
 yet on things above ; our life open with men 
 in the world, yet hid with Christ in God ; 
 the task is no easy one. Yet the true 
 Christian is the man who can go in and out. 
 He is the same man in his religion as in his 
 34 
 
Christ and Our Homelessncss 
 
 business. He can come out from the inner 
 sanctuary of his life, fortified by all he has 
 learned there, and he can re-enter it with all 
 the experience he has gained in the world of 
 affairs. He obeys and is judged by a law, 
 but it is the "law of liberty." 
 
 3. A Home of Nurture. 
 
 " By Me if any man enter in, he shall • . . 
 find pasture." He shall find pasture without 
 as well as within ; perhaps more without than 
 within. But his power to find it and to feed 
 on it will depend on what he has gained 
 within the Door. What Christ offers us, as 
 we have seen already, is, briefly, a home ; 
 and a home gives nurture as well as pro- 
 tection. In the home we not only live ; we 
 l^row. And while that on which we feed 
 may come from many sources, the home is 
 the centre of all. We get ideas from this 
 source and from that ; but our impressions 
 are steadied, focused given their due per- 
 spective and proportion, under the roof which 
 shelters us. Of course this is not always so ; 
 there is bad home influence as well as good. 
 35 
 
The Sevenfold I AM 
 
 But we are speaking of the ideal ; and the 
 home Christ oiFers is such. We may feel 
 that the figure of the Door has retreated, so 
 to speak, into the background. But this is 
 only because it has opened the way to so 
 much more. Implicitly it contains a great 
 deal beyond itself. Admit a man within 
 your door, and you have gone far towards 
 admitting him to your fireside and your 
 table. The beginning and the fruition of 
 membership in Christ are symbolically re- 
 presented in some churches by the font at 
 the western entrance and the Holy Table at 
 the eastern end. But both are under the 
 same roof, and represent only different stages 
 in the Christian life. Admission within the 
 door leads on to nurture and fellowship. 
 The life in Christ is a life rich in spiritual 
 blessing and progress. We come to find 
 riches in it of which we never dreamed when 
 we first embraced it. It is a growth, whose 
 end is potentially contained in its beginning, 
 as the flower and fruit are in the seed. " You 
 may say," writes Marcus Dods, "you are 
 saved when you fairly put yourself into 
 
 36 
 
Christ and Our Homelessness 
 
 Christ's hand, but you must also remember 
 that then your salvation is only beginning, 
 and that you cannot, in the fullest sense, say 
 you are saved until Christ has wrought in 
 you a perfect conformity to Himself." Christ 
 does not develop here the idea of nurture. 
 It is given fuller expression under the figure 
 of the Bread of Life. Here it is only men- 
 tioned and no more. We get, as it were, 
 only a glimpse through the Door into the 
 life within, with all its privileges and benefits. 
 But the glimpse should be enough to inspire 
 us with confidence, and to encourage us to 
 enter if we have not done so before. 
 
 Christ the Door, then, is Christ as the 
 entrance to the Christian life. He is the 
 Alpha as He is the Omega ; He meets us at 
 the very beginning. What He offers us is 
 a home : a centre from which to live, a 
 standpoint from which to view everything 
 else. His only condition is that we do enter 
 the Door ; that we take our stand inside and 
 not outside. For if we do, though we may 
 go in and out, and find pasture without as 
 37 
 
The Sevenfold I AM 
 
 well as within, we are saved, and shall be 
 saved from the evil both in ourselves and in 
 the world. 
 
 Let us not be afraid to make a beginning. 
 True, the beginning is not all ; many have 
 begun to build and have not been able to 
 finish. The worst enemies of Christianity 
 have been those who first espoused and then 
 deserted its cause ; Judas, who betrayed his 
 Lord ; Demas, who loved this present world. 
 We are warned not to begin without counting 
 the cost. But with many of us the danger 
 rather lies in the direction of never beginning 
 at all ; and while the man who begins may 
 not finish, the man who never begins cannot. 
 If the road to hell be paved with good in- 
 tentions, the road to heaven is paved with 
 them too. There is truth in the proverb, 
 "Well begun, half done." Enter, then, by 
 the Door. Enter, and you will never regret 
 the step you took. Enter, and you will be 
 led on from grace to grace and from strength 
 to strength. There is no good to be got 
 from hesitating on the threshold ; you must 
 be on one side or other. Choose you this 
 
 38 
 
Christ and Our Homelessness 
 
 day whom you will serve. Now Is the 
 accepted time. The Door that stands open 
 to-day may, for one or other of many causes 
 which we cannot foresee, be shut to us to- 
 morrow. 
 
 <* Would a man 'scape the rod?** 
 (Rabbi ben Karshook saith) 
 
 "See that he turn to God 
 The day before his death.'* 
 
 **Ay, could a man enquire 
 
 When it shall come ! " I say. 
 
 (The Rabbi's eye shoots fire) 
 "Then let him turn to-day!*' 
 
 39 
 
in 
 
 CHRIST AND OUR WAYWARDNESS 
 
Ill 
 
 CHRIST AND OUR WAYWARDNESS 
 
 " I AM the Way, the Truth, and the Life ; no man 
 cometh unto the Father, but by Me." — St. John xiv. 6. 
 
 We must beware, of course, of spoiling 
 our Lord's metaphors about Himself by 
 trying to make them parts of one consistent 
 figure. They were spoken at different 
 times, as circumstances suggested ; they 
 were not, for the most part, used with any 
 distinct reference to one another. When 
 our Lord called Himself the Door, for 
 example. He was not thinking of a door 
 opening on to a way, but in to an enclosure ; 
 and when He called Himself the Way, the 
 image of the Door was not before His mind. 
 Yet it is no idle fancy to associate the two 
 images with one another. Our Lord Him- 
 self did so when He said, " Wide is the 
 43 
 
The Sevenfold I AM 
 
 gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to 
 destruction." . . . "Strait is the gate, and 
 narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life." 
 The association of the two has been further 
 familiarised to us in the Pilgrim's ProgresSj 
 where no sooner has the traveller entered 
 the Gate than he is pointed to the one and 
 only Way. There is no " way " before 
 coming to the gate ; he may come to it by 
 any route ; as a matter of fact he chooses a 
 very roundabout one. But once he is there, 
 the way is clear and definite. Many persons 
 and things may lead us to Christ, but only 
 Christ can lead us, in a full sense, to God. 
 Thus the Door and the Way may be 
 regarded as complementary figures, each 
 having its part in any right conception of 
 what Christ does for us. Entering by a 
 Door is a single decisive act ; traversing 
 a Way is a long continuous process. In 
 religion, as in everything, it is important 
 that there should be a fixed and definite 
 starting-point ; a basis from which to work. 
 But it cannot be too often insisted upon that 
 this is only the beginning. He that putteth 
 44 
 
Christ and Our Waywardness 
 
 on his harness must not boast as he that 
 taketh it ofF. There must be continual 
 progress in the Christian life. And in view 
 of this two-fold need — a definite start and 
 a regular march — it is surely not without 
 significance that He who said, " I am the 
 Door," said also, " I am the Way " ; that He 
 Who said, " By Me if any man enter in, he 
 shall be saved," said also, "No man cometh 
 unto the Father, but by Me." By the one 
 Door we enter ; by the one Way we travel. 
 In the one case Christ offers Himself to us 
 in our homelessness — offers us a Door, a 
 home, with its refuge, its freedom, its 
 nurture. In the other He corrects our 
 waywardness, offers us a Way of truth and a 
 Way of life, to keep us alike from error and 
 from sin, and to lead us to the Father Who 
 is the source of all truth and life. 
 
 The three words here applied by our 
 Saviour to Himself — Way, Truth, and Life — 
 have always been felt to possess a special 
 attractiveness — an attractiveness perhaps all 
 the greater because the relation of the three 
 ideas to one another is not immediately 
 45 
 
/ 
 
 The Sevenfold I AM 
 
 apparent. Even the coincidence that in 
 Latin, the language of medieval theology, 
 they form an alliteration — Via^ Veritas^ 
 Vita — has proved attractive, and has led to 
 such elaborations as Augustine's Vera via 
 vitcBy and Bernard's Via in exemplo^ Veritas 
 in promissoy vita in prc^mio. As an example 
 of the way in which men loved to enlarge on 
 this theme, we may take the following from 
 Thomas ^ Kempis : — 
 
 " Follow Me ; I am the Way, the Truth, 
 and the Life. 
 
 ** Without the Way, there is no going ; 
 without the Truth, there is no knowing ; 
 without the Life, there is no living. 
 
 " I am the Way which thou must follow, 
 the Truth which thou must believe, the 
 Life which thou must hope fon 
 
 " I am the Way inviolable, the Truth 
 infallible, and the Life interminable. 
 
 " I am the Way most straight, the Truth 
 most high, the true Life, the blessed Life, 
 the uncreated Life. 
 
 " If thou abide in My Way, thou shalt 
 know the Truth, and the Truth shall make 
 
Christ and Our Waywardness 
 
 thee free, and thou shalt lay hold on eternal 
 Life. 
 
 " If thou wilt enter into Life, keep the 
 commandments. If thou wilt know the 
 Truth, believe Me." 
 
 Luther and Calvin regard Way, Truth, 
 and Life as the beginning, middle, and end 
 of the Christian course. Attempts have 
 also been made to apply the words to the 
 three offices of Christ — Priest (Way), 
 Prophet (Truth), and King (Life) ; or to 
 suggest that they represent the three ele- 
 ments of His work for us — His sacrifice 
 being the Way, His teaching, the Truth, 
 His example, the Life. Many hymns, too, 
 have been founded on the words. 
 
 Thou art the Way, the Truth, the Life ; 
 
 Grant us that Way to know. 
 That Truth to keep, that Life to win, 
 
 Whose joys eternal flow. 
 
 The Occasion. 
 
 The words were first spoken on the night 
 on which our Lord was betrayed. The 
 apostles, gathered round the first Communion 
 47 
 
The Sevenfold I AM 
 
 Table, had come to realise that their Master 
 was about to leave them. '^ Whither I go," 
 He said, "ye cannot come." St. Peter 
 breaks in with questions such as those which 
 any child would ask at such an announcement. 
 " Lord, whither goest Thou ? " '' Why 
 cannot I follow Thee now ? " Jesus speaks 
 words of comfort, and bids them trust His 
 Father and Himself. He tells them of the 
 heavenly mansions, of His going to prepare 
 them a place, of His coming again to receive 
 them unto Himself. Then He adds, 
 ** Whither I go ye know, and the way ye 
 know," or perhaps more tersely, " Whither I 
 go, ye know the way." St. Thomas, always 
 the rationalist of the band, breaks in with : 
 " Lord, we know not whither Thou goest ; 
 and how can we know the way ? " Jesus, in 
 His reply, does not so much answer the 
 particular question, as raise the whole 
 matter from the particular to the universal. 
 "I am the Way, the Truth, and the 
 Life ; no man cometh unto the Father, 
 but by Me." He goes on to show how 
 the knowing of Him implies the knowing 
 
 48 
 
Christ and Our Waywardness 
 
 of His Father ; and In reply to St. Philip's 
 demand, "Show us the Father/' re-affirms 
 the same truth in different language. 
 "He that hath seen Me hath seen the 
 Father." 
 
 From this it would seem that PFay^ Truthy 
 and Life are not correlative terms, each 
 corresponding to some one phase of our 
 Lord's life and work. Rather is the first 
 term inclusive of the others, and illustrated 
 by them. IVay constitutes the parable, 
 Truth and Life the Interpretation. Jesus 
 had already spoken of the way, and St. 
 Thomas had also referred to the way. This 
 word Jesus accordingly takes up and uses in 
 a figurative sense. A way may be at once a 
 way of truth and a way of life. JVay^ as 
 applied to spiritual things. Is a figure of 
 speech, while Truth and Life are not. 
 The idea would have been a complete 
 one, though of course less full and explicit, 
 had our Lord left out Truth and Life 
 altogether, and simply said, "I am the 
 Way ; no man cometh unto the Father, 
 but by Me." 
 
 D 49 
 
The Sevenfold I AM 
 
 Christ the Way. 
 
 It is as the Way, then — the Way to the 
 Father — that Jesus here offers Himself to 
 His people. And this surely meets a human 
 need. There could be no more pathetic 
 study than that of the many strange ways in 
 which men have sought to reach God. Man- 
 kind apart from Christ are troubled by two 
 difficulties. One is that they do not know 
 the way to God ; the other is that God's 
 own ways are past finding out. Could 
 they but understand these two things — 
 God's way with man, man's way to God — 
 a great part of life's problem would be 
 solved. To Israel, the conception of a way 
 was a familiar one. True, they might say 
 of God, "Thy way is in the sea, and Thy 
 path in the great waters, and Thy foot- 
 steps are not known." ^ Yet man had not 
 been left entirely ignorant even of God's 
 ways. " All the paths of the Lord are mercy 
 and truth unto such as keep His covenant 
 and His testimonies." And with regard 
 to the way in which man ought to walk, the 
 
 50 
 
Christ and Our Waywardness 
 
 revelation was clearer still. The wander- 
 ings between Egypt and Canaan were sym- 
 bolic of the truth that God was always 
 leading His people, though often by a way 
 that they knew not. But here our Lord 
 once and for all answers both the questions 
 we have indicated. He is God's Way to 
 man, and because of that. He is man's Way 
 to God. On Him, as on the ladder 
 between earth and heaven, angels of God 
 are seen both ascending and descending. In 
 Him God seeks and finds us ; in Him, too, 
 we seek and find God. The latter truth 
 rests upon the former. The true way to 
 God could only be shown by One Who 
 Himself came from God. This is implicit 
 in His substitution of *^ cometh " for St. 
 Thomas's "goest." He speaks not as one 
 who starts from earth, but as One Whose 
 home is in heaven. Yet His reference here 
 *s mainly to His work of bringing men to 
 God. He answers the human craving for 
 guidance and direction. When He calls 
 Himself the Way to the Father, He utters 
 a very rich and a very comprehensive truth. 
 51 
 
The Sevenfold I AM 
 
 He does not refer exclusively to His teach- 
 ing, or His example, or His sacrifice ; He 
 means all these and more ; He means Him- 
 self. He means us to accept Him in all 
 His fulness if we would reach God. His 
 teaching warns us against evil and points us 
 to good ; His example presents us with the 
 highest and holiest life ever lived ; His 
 sacrifice consecrates for us a new and living 
 way into the Holiest of all. But over and 
 above any of these is the great fact that 
 our way to God must lie through Christ. 
 Eliminate Him for a moment, even in 
 thought, and the whole idea of approach to 
 God breaks down. Try to leave out of 
 account all that Christ has been and done, 
 and taught and suffered, and you will find, 
 like Dante in his dark wood, that the right 
 way is lost, and that you are exposed to the 
 powers of evil. We need not wonder, then, 
 that the following of Christ, as we see from 
 the Book of Acts, was soon known as " the 
 Way," or that one of the earliest Christian 
 writings after the New Testament was called 
 the Duce Vice^ as showing the way of life 
 52 
 
Christ and Our Waywardness 
 
 and the way of death. No doubt many 
 noble souls of heathendom have sought and 
 felt after God, and have been not far from 
 His kingdom. But are we not justified in 
 saying that where they did come near Him 
 they were following, albeit unconsciously, 
 the way of Christ — that He was in some 
 sort shaping and directing their way ? Can 
 we except even their experience from the 
 exclusive claim He makes here — " No man 
 Cometh unto the Father, but by Me " ? 
 
 Our Lord explains and amplifies this 
 expression, " I am the Way," by stating the 
 two chief forms in which it is manifested, 
 " I am the Truth," and « I am the Life." 
 These two are correlative to one another, and 
 are each related to "I am the Way." To 
 keep on the right way Is to do two things ; 
 to observe correctness of judgment and 
 rectitude of conduct. To depart from the 
 right way Is to commit Intellectual error, or 
 moral failure, or both. Thus the Way 
 represents both Truth and Life ; on our 
 attitude towards It depend alike our creed 
 and our conduct, our belief and our practice, 
 S3 
 
The Sevenfold I AM 
 
 our faith and our works. This becomes 
 clearer when we remember that the Way is 
 a Way by which we "come to the Father." 
 For God is at once absolute Truth and 
 absolute Life ; and we are only fully His 
 when freed from both error and sin. In a 
 sense, no doubt, we are freed from both 
 when we enter the Door. We then experi- 
 ence for the first time the love that reveals 
 and redeems. Yet we became progressively 
 freed from both as we follow the Way which 
 is at once Truth and Life. 
 
 I. A Way of Truth. 
 
 To Pilate He said, "To this end was I 
 born, and for this cause came I into the 
 world, that I should bear witness unto the 
 truth. Every one that is of the truth 
 heareth My voice." But to His disciples He 
 could say more : not " I bear witness to the 
 truth," or " I teach you the truth," but " I 
 am the Truth." And while the word has 
 a universal bearing. He means especially the 
 truth about God, and about man in his 
 54 
 
Christ and Our Waywardness 
 
 relation to God. The words are governed by 
 the final clause, " No man cometh unto the 
 Father, but by Me." No man can know 
 God in any full and intimate sense except 
 through Christ. He is the Word of God — 
 the articulate expression of the Godhead. 
 He is, as He has already told us, the Light 
 of the world, dispelling the darkness and 
 making all things clear. No doubt many 
 precious truths with regard to God had been 
 revealed before Christ appeared. To these 
 He did full justice ; He came not to destroy 
 but to fulfil. Yet the truth, before His day, 
 had been fragmentary, heterogeneous, obscure. 
 It was " line upon line, precept upon precept, 
 here a little and there a little." It resembled 
 extracts from a great author, set in a child's 
 lesson-book, for the benefit of those unfit to 
 read his works in their entirety. It was 
 like the separate stones of a building, not 
 yet fitly framed together. It was like the 
 broken lights of the solar spectrum as shown 
 through a prism, not yet fused into one clear 
 radiance. It was diverse in its methods, in 
 its agents of communication, in the principles 
 55 
 
The Sevenfold I AM 
 
 which it imparted. But at last God spoke 
 to man not "In sundry portions and in 
 divers manners through the prophets," but 
 " by His Son, the brightness of His glory 
 and the express Image of His Person." 
 Christ speaks directly from God. His 
 words ring true. He is sure of Himself. 
 What He says has authority. "He that 
 hath seen Me hath seen the Father." "All 
 things that I have heard of My Father I have 
 made known unto you." His Gospel is a 
 manifestation of God's nature. His parables 
 are revelations of God's truth. His mighty 
 works, in one of their aspects, are " signs " 
 or illustrations of truth. Even His great 
 sacrifice, while it is much more, is the pro- 
 foundest explanation of God ever given, the 
 evidence of God's love for the world. The 
 Spirit He promises to His disciples is a 
 Spirit of truth, a Spirit Who shall teach, and 
 testify, and bring to remembrance, and guide 
 them into all truth. Nor has the Church 
 ever wholly lost sight of the fact that the 
 communication of truth is one of the great 
 tasks with which she is entrusted. When 
 
 56 
 
Christ and Our Waywardness 
 
 St. Paul said at Athens, " Him Whom ye 
 ignorantly worship declare I unto you," he 
 was following out the words of Christ, ^* I am 
 the Truth." The ordinance of preaching, 
 the formation of the creeds, the whole fabric 
 of Christian theology. Is but the development 
 of the same Idea. No doubt there is a great 
 deal of truth which Christ does not directly 
 touch. The Church has often erred in 
 ignoring such truth, and her too one-sided 
 and partial view of what truth means has had 
 its reaction in the equally one-sided tendency 
 to regard the truth of nature as the only 
 truth attainable. A narrow orthodoxy in 
 religion has been answered by as narrow an 
 orthodoxy of science. But while we thank- 
 fully accept all that science tells us as to 
 many of God's wondrous ways, it Is not 
 by Its means that we can ever see Himself. 
 It is in Christ that God stands revealed. 
 "No man hath seen God at any time; 
 the only begotten Son, which is in the 
 bosom of the Father, He hath declared 
 Him." 
 
 57 
 
The Sevenfold I AM 
 
 2. A Way of Life. 
 
 If Christ Is the Way because He is the 
 Truth, He is the Way for a yet more signi- 
 ficant reason — because He is the Life. A 
 way is a safeguard not only against intel- 
 lectual, but against moral failure ; and the 
 search after righteousness is an even more 
 important thing than the search after wisdom. 
 Our main business here is not to know, but 
 to five ; and truth is valueless until trans- 
 lated into action. St. Peter, as long as he 
 remained on the housetop, could only 
 "doubt in himself what this vision which 
 he had seen should mean." He found the 
 answer to his doubts when he accompanied 
 the men who were sent for him, and gave Cor- 
 nelius the blessing he sought. St. Paul's 
 first cry after his conversion, "Who art 
 Thou, Lord ? " is quickly followed by a 
 second, "What wilt Thou have me to 
 do ? " Truth and life have a mutual 
 influence ; if truth can inspire, action can 
 illuminate. And thus, to come back to the 
 words of our Saviour, it is clear that to 
 
 58 
 
Christ and Our Waywardness 
 
 "come to the Father" must imply more 
 than the mere knowledge of God. Many of 
 the Church's greatest mistakes, much of her 
 intolerance and persecution, have come from 
 a one-sided conception of religion as truth 
 to the neglect of life. Our Lord never 
 regarded mere education as a panacea for all 
 ills. He never said, like Socrates, that 
 knowledge was virtue. Men, to Him, 
 were not only blind, but sick ; not only in 
 error, but in sin ; and He must, therefore, 
 give them health as well as light, life as 
 well as truth. Hence, to know Christ as 
 the Truth is not enough ; we must find 
 Him as the Life. The Way is a way to 
 life in God. ^' I am come that they might 
 have life, and that they might have it more 
 abundantly." All the work of Christ was 
 directed to this end. His teaching had 
 invariably a practical object. His miracles, 
 if they were *' signs," were yet more 
 emphatically " works " directed towards the 
 helping and serving of men. His com- 
 mand, as he instituted the Holy Supper, 
 was not " Look," but '^ Eat " ; the act was 
 59 
 
The Sevenfold I AM 
 
 to signify assimilation of life as well as 
 apprehension of truth. His great sacri- 
 fice, while it contained the sublimest revela- 
 tion of God's nature ever made to man, had 
 life, not truth, as its ultimate end ; its aim 
 was not so much to show God to man, as 
 to give God to man, and to bring man to 
 God. And while, as we have seen. He 
 promised the Holy Spirit as a Spirit of 
 truth, that Spirit is even more strikingly 
 displayed as a Spirit of life and power. The 
 Pentecostal grace consisted not only of illu- 
 mination, but of inspiration ; its emblems 
 were the wind and the fire. And it is thus 
 that the work of the Spirit is still manifest. 
 As the Shorter Catechism well puts it, He 
 operates not only by "enlightening our 
 minds in the knowledge of Christ," but by 
 "renewing our wills." According as we 
 keep near to Christ we enter into larger and 
 fuller life. As He alone can lead us to 
 the full knowledge of God — to "know as 
 we are known " of Him — so He will 
 also lead us to perfect fellowship with God — 
 to the fulness of what he calls " eternal life." 
 60 
 
Christ and Our Waywardness 
 
 In these two respects — as the Truth and 
 the Life — is Christ, for us, the Way to 
 God — the One without Whom "no man 
 cometh unto the Father." As Godet tersely 
 puts it, "The truth is God revealed in 
 His essential nature — that is to say, in 
 His holiness and in His love ; the life 
 is God communicated to the soul, and 
 imparting to it holy strength and perfect 
 blessedness." 
 
 If the lesson of our last study, then, was 
 " Enter by the one Door," our lesson from 
 this one is "Journey by the one Way." 
 Let your religion be a progress forward, on- 
 ward, upward ; an increase in knowledge, a 
 growth in grace ; a constant advance in 
 truth and life. Perhaps nothing is so want- 
 ing in the average Christian life of to-day 
 as the signs of progress and growth. Re- 
 member that while life is a journey it is not 
 meant to be a haphazard wandering. It has 
 Christ as its Way, God as its goal. • It leads 
 through the world, but in Christ we can 
 learn to use even the world as a means of 
 6i 
 
The Sevenfold I AM 
 
 approach to God. We forget what is be- 
 hind, and reach forth to what is before. 
 Every trial, every conquest, every failure 
 even, becomes a step on the way of truth 
 and life. We "press toward the mark for 
 the prize of the high calling of God in Christ 
 Jesus." 
 
 62 
 
IV 
 CHRIST AND OUR HELPLESSNESS 
 
IV 
 CHRIST AND OUR HELPLESSNESS 
 
 "I AM the Good Shepherd; the Good Shepherd 
 giveth His life for the sheep. ... I AM the Good 
 Shepherd, and know My sheep, and am known of 
 Mine.'' — St. John x. ii, 14. 
 
 The pastoral life — the relation of shepherd 
 and flock — has always had about it a 
 peculiar charm. It has touched the 
 imagination, and been made the frequent 
 subject both of pictorial and of poetic art. 
 The classic poets, the early English writers, 
 and even the homelier bards of Scotland, 
 have given the shepherd a place of honour. 
 In his calling there would seem to lie that 
 sympathy with Nature which comes of 
 living in green pastures and far from the 
 busy haunts of men. His task, though an 
 engrossing, is not an enslaving one. It is 
 one of responsibility rather than of drudgery ; 
 E 65 
 
The Sevenfold I AM 
 
 one where the eye can look far ahead and 
 far afield. It is a work that has often 
 afforded opportunity for meditation and 
 reflection, whether under the starry heavens 
 by night, or amid the ever-changing scenery 
 of mountain and glen by day. Hence 
 men have always felt that there is some- 
 thing ideal in the life of the shepherd ; 
 something typical of life at its highest. 
 
 In Eastern lands the shepherd's work is 
 invested with yet greater honour and 
 significance by reason of the danger, the 
 anxiety, the self-sacrifice, which it entails. 
 There is a certain sacredness in having the 
 care of a living creature ; and in the case 
 of the Eastern shepherd everything tended 
 to increase that sacredness. He knew his 
 sheep by name, and they knew him. He 
 did not drive them from behind, but led 
 them from before. For them he had to 
 encounter many perils, and might even 
 have to give his life. 
 
 The Shepherd in Scripture. 
 
 As we read the Old Testament we cannot 
 66 
 
Christ and Our Helplessness 
 
 but be struck by the number of shepherds 
 we meet in its pages. The righteous Abel 
 was a keeper of sheep. The faithful 
 Abraham was very rich in cattle, and flocks, 
 and herds. The patient Jacob kept the 
 flock of his kinsman Laban, and met at the 
 well's mouth the shepherdess for whom he 
 was to wait twice seven long years. Moses 
 was leading sheep through the desert when 
 the word of God bade him conduct a 
 mightier flock through a vaster wilderness. 
 Amos, the stern preacher of righteousness, was 
 a herdman of Tekoah. At the head of the 
 whole band stands the great shepherd-king 
 David. Long ere he fought human enemies 
 he had slain the lion and bear that 
 threatened the life of his sheep. While he 
 yet lived among the flocks he had come to 
 know that the Lord was his Shepherd, 
 leading him beside the still waters, showing 
 him the straight paths, comforting him with 
 rod and staflF even in the valley of the 
 shadow. They were shepherds, too, who 
 watched their flocks on that night when 
 the glory of the Lord shone round about 
 
 67 
 
The Sevenfold I AM 
 
 them, and the herald-angel delivered his 
 message — " Unto you is born this day in 
 the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ 
 the Lord." 
 
 The relation of shepherd and sheep — 
 strength and tenderness on the one hand, 
 weakness and trust on the other — inevitably 
 suggested that of God and His people. 
 "Give ear, O Shepherd of Israel," writes 
 one psalmist, "Thou that leadest Joseph 
 like a flock." "We," writes another, "are 
 the people of His pasture, and the sheep 
 of His hand." And in the anticipations 
 formed of the Messiah, it was not seldom 
 as the Shepherd that He was depicted. " I 
 will set up one Shepherd over them," 
 writes Ezekiel, "and He shall feed them, 
 even My servant David ; He shall feed 
 them, and He shall be their Shepherd." 
 "He shall feed His flock," writes the 
 second Isaiah, " like a shepherd ; He shall 
 gather the lambs with His arm, and carry 
 them in His bosom, and shall gently lead 
 those that are with young." Our Lord, 
 when He came, not only accepted the same 
 68 
 
Christ and Our Helplessness 
 
 office, but passed it on to the apostles and 
 ministers of His appointing. To St. Peter 
 He says, "Feed My lambs," "Tend My 
 sheep " ; and that apostle in turn says to his 
 own disciples, "Feed the flock of God 
 which is among you, taking the oversight 
 thereof ; . . . and when the Chief Shepherd 
 shall appear, ye shall receive a crown of 
 glory that fadeth not away." The tradition 
 has been handed on ; even the bishop's 
 staff was fashioned after the likeness of a 
 shepherd's crook ; and in many countries 
 the minister of Christ is still called the 
 pastor or shepherd, bound to render an 
 account to his Master of the souls placed 
 in his charge. 
 
 Christ the Shepherd. 
 
 It is thus in the midst of a goodly array 
 that our Lord here stands as the Good 
 Shepherd, fulfilling the old, instituting the 
 new. 
 
 Before proceeding to the details of the 
 picture given here, we learn something 
 from a comparison of the two figures, " I 
 
 69 
 
The Sevenfold I AM 
 
 am the Door," and "I am the Good 
 Shepherd." At first we are half tempted 
 to wish that our Lord had kept to one or 
 other figure, in order to make the picture 
 a clear and complete one. But we gain 
 something from the very fact that He did 
 not. We might almost say that in the 
 parable the two conceptions of Christ as 
 the Door and as the Shepherd struggle for 
 the mastery, and that the latter prevails in 
 the end. When Jesus speaks of a door. 
 He is thinking of the door of a fold ; but 
 when He speaks of a shepherd. He is 
 thinking of the shepherd of a flock. The 
 idea of the fold has retired into the back- 
 ground ; for the words at the end of verse 
 1 6 should be, not "one fold, one shepherd," 
 but " one flock, one shepherd." Moreover, 
 when He speaks of Himself as the Door, 
 He speaks of our entering in ; but when 
 He speaks of Himself as the Shepherd, He 
 says, " He leadeth them out.^^ On the one 
 side, then, we have Door^ fold^ in ; on the 
 other side, Shepherdy jflocky out. And the 
 second conception is an advance upon the 
 70 
 
Christ and Our Helplessness 
 
 first, both with reference to Christ and to 
 
 His Church. In the first, all is stationary, 
 
 fenced round, isolated ; in the second, all 
 
 'is moving, free, progressive. According to^ 
 
 the first idea the Church is a fold, of which 
 
 Christ is the Door, and into which the flocks 
 
 must be gathered in. But according to the 
 
 second, the Church is a flock, of which 
 
 Christ is the Shepherd, leading out His 
 
 flock, some from one fold and some from 
 
 another. And it is doing no injustice to 
 
 the first figure to say that the second goes 
 
 farther and deeper. One is reminded of 
 
 the diff^erent ways in which two great English 
 
 poets have spoken of death. Spenser uses 
 
 the more obvious figure, that of entering a 
 
 harbour. 
 
 Sleep after toil, port after stormy seas, 
 Ease after war, death after life, does greatly please. 
 
 But Tennyson has the courage to invert the 
 figure, and to speak of death as of leaving a 
 harbour. 
 
 May there be no moaning of the bar 
 When I put out to sea. 
 
 And there is a similar distinction here. 
 71 
 
The Sevenfold I AM 
 
 There Is comfort, no doubt, in the thought 
 that Christ means for us entrance Into a fold 
 where we shall be safe from peril. But 
 there Is more that appeals to our chivalry In 
 the thought that Christ Is leading us out, 
 and that we must follow Him. Our attach- 
 ment Is not to a place but to a Person. 
 Better that we should be members of a flock 
 than dwellers In a fold. We may say of 
 metaphors what William Robertson of Irvine 
 truly said of the arts — that while some, like 
 architecture, painting, sculpture, tend to 
 localise religion, there are others, like poetry 
 and music, on whose wheels the chariot of 
 the everlasting Gospel has gone abroad. It 
 IS grander to think of Christ's people as 
 following Him out of many folds than as 
 enclosed by Him within one. " UbI Chrlstus, 
 ibi ecclesla." We can say, as Ittal the GIttlte 
 said to King David, " Surely In what place 
 my lord the king shall be, whether In death 
 or life, even there also will thy servant be.'' 
 And It widens our whole conception of the 
 Church of Christ, and shows us how different 
 it may be from all our preconceived Ideas, to 
 72 
 
Christ and Our Helplessness 
 
 read His words in this sense, and hear Him 
 say, " Other sheep I have, which are not of 
 this fold ; them also I must bring, and they 
 shall hear My voice ; and they shall become 
 one flock, one Shepherd." 
 
 Turning to the details of our Lord's 
 picture, we find it to be one of sharp con- 
 trasts. Over against the picture of the Good 
 {i.e. the true, the real) Shepherd, He places 
 two types of false shepherds. It will make 
 for clearness if we examine these first. 
 
 I. The False Shepherds. 
 
 We may omit the " stranger " of verse 5, 
 who may either be a person of no account, 
 or may represent either of the two following 
 classes ; and pass at once to — 
 
 The thief. — It must be noted that into one 
 fold might be gathered the sheep of different 
 flocks by night, guarded by a watchman or 
 porter. To this fold came the various 
 shepherds in the morning, to lead their 
 several flocks out to pasture. Each has a 
 recognised signal or knock, which when the 
 porter hears he opens the door. Any one 
 73 
 
The Sevenfold I AM 
 
 who IS not a true shepherd need not attempt 
 to gain entrance in this legitimate way. The 
 porter will not admit him, nor will the sheep 
 follow him, not knowing his voice. To 
 enter at all, he must enter " not by the door," 
 but " climb up some other way," and carry 
 off the sheep by force or by stealth. Milton's 
 elaboration of the parable was probably 
 justified by the conduct of many so-called 
 shepherds of his day — men who 
 
 Creep and intrude, and climb into the fold ; 
 
 Of other care they little reckoning make 
 
 Than how to scramble at the shearers' feast, 
 
 And shove away the worthy bidden guest. 
 
 Blind mouths ! that scarce themselves know how to hold 
 
 A sheep-hook, or have learned aught else the least 
 
 That to the faithful herdsman's art belongs ! 
 
 What recks it them ? what need they ? they are sped ; 
 
 And when they list, their lean and flashy songs 
 
 Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw ; 
 
 The hungry sheep look up and are not fed, 
 
 But swol'n with wind, and the rank mist they draw, 
 
 Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread ; 
 
 Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw 
 
 Daily devours apace, and nothing said. 
 
 The thiefs purpose is as evil as his method 
 of entrance is unlawful. While the true 
 74 
 
Christ and Our Helplessness 
 
 Shepherd comes for a beneficent purpose, 
 the object of the thief is "to steal, and to 
 kill, and to destroy." 
 
 The hireling, — There is another type of 
 so-called shepherd from which the true 
 shepherd must be carefully distinguished. 
 This is the hireling, " whose own the sheep 
 are not." No doubt a man may be a hireling, 
 in the sense of a man who works for hire, 
 and yet have as strong a sense of responsi- 
 bility as the actual owner. Most shepherds, 
 indeed, are hirelings in this sense. But the 
 hireling referred to here is a hireling and no 
 more. He thinks not of the charge, but 
 only of the reward. His aim is not the 
 
 ^ welfare of the flock, but his own enrichment. 
 
 i This is an old temptation to shepherds of 
 souls. "Woe be," says Ezekiel, "to the 
 shepherds of Israel that do feed themselves ! 
 should not the shepherds feed the flocks ? 
 Ye eat the fat, and ye clothe you with the 
 wool, ye kill them that are fed ; but ye feed 
 not the flock." "Their own shepherds," 
 says Zechariah, "pity them not." And 
 St. Peter warns his successors in the pastoral 
 
 75 
 
The Sevenfold I AM 
 
 office to " feed the flock of God • . . not by 
 constraint, but willingly ; not for filthy lucre, 
 but of a ready mind." Much, too, in 
 Milton's description given above applies 
 rather to the hireling than to the thief. 
 Trouble or danger at once reveals the hireling 
 in his true colours. The man who " careth 
 not for the sheep," who puts himself and not 
 his charge first, naturally seeks his own safety 
 when evil days come. While he perhaps would 
 not willingly harm the flock, he does not 
 feel bound to endanger his life in keeping 
 others from doing harm. Many of us who 
 would not do a fellow-man a positive injury 
 will not lift a finger to protect him from the 
 injuries inflicted by others. Here, as in the 
 parable of the Good Samaritan and else- 
 where, our Lord reminds us that sins of 
 omission may be as dangerous as those of 
 commission. In any position of trust it is 
 not enough to avoid being a thief. We 
 must also abhor the spirit of the hireling, 
 and regard the safety of those under 
 our charge as of greater consequence than 
 our own. 
 
 76 
 
Christ and Our Helplessness 
 
 2. The Good Shepherd. 
 
 As already stated, this means the real, the 
 true Shepherd, as against the false. The 
 proofs of His reality are two in number. 
 One is, "I am the Good Shepherd; the 
 Good Shepherd giveth His life for the sheep." 
 The other is, " I am the Good Shepherd, and 
 know My sheep, and am known of Mine." 
 We may call these proofs, respectively, self- 
 sacrifice and mutual confidence. 
 
 Self-sacrifice. — "I lay down My life for 
 the sheep." This brings us straight to the 
 heart of all Christ's work for man. Un- 
 like the thief, whose object was the sheep's 
 destruction and his own enrichment ; unlike 
 the hireling, who cared nothing for the sheep, 
 but everything for the safety of his own 
 skin : the Good Shepherd lays down His 
 life that the sheep may win theirs, that they 
 may be delivered from danger and may enter 
 into more abundant life. " All we like sheep 
 have gone astray ; we have turned every one 
 to his own way ; and the Lord hath laid on 
 Him the iniquity of us all." To help His 
 77 
 
The Sevenfold I AM 
 
 lost sheep, the Good Shepherd suffered death, 
 and that willingly. 
 
 " Lord, whence are those blood-drops all the way, 
 That mark out the mountain's track ? " 
 
 " They were shed for one who had gone astray. 
 Ere the Shepherd could bring him back." 
 
 " Lord, whence are Thy hands so rent and torn ? " 
 "They are pierced to-night by many a thorn." 
 
 "No man taketh it from Me, but I lay it 
 down of Myself. I have power to lay it 
 down, and I have power to take it again." 
 The "laying down " and "taking again " of 
 His life were both for our sakes ; that He 
 might work both for us and in us ; that He 
 might die for us and live for us. Here is 
 the central mystery and glory of our faith — 
 the sacrifice of very God for man. 
 
 Mutual confidence. — " I know My sheep, 
 and am known of Mine." Not only does 
 He know His own sheep from those which 
 are not, but knows them individually ; knows 
 them by name. Nor is the relation com- 
 plete until they too know Him. The 
 knowledge spoken of is by voice rather than 
 by appearance. It is told that a Scottish 
 traveller in Palestine, wishing to test the 
 
 78 
 
Christ and Our Helplessness 
 
 accuracy of these words, changed garments 
 with a shepherd whom he met under the 
 walls of Samaria. Thus disguised, he at- 
 tempted to call the sheep. But they would 
 not move. The true shepherd then raised 
 his voice, and, in spite of his unaccustomed 
 dress, they rallied to him at once. We are 
 apt sometimes to belittle the Intelligence of 
 sheep. But we might well take a lesson 
 from them in this respect. Let us learn to 
 know the voice of Christ ; to distinguish 
 His call from the beguiling voices of those 
 who wish our hurt ; to recognise Him even 
 when we meet Him in unexpected places 
 and in strange guise — hungry, sick, in prison. 
 Then will His words be literally as well as 
 ideally true, " I know Mine own, and Mine 
 own know Me, even as the Father knoweth 
 Me, and I know the Father.*' 
 
 ^> 
 
 If men were asked which of all our Lord's 
 / arns appealed most to the heart, there are 
 few who would not give the favourite place 
 to "I am the Good Shepherd." We may 
 follow a Light, we may enter a Door, we 
 79 
 
The Sevenfold I AM 
 
 may traverse a Way. But these symbols 
 are all inanimate things. They cannot, 
 owing to their inherent limitations, express 
 with any fulness what Christ is to us. When 
 we think of the infinite Love of Him Who 
 gave His life that we might live, and of the 
 infinite Wisdom of Him Who knows us 
 and bids us know Him, it is as the Good 
 Shepherd that He appeals to us. For among 
 the many other specially attractive features 
 of the symbolism of shepherd and flock, not 
 the least striking is this — that it brings so 
 clearly into view both our individual and 
 our social relations with Him. We cannot 
 read the allegory without seeing in it the 
 personal contact of every follower of Christ 
 with his Master. Sheep are prone to follow 
 each other ; but here they are represented 
 each as separately hearing the voice of the 
 shepherd, and each as the separate object of 
 the shepherd's care. But while this is so, 
 the unifying, consolidating influence of the 
 Shepherd is no less clearly marked. His 
 ideal is " one flock, one Shepherd " ; and it 
 is according as we own and follow the one 
 80 
 
Christ and Our Helplessness 
 
 Shepherd that we can ever become one flock. 
 " Sheep having no shepherd " are scattered 
 abroad ; the shepherd's presence and care 
 are necessary to the very existence of a flock 
 as such. " We being many are one body 
 in Christ, and every one members one of 
 another." 
 
V 
 
 CHRIST AND OUR FAINTNESS 
 
CHRIST AND OUR FAINTNESS 
 
 « I AM the Bread of Life ; he that cometh to Me shall 
 never hunger, and he that believeth on Me shall never 
 thirst." — St. John vi. 35. 
 
 On all the emblems under which our Lord 
 describes Himself as responding to human 
 need, none is more realistic than this one of 
 Bread. Bread is the general word we use 
 when we mean food. We call bread the 
 staff of life ; we speak of man's working for 
 his bread ; we pray, " Give us this day our 
 daily bread." And food represents man's 
 primary need as an animal being. Other 
 things he may make shift to do without ; 
 food he must have, or he dies. When Christ, 
 therefore, calls Himself our Bread, He uses 
 ^ the strongest figure at His command. He 
 means that He is what we want — nay, what 
 we must have — if wc would live. He is as 
 truly and essentially the proper food for the 
 
 85 
 
The Sevenfold I AM 
 
 human soul as the fruits of the earth are for 
 the human body. Upon our acceptance or 
 rejection of Him will depend our spiritual 
 life or death. 
 
 The Occasion. 
 
 Bread was much in the minds of those 
 who listened to our Lord as He said these 
 words. A great multitude had followed 
 Him, having seen the miracles which He did. 
 He had asked St. Philip, *' Whence shall we 
 buy bread, that these may eat ? " With the 
 five barley loaves and the two small fishes 
 He had wondrously fed the multitude, and 
 His disciples had filled twelve baskets with 
 the fragments that were left. It was on the 
 following day, after the night on which 
 Jesus had come to the relief of His dis- 
 tressed disciples on the lake, that the people, 
 finding Him, to their surprise, on the other 
 side, ask Him anxiously, '^When camest 
 Thou hither ? " In reply He taxes them 
 with a motive in seeking Him, which some 
 of them at least must have felt that they 
 deserved. ** Verily, verily, I say unto you, 
 86 
 
Christ and Our Faintness 
 
 ye seek Me, not because ye saw the signs, but 
 because ye did eat of the loaves, and were 
 filled." He adds the warning, " Labour not 
 for the meat which perisheth, but for that 
 meat which endureth to everlasting life." 
 
 These words constitute an introduction to 
 what follows, and furnish a very searching 
 preliminary test. Before going on to in- 
 quire as to how Christ is the Bread of Life 
 there is the prior question for each of us — 
 "Do I really want Bread of Life, or are my 
 aims exclusively material ? Even in my 
 desire to be connected with Christ and His 
 Church, am I thinking mainly of temporal 
 advantage — of what He can give me in the 
 way of position, or repute, or comfort in 
 this life ? " Missionaries tell us of the ex- 
 treme difficulty of knowing the real motives 
 of their would-be converts, and of the num- 
 bers who expect something in return for 
 their Christian profession, such as land, or 
 influence, or the redress of their wrongs. 
 We all need to put it very clearly before us 
 that we are to seek jfrj/, i.e. chiefly, the 
 kingdom of God and His righteousness. 
 
 87 
 
The Sevenfold I AM 
 
 All good gifts, it is true, come from above. 
 Our Saviour did not ignore the body ; He 
 came eating and drinking ; He provided 
 men with food and drink. But He makes 
 it clear that these are not His distinctive and 
 essential gifts. They are not what He came to 
 oiFer, nor what we must seek Him for. The 
 hunger and thirst He comes to satisfy are those 
 of the human spirit, and the first necessity is 
 that we really have that hunger and thirst. 
 
 Christ the Bread. 
 
 What is this heavenly food, then, that 
 Christ bids us seek ? It is Himself. " I 
 am the Bread of Life ; He that cometh to 
 Me shall never hunger, and he that believeth 
 on Me shall never thirst." By adding the 
 word " thirst " He makes the figure a more 
 perfect one, embracing the two great neces- 
 sities of food and drink. If our Lord never 
 actually says in so many words, " I am the 
 Water of Life," He says practically the same to 
 the woman of Samaria at the well, and also 
 to the people at the Feast of Tabernacles. 
 The parallel between food and drink is kept 
 88 
 
Christ and Our Faintness 
 
 up throughout His teaching. As He speaks 
 of living Bread, so He speaks of living Water. 
 His words here, ** If any man eat of this 
 Bread, he shall live for ever," correspond to 
 His words elsewhere, "The water that I 
 shall give him shall be in him a well of 
 water springing up into everlasting life," 
 We must take the word "Bread" in the 
 widest sense, indicating that He satisfies the 
 wants of the soul as completely as food and 
 drink satisfy those of the body. 
 
 In saying " I am the Bread of Life," our 
 Lord refers in the first place to His source 
 and being : where He comes from ; what 
 He is. In the second place, He refers to 
 His purpose and work : what He achieves ; 
 what He bestows. The Bread of Life 
 means the Bread which contains life in itself, 
 and which is therefore able to give life unto 
 the world. On the one hand, Christ comes 
 to us living, and from the source of life. 
 "I am the living Bread which came down 
 from heaven." On the other hand, He 
 comes to us that we may live, and that our 
 life may be eternal. "If any man eat of 
 
 89 
 
The Sevenfold I AM 
 
 this Bread, he shall live for ever." The 
 two ideas are intimately connected ; life 
 begets life. "The Bread of God is He 
 which {a) cometh down from heaven, and 
 {b) giveth life unto the world." "As {a) 
 the living Father hath sent Me, and I live 
 by the Father ; so (^) he that eateth Me, 
 even he shall live by Me." In a word, 
 the Bread of Life is both living and life- 
 giving. 
 
 I. Living Bread. 
 The Bread of Life means, first, the Bread 
 that comes to us living, and forms the source 
 of life. " I am the living Bread which came 
 down from heaven." He claims a heavenly 
 origin, a Divine ancestry. He compares and 
 contrasts Himself not only with the bread 
 with which He has just fed the multitude, 
 but with the manna by which God had sus- 
 tained His people in the wilderness. Some 
 of His hearers have referred to this manna, 
 quoting the words, " He gave them bread 
 from heaven to eat." Our Lord replies that 
 He is the true Bread from heaven, as superior 
 to the manna of the wilderness as to the 
 90 
 
Christ and Our Faintness 
 
 loaves of His own giving. The Jews mur- 
 mur at this, and ask how He can thus speak 
 of coming down from heaven. He is only 
 "Jesus the son of Joseph, whose father and 
 mother we know. How is it, then, that 
 He saith, ^ I came down from heaven ' ? '' In 
 reply, our Lord is extremely explicit as to 
 His heavenly origin. Six or seven times 
 throughout this discourse does He speak 
 of Himself as having " come down from 
 heaven.'* They had fallen into the common 
 error of thinking that what they knew of 
 His origin explained everything about Him. 
 Familiarity, as it often does, had bred con- 
 tempt. The prophet had no honour in his 
 own country. Nor are they the last who 
 have argued that because Jesus is human He 
 cannot be Divine. But men will argue in 
 this way about anything. They will say that 
 because man's body may have been evolved 
 from lower forms of life, his soul can have 
 no real existence. Or they will argue that 
 because a man has sprung from the people, 
 he cannot have refined feelings or noble 
 instincts. But God's ways of working are 
 91 
 
The Sevenfold I AM 
 
 not limited by any such rules. He can 
 make man in His own image, and so dis- 
 tinguish him from all the lower creation. 
 He can put the fire of genius in the 
 humblest peasant's soul. He can incarnate 
 Himself in all His fulness in one frail human 
 form. In Jesus Christ we find not only the 
 Bread, but the living, the heavenly Bread. 
 The best gift is that which contains in it 
 most of the giver ; and so God's best gift 
 to man is not a book or a rule, but a Life. 
 What God gives us in Christ is His own 
 Life, and that is why Christ can speak of 
 Himself as living and heavenly Bread. " In 
 Him we have God, and in Him we touch 
 the actual source of all life. In Him we have 
 the one thing within our reach which is not 
 earth-grown, the one uncorrupted source of 
 life to which we can turn from the inadequacy, 
 impurity, and emptiness of a sin-sick world." 
 
 2. LiFE-GiviNG Bread. 
 
 The words "Bread of Life," however, 
 mean more than this. They mean not only 
 that Christ has eternal life in Himself, but 
 92 
 
Christ and Our Faintness 
 
 that He is the source of eternal life in others. 
 " He that cometh to Me shall never hunger, 
 and he that believeth on Me shall never 
 thirst." " If any man eat of this Bread, he 
 shall live for ever." 
 
 Observe the condition attached to the 
 promise. It is described both metaphorically 
 and literally ; metaphorically by the word 
 "eateth," literally by "cometh" and "be- 
 lieveth." The one use of bread is to be 
 eaten, and the one way of benefiting by it is 
 to eat it. With food on the one side and 
 a hungry man on the other, eating is the 
 natural and necessary consequence. You 
 get no good by seeing or smelling or touch- 
 ing bread ; you can only benefit by eating 
 it, living on it, making it part of yourself. 
 This, as applied to our bodily life, seems 
 almost childishly simple. But it is what 
 many men completely fail to realise in the 
 spiritual life. Once be sure that Christ is 
 the Bread of Life — the true, the living, the 
 heavenly Bread — and then, surely, the only 
 safe and sane course is to feed upon Him, 
 to take His nature into yours, to fill yourself 
 93 
 
The Sevenfold I AM 
 
 with His fulness, to assimilate Him and be 
 partakers of Him. Yet that is where so 
 many of us fail. We look, we hear, we 
 touch, but we will not eat and live. We 
 talk about Christ, read about Him, sing to 
 Him, call ourselves by His name, associate 
 ourselves with His Church ; but we will 
 not come to Him that we may have life ; 
 we will not let Him dwell in us, occupy 
 us, transfigure us. What a power would 
 Christians exercise in the world did their lives 
 express the spirit of St. Patrick's hymn — 
 
 Christ be with me, Christ within me, 
 Christ behind me, Christ before me, 
 Christ beside me, Christ to win me, 
 Christ to comfort and restore me, 
 Christ beneath me, Christ above me, 
 Christ in quiet, Christ in danger, 
 Christ in hearts of all who love me, 
 Christ in mouth of friend and stranger. 
 
 Acceptance is the condition ; life is the 
 
 and. The living Bread, from a living God, 
 
 makes living men. "As the living Father 
 
 hath sent Me, and I live by the Father ; so 
 
 he that eateth Me, even he shall live by Me." 
 
 The bond is a living one throughout. 
 
 Christ's own meat and drink were to do the 
 
 94 
 
Christ and Our Faintness 
 
 will of Him that sent Him, and ours must 
 be to do the will of Him that has sent us. 
 The result will be — life ; the only life worth 
 living. 
 
 The life, too, will be an eternal one ; for 
 this is a point on which our Lord insists 
 with the most marked emphasis. If there is 
 anything more emphatic than His reiteration 
 of the phrase " I came down from heaven,'' 
 it is His assurance of immortality contained 
 in such words as " He shall live for ever," 
 " He shall never die," " I will raise him up 
 at the last day." The bread with which He 
 had fed the multitude, wondrous though it 
 might be, was only " meat which perisheth '' ; 
 the other was " meat which endureth." Nay, 
 the very manna given in the wilderness — 
 bread from heaven though it was — was bread 
 of which their fathers had eaten and were 
 dead ; whereas " he that eateth of this Bread 
 shall live for ever." It must always be so. 
 Live on what is temporary, evanescent, fleet- 
 ing, and you yourself will become a mere 
 creature of a day, possessing nothing that can 
 endure to the end, no fruit that can remain. 
 95 
 
The Sevenfold I AM 
 
 Live on what is permanent, eternal, immortal, 
 and you yourself will have a place among the 
 immortals ; you will have that within you 
 which cannot die. " The world passeth away, 
 and the lust thereof ; but he that doeth the 
 will of God abideth for ever.'* Poets and 
 alchemists have dreamed of an elixir of life, 
 by drinking which a man could secure per- 
 petual life and youth. But Christ affords 
 the only elixir that will not disappoint or 
 embitter us. " If any man eat of this Bread, 
 he shall live for ever.'* Apart from Him 
 there is no immortality. Take His life into 
 yours and you cannot die. You are one 
 with God, because you live on Him Who 
 lives on God. 
 
 Life through Death. 
 
 It is significant that in the latter part of 
 His discourse our Lord finds even the word 
 ^' Bread " insufficient to express His meaning, 
 and changes it to a stronger and more specific 
 term — "flesh." "The bread which I will 
 give is My flesh, which I will give for the 
 life of the world." This expression seemed 
 
 96 
 
Christ and Our Faintness 
 
 to those who heard it even more harsh and 
 strange than the former. They had " mur- 
 mured at Him " when He called Himself 
 the Bread from heaven. They now " strove 
 among themselves, saying, How can this 
 man give us his flesh to eat ? " Yet there 
 was a reason for the transition from the one 
 term to the other. While bread and flesh 
 both mean food, there is this difi^erence 
 between them, that flesh can become our 
 food only through death. What is death to 
 the one being is life to the other. We have 
 already seen how the Bread of Life is both 
 living and life-giving ; life-giving because 
 living. But it is only now that we are given 
 the real connection between the two. It is 
 by giving up His life that Christ gives life 
 to others. Jesus had already contrasted 
 Himself with the bread He had given to the 
 hungry people, and with the manna rained 
 from heaven in the wilderness. Here, how- 
 ever, He compares Himself to another and 
 still more sacred food. This was the lamb 
 of the paschal service, whose flesh was eaten 
 by the people, and whose blood was sprinkled 
 o 97 
 
The Sevenfold I AM 
 
 on their houses, In memory of God's de- 
 liverance. When He says, " The bread that 
 I will give is My flesh, which I will give for 
 the life of the world," He is expressing the 
 same truth emphasised in His later words, 
 "This is My Body, which is broken for 
 you. • . . This is My Blood of the new 
 covenant, which is shed for many for the 
 remission of sins." The law of death-in- 
 life finds its full expression in the sacrifice 
 of Jesus Christ. He became poor that we 
 might be rich ; He suffered that we might 
 reign ; He died that we might live. 
 
 Thine the sharp thorns, and mine the golden crown : 
 Mine the life won, and Thine the life laid down. 
 
 Had Jesus merely spoken of our eating the 
 Bread, we might have imagined that He was but 
 referring to our copying the example of His 
 earthly life. But when He speaks of our 
 eating His flesh and drinking His blood, 
 He touches a principle deeper and more 
 vital. We are to believe on Him as the 
 One Who died for us and lives again. We 
 are to appropriate His sacrifice and make it 
 
 98 
 
Christ and Our ^^.ainxnc&§ 
 
 our own. We are to act out in practice the 
 beautifully suggestive words of St. Paul : 
 "Always bearing about in the body the 
 dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of 
 Jesus might be made manifest in our body." 
 
 Christ the Bread of Life, then, means to 
 us the indwelling Christ — the Christ in man. 
 What is it that gives the Sacrament of the 
 Holy Communion its eternal vitality ? What 
 makes it, under all forms and in spite of all 
 controversies, the service of the Church ? 
 Largely, no doubt, our Saviour's command, 
 "This do in remembrance of Me." But 
 this only takes us a step farther back. Why 
 was the command given ? we ask with all 
 reverence. Why was this act, of all others, 
 perpetuated ? Surely because it responds to 
 an essential want in man's nature — that he 
 must eat in order to live. Man's principal 
 need is not a strength without but a strength 
 within ; not a strength on which he must 
 lean, but a strength by which he can stand. 
 We are not merely to admire and follow 
 Christ, but to possess Him re-incarnate 
 99 
 
: ;Tbe: Scyc^^^ I AM 
 
 within our own being. In Christ the Good 
 Shepherd we have a Guide, a Friend. We 
 know His voice, we feel His hand, we lean 
 on His bosom. But in Christ the Bread of 
 Life we can have Him within ourselves. 
 His voice rings out in ours ; His mark is 
 on our forehead, His grace in our counten- 
 ance, His strength in our arm. "Should 
 any one,'* said the great German reformer, 
 ^' knock at my breast and say, 'Who lives 
 here ? ' I should reply, ' Not Martin Luther, 
 but the Lord Jesus.' " Let us cling fast, 
 then, to the truth expressed in the words, 
 " I am the Bread of Life." Let us find in 
 Christ the satisfaction, the nourishment, the 
 strength of the soul. Let us see in Him 
 the true, the living, the heavenly, the en- 
 during Bread. Let us realise what He gives 
 us, and how He lays down His life that it 
 may be the source of new life in us. As 
 He gives, let us receive. Making Him our 
 very own, feeding on Him, strengthened by 
 Him, we shall receive out of His fulness the 
 gift of everlasting Life. 
 
 lOO 
 
CHRIST AND OUR BARRENNESS 
 
VI 
 
 CHRIST AND OUR BARRENNESS 
 
 " I AM the Vine, ye are the branches : he thatabideth 
 in Me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit ; 
 for without Me ye can do nothing." — St. John xv. 5. 
 
 The allegory of the True Vine is, in a 
 sense, complementary to that of the Bread 
 of Life, and expresses a different side of 
 the same truth. Both of them are designed 
 to show that intimate union of Christ with 
 His people of which the Sacrament is the 
 sign and seal : the truth that they dwell in 
 Him and He in them. But while the 
 figure of Bread is best adapted for showing 
 the one side of this relationship, the figure 
 of the Vine best shows the other. The 
 message of the Bread of Life is " Christ in 
 us " ; the message of the True Vine is " we 
 in Christ." As partakers of the Bread, we 
 take Christ into ourselves, and have Him 
 103 
 
The Sevenfold I AM 
 
 dwelling within us. As branches of the 
 Vine we are grafted into Him, merge our 
 lives in His, and participate in His Divine 
 life. 
 
 This distinction carries us farther than 
 we are apt to think. For it is here that 
 we realise for the first time how our relation 
 to Christ takes us beyond the mere satisfy- 
 ing of our own wants. Hitherto it has 
 been because we could get so little good 
 elsewhere that we came to Christ. Here, 
 on the contrary, it is because we can do so 
 little good otherwise that we come to Christ. 
 Hitherto, while no doubt the good of others 
 has been implied, the satisfying of our own 
 wants has been the chief end and aim. 
 Christ has offered Himself as a Light to our 
 darkness, a Door which we may enter, a 
 Way by which to travel, a Shepherd whom 
 we may know and follow. And in the 
 great allegory of the Bread of Life He has 
 said, "He that cometh to Me shall never 
 hunger, and he that believeth in Me shall 
 never thirst." But our present allegory is 
 quite different. It is not " He that abideth 
 104 
 
Christ and Our Barrenness 
 
 in Me, the same shall eat much fruit," but 
 " he that abideth in Me and I in him, the 
 same bringeth forth much fruit." We are 
 not to be consumers, but producers. We 
 are to measure life " not by the wine drunk, 
 but the wine poured forth." Not our 
 faintness, but our barrenness, is the chief 
 trouble here. "Eat fruit and live" ex- 
 presses a great truth ; but " Bear fruit and 
 live " expresses a greater. Our coming to 
 Christ is to lead us far beyond ourselves. 
 We are not only to be disciples ; we 
 are to be apostles. Faith without works is 
 dead. Privilege cannot be divorced from 
 responsibility. Freely we have received ; 
 let us freely give. Gladly would we learn ; 
 let us gladly teach. 
 
 The lesson, no doubt, is not entirely 
 new. We have had glimpses of it in what 
 was said of the Light and the Shepherd. 
 But here for the first time is fruit-bearing 
 put in the foreground. We need not 
 therefore be surprised that this / am 
 was spoken later than the others, or that it 
 was one of those spoken to the inner circle, 
 105 
 
The Sevenfold I AM 
 
 not to the multitude. Its appeal is to those 
 who have advanced some little way in the 
 Christian life ; to those who, having been 
 helped, are prepared to become helpers in 
 turn. 
 
 The Occasion. 
 
 It is perhaps just for this reason that our 
 Lord here makes use of the figure of the 
 Vine, though other causes may have con- 
 tributed to bring it to His mind. He had 
 alluded to the Vine in instituting the Holy 
 Supper, saying that He would drink no more 
 of its fruit until He drank it new with His 
 disciples in His Father's Kingdom. In the 
 valley of the Kedron, where He walked with 
 them shortly afterwards, there were vines 
 with spreading branches ; and over the gate- 
 way of the Temple there was a wreath of 
 golden vines with large clusters of grapes. 
 Often had Israel been compared by the 
 prophets to a vine or a vineyard. And one 
 reason for this lay in the fact that the vine, 
 more than any other tree, has the production 
 of fruit as its one end and aim. Eliminate 
 the fruit, and its usefulness is at an end. 
 io6 
 
Christ and Our Barrenness 
 
 Ezeklel gives a striking parable of a vine — 
 a fruitless vine. " Shall wood," he says, 
 " be taken thereof to do any work ? or will 
 man take a pin of it to hang any vessel 
 thereon ? Is it meet for any work ? " The 
 sole end of the vine is the producing of 
 fruit ; and for this it is cut and pruned and 
 held back in every other way. Nothing 
 could better suggest the sacrifice, the de- 
 votion, the consecration of a true Christian 
 life. And therefore Christ 
 
 did not choose the summer corn, 
 That shoots up straight and free in one quick growth, 
 And has its day, and is done, and springs no more ; 
 Nor yet the olive, all whose boughs are spread 
 In the soft air, and never lose a leaf. 
 Flowering and fruitful in perpetual peace; 
 But only this for Him and His in one, 
 The everlasting, ever-quickening Vine, 
 That gives the heat and passion of the world, 
 Through its own life-blood, still renewed and shed. 
 
 Christ the Vine : We the Branches. 
 
 In what our Lord says of the Vine and 
 the branches, He dwells less upon Himself 
 than in any of the other figures wc have 
 107 
 
The Sevenfold I AM 
 
 Studied. While He says, " I am the True 
 Vine, and My Father is the Husbandman," 
 the main interest of the picture is made to 
 centre in the branches. The message He 
 gives is a bracing rather than a soothing 
 one. It is an invitation to work, not to rest 
 On the branches is thrown the responsibility 
 not only for their own usefulness, but for 
 the credit of the Vine and the Husbandman. 
 It is through the branches alone that the 
 Vine can work, and on them that its success 
 must largely depend. In the branches' ful- 
 filment of their task lies the ethical import 
 of the parable. 
 
 The functions of a branch, as here set 
 forth, are two in number, and they are very 
 closely and intimately connected. One is, 
 to bring forth fruit ; the other is, to abide 
 in the Vine. Every branch, to fulfil its 
 proper end, must do both. The branch 
 stands midway between stem and fruit, 
 deriving life from the one, and communicat- 
 ing it to the other. Its business is at once 
 to get and to give ; to derive sap from the 
 true source, and to impart this in some 
 io8 
 
Christ and Our Barrenness 
 
 form to the fruit. So must It be with all 
 Christian profession and service. In It all 
 there must be a getting and a giving. We 
 cannot communicate to others what we have 
 not ourselves received. Nothing can flow 
 out where nothing has flowed In. "As the 
 branch cannot bear fruit of Itself, except It 
 abide In the Vine ; no more can ye, except 
 ye abide In Me." Yet we cannot properly 
 receive without being ready to give. " He 
 that abldeth In Me and I In him, the same 
 bringeth forth much fruit." 
 
 I. Bring forth Fruit. 
 
 No more Important lesson could have 
 been put before the apostles at that hour. 
 The personal ministry of Jesus on earth was 
 about to close, and theirs was about to 
 begin. There was an Immense work ahead 
 of them, of which as yet only the firstfrults 
 had been gathered. Fruit, then, was the 
 end at which they must aim. And what 
 holds good of them holds good of us. " By 
 their fruits ye shall know them," our Lord 
 had said ; and by fruits men, like trees, are 
 109 
 
The Sevenfold I AM 
 
 known still. The world is becoming less 
 and less satisfied with anything short of 
 fruits. High-sounding titles with no reality 
 behind them ; offices of profit with no 
 corresponding duty — the days of such things 
 are numbered. And the demand for fruits 
 is surely a reasonable one. Carlyle's " What 
 hast thou done, and how ? Out with it — let 
 us see thy work ! '* is a test which no one, 
 least of all the follower of Christ, has any 
 right to resent. For it is not only the world 
 that asks for fruits. God asks for fruits, 
 and He is a far better judge than the world 
 as to whether fruits are of the right kind. 
 Our Lord accordingly draws a sharp dis- 
 tinction between the branches which bear 
 fruit and those which do not. Fruitfulness 
 is to be the all-important test ; and on the 
 presence or absence of it our fate is to 
 depend. 
 
 barren branches. — "Every branch in Me 
 that beareth not fruit He taketh away." No 
 branch of a fruit-tree has the right to be 
 merely ornamental. No follower of Christ 
 is allowed to be inactive. If we are not 
 no 
 
Christ and Our Barrenness 
 
 helping His work, we are hindering it. We 
 are not only doing no good ; we are doing 
 positive harm. We are taking up the place 
 that might be occupied by others who would 
 do better work than we, and the sooner we 
 are taken away the better for that work, 
 "To go through life," says Froude, "and 
 plead at the end of it that we have not 
 broken any of the commandments, is but 
 what the unprofitable servant did who kept 
 his talent carefully unspent, and yet was 
 sent to outer darkness for his uselessness." 
 It is true that God has infinite patience. 
 But there comes a limit to the opportunities 
 a man ought to have. The fig-tree that 
 bears nothing but leaves is doomed. The 
 candlestick that carries no light Is removed 
 out of its place. So must the barren branch 
 be removed. The tree is not dependent on 
 the life of any one branch. 
 
 God doth not need 
 Either man's work or His own gifts 
 
 He can accomplish His purposes quite 
 
 well without us ; we are not indispensable. 
 
 If we fail to produce /ruit, ours will be the 
 
 III 
 
The Sevenfold I AM 
 
 penalty ; we shall simply be taken away, 
 passed over, done without. The vine will 
 flourish, but we shall have no part in its 
 flourishing. Those who live for self, and 
 not for others and for Christ, are not wanted ; 
 they are of no use in the kingdom of God. 
 
 Fruitful branches. — "Every branch that 
 beareth fruit. He purgeth it, that it may 
 bring forth more fruit." We must not com- 
 plain if we are not rewarded at once when 
 we do well. Part of the branch may have 
 to be removed that the rest may do better 
 work ; trials often only begin when we 
 determine to do right. But just as fire tries 
 the gold, and turns iron into the finer steel, 
 and as pruning helps the fruit, so has many 
 a man been helped by the trouble God has 
 sent him. Pascal turned his ill-health into 
 a means of spiritual perfection. Wesley 
 accepted the wreck of his domestic happiness 
 as another call to his public work. John 
 Henry Shorthouse regarded the painful 
 stammer from which he suffered as a means 
 of concentrating his energies on literature. 
 If our end and aim be fruit-bearing, we 
 
 XI2 
 
Christ and Our Barrenness 
 
 must be prepared to put happiness or un- 
 happiness on one side as of comparatively 
 little account. "I never allow myself," said 
 Gladstone, " in regard to my public life, to 
 dwell upon the fact that a thing is painful. 
 Indeed, life has no time for such broodings." 
 After all, we are not here for pleasure but 
 for work ; and much that is pleasant, and 
 even beautiful of its kind, may have to be 
 given up that the one end may be served. 
 The choice is here put plainly before us. 
 We must be thrown aside as useless, or else 
 tried in order to greater efficiency in the 
 Master's service. Let us choose the higher 
 and harder path. 
 
 Fruit-bearing, however, is dependent on a 
 prior condition. 
 
 2. Abide in the Vine. 
 
 This watchword was no less necessary for 
 the apostles than the other. There was to 
 be no loosening of the tie that bound them 
 to their Lord. Bewildered as they were by 
 the tidings that He was soon to leave them, 
 the bond between Him and them must be 
 H 113 
 
The Sevenfold I AM 
 
 Strengthened, not. relaxed. They must 
 realise that His bodily absence really involved 
 a spiritual presence. Henceforth He was to 
 be nearer them than when on earth. His 
 Holy Spirit, the Comforter, was to dwell 
 with them and enter into them. But there 
 must be two sides to every spiritual relation- 
 ship. The prayer, " Abide with us," cannot 
 be answered unless the command, " Abide in 
 Me," is obeyed. The unity between Christ 
 and His people must be a real one — a unity of 
 spirit and life. A branch plucked from the 
 tree may, like flowers gathered for a nosegay, 
 look well for a time, but its real life is gone. 
 " Th€ branch cannot bear fruit of itself." 
 To realise this is a crying necessity in our 
 busy age. The life of any earnest man be- 
 comes so full of outward activities that it is 
 quite possible for the servant of Christ to 
 become so concerned over so-called fruit- 
 bearing as to lose sight of Christ's other 
 command, " Abide in Me." Even William 
 Wilberforce's celebrated retort to the lady 
 who asked him, in the midst of his self- 
 denying work, whether he ever took thought 
 114 
 
Christ and Our Barrenness 
 
 for his soul — " Madam, I had forgotten I 
 had one " — is not altogether to be com- 
 mended. If fruit is to be real, the branch 
 must abide in the Vine. The life for Christ 
 can only be blessed if it is also a life in 
 Christ. 
 
 These words of our Lord, " Abide in Me," 
 bring into view a deeper distinction between 
 branches than even that afforded by the 
 presence or absence of fruit. If the barren 
 be opposed to the fruitful branch, still more 
 sharply opposed to one another are the dead 
 branches and the living. 
 
 Dead branches. — " If a man abide not in Me, 
 he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered ; 
 and men gather them, and cast them into 
 the fire, and they are burned." A branch 
 that was merely barren might be spared for a 
 time ; but a dead one never. " Without 
 Me ye can do nothing." A Christian without 
 Christ is like a severed limb or a broken 
 twig — good for nothing, and possessing no 
 life. Yet individuals and even Churches 
 may be found in this condition. "Thou 
 hast a name that thou livest," says the 
 115 
 
The Sevenfold I AM 
 
 Lord's messenger to the Church In Sardis, 
 "and art dead." It was a Church "on 
 paper " ; it had lost all reality, because it had 
 lost touch with Christ. It was like a dead 
 branch, differing from it only In this, that it 
 was not beyond the power of Christ's reviv- 
 ing hand. It is sad to think that there have 
 been branches of the Vine not only barren, 
 but dead. Only by abiding In Him can we 
 maintain our spiritual life. Apart from Him 
 we not only fail in our influence over others ; 
 we are devoid of life in ourselves. We are 
 like salt that has lost its savour ; like 
 branches that have lost their sap. To be 
 cast forth, gathered, burned — not even as 
 fuel, but as a waste-heap — is all that such 
 branches are good for. 
 
 Living branches. — " If ye abide in Me, and 
 My words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye 
 will, and It shall be done unto you." The 
 Idea Involved here is greater than can well 
 be confined within the fetters of an allegory — 
 even such an allegory as that of the True 
 Vine. The framework Is discarded when it 
 has served Its purpose. Christ speaks here 
 ii6 
 
Christ and Our Barrenness 
 
 of living members rather than of living 
 branches. It is when there is unity of life 
 between Christ and His people — when He 
 is in them and they are in Him — that they 
 get from Him the strength they need. As 
 a living branch can draw from the Vine 
 sufficient strength for its needs, so there are 
 no limits to the strength which the man who 
 " abides in Christ " can draw from Him. 
 We have but to " ask what we will." And 
 the best thing of all we can ask is a fuller 
 measure of that self-sacrificing love which is 
 in Himself, that we may bring forth the 
 Vine's own fruit. Each one of us has it in 
 his power to become, in the words of Whit- 
 field about Isaac Watts, "a bit of Christ." 
 The worth of our influence on others will be 
 measured by the extent of Christ's influence 
 on us. As we realise our own helplessness 
 and barrenness, we shall rely more and more 
 upon the fountain of strength within. To 
 Christ's words, *' Without Me ye can do 
 nothing," we shall add these of St. Paul, 
 "I can do all things through Christ which 
 strengtheneth me." 
 
 117 
 
The Sevenfold I AM 
 
 "I am the Vine" is perhaps the most 
 closely-reasoned and suggestive of all the 
 allegories of our Lord about Himself. A 
 recapitulation of its main features may be 
 helpful. Christ is the Vine, His Father the 
 Husbandman, His people the branches. 
 These branches must (i) bring forth fruit \ 
 they must not be {a) barren — else they may 
 be *^ taken away " — but {U) fruitful — even 
 though they may have to be purged to 
 ensure greater fruitfulness. To accomplish 
 this, they must (2) abide in the Vine : they 
 must not be {a) dead — else they will be cast 
 out and burned — but {U) living — that they 
 may receive from the Vine the strength they 
 need. 
 
 The picture is a vivid one, and whether 
 we have rightly interpreted all its details or 
 not, it brings into prominence the two 
 essentials of the Christian life — union with 
 Christ and service for man. These it 
 focuses in the two commands, "Abide in 
 Me," and "Bring forth fruit." There we 
 have life in Christ and life for Christ ; the 
 one enabling us to say " Whose I am," the 
 118 
 
Christ and Our Barrenness 
 
 other " Whom I serve." As the life of the 
 Vine abides in the branches and the branches 
 in the Vine, so must Christians dwell in 
 Christ and Christ in them. And as the 
 branches are the only means whereby the 
 Vine can produce its fruit, so are Christians 
 the means whereby the life and power of 
 Christ are to be communicated to the world. 
 While the Christian life is hid with Christ in 
 God, its fruits are known and tasted of men. 
 
 119 
 
VII 
 CHRIST AND OUR DEADNESS 
 
VII 
 CHRIST AND OUR DEADNESS 
 
 *< I AM the Resurrection, and the Life : he that be- 
 lieveth in Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live : 
 and whosoever liveth, and believeth in Me, shall never 
 die." — St. John xi. 25. 
 
 "I AM the Resurrection and the Life." 
 Such are the solemn triumphant words 
 which we have heard read at many a burial 
 service, converting what would otherwise be 
 a ceremony of utter darkness and gloom 
 into an observance of sober joy and hope. 
 Spoken in the presence of death and the 
 grave, they serve to remind us of Him who 
 has robbed the one of its sting and the other 
 of its victory. They take us back to the 
 hour when they were first uttered — the hour 
 when the Lord of Life showed a sorrowing 
 woman His power over death. They bid us 
 think, too, of that hour when other sorrow- 
 ing women, standing by another tomb, heard 
 123 
 
The Sevenfold I AM 
 
 the words, " I know that ye seek Jesus, which 
 was crucified. He is not here, for He is 
 risen, as He said." 
 
 We must have already been struck by the 
 fact that the various gifts offered by our 
 Lord for the satisfaction of our human needs 
 all consist of life in some one or other of its 
 forms. Does He call Himself the Light ? 
 " He shall have the Light of Life." Or the 
 Way ? " I am the Way, the Truth, and the 
 Life." Or the Shepherd ? " I am come 
 that they might have Life." Or the Bread ? 
 " I am the Bread of Life." Even where not 
 expressed, the idea is implied. It is Life to 
 which the Door gives entrance ; Life that 
 unites Vine and branches. And now the 
 Life which has triumphed over hunger, 
 thirst, darkness, barrenness, triumphs over 
 its great enemy, death. In the presence of 
 the dreadest fact of all, Christ makes His 
 highest claim, calls on faith to make its final 
 venture, bids His people trust Him to the 
 uttermost. He who is the Light of life, the 
 Way of life, the Shepherd of life, the Bread of 
 life, is now " The Resurrection and the Life." 
 124 
 
Christ and Our Deadness 
 
 Christ the Resurrection and the Life. 
 
 It Is important to observe, by way of 
 analysis, that the verse in which our Lord 
 makes this claim has two clauses, and that 
 each of them is in its turn divided, the 
 division in the second clause corresponding 
 to the division in the first. The first clause 
 is about Christ Himself ; the second is 
 about His people. The first begins with " I 
 am " ; the second with " He that believeth 
 in Me." The first gives us two names for 
 Christ ; the second gives us two facts about 
 His people which correspond to these names. 
 The two names are Resurrection and Life. 
 To the first name, " I am the Resurrection," 
 correspond the words, " He that believeth 
 in Me, though he were dead, yet shall he 
 live." To the second name, " I am the 
 Life, " correspond the words, " Whosoever 
 liveth, and believeth in Me, shall never die." 
 
 Before studying the two names separately, 
 
 it is worth while to notice the words " I am," 
 
 which cover both the names in the first 
 
 clause, and the words " he that believeth in 
 
 125 
 
The Sevenfold I AM 
 
 Me," which cover both the facts in the 
 second. His claim is not primarily, " I give 
 you," but "I am." He gives of Himself. 
 As a sovereign confers a title in virtue of 
 being the fountain of honour, so Christ con- 
 fers life as being Himself the Fountain of 
 life. In this interview Martha has spoken to 
 Him of a resurrection at the last day ; but 
 He would lead her from trust in a future 
 event to trust in a living Person. Victory 
 over death is His personal work. Our 
 hopes of immortality are centred in Christ. 
 Our trust in Him carries us beyond trust 
 in His promises. Faith does not mean our 
 belief that He will do this or that for us, 
 but our belief in Himself. We believe that 
 a promise will be kept because we believe 
 in the one who makes the promise. So 
 with Christ it is / am^ not I give. " He 
 that belie veth in {Me^' not in My gifts. 
 Faith in the Person is what involves faith in 
 the promises. The best illustration of this 
 is given in the words that follow. He asks, 
 "Believest thou this?" Martha's answer 
 practically amounts to saying, "I do more 
 126 
 
Christ and Our Deadncss 
 
 than believe this — I believe Thee^ "Yea, 
 Lord," she says, " I believe that Thou art the 
 Christ, the Son of God, which should come 
 into the world." Christ is the Fountain of 
 immortality, and he that is united to Christ 
 is partaker of His immortality. The gift 
 held out in " I am " is accepted by " whoso- 
 ever believeth in Me." 
 
 The two names which our Lord here gives 
 Himself indicate respectively two sides of 
 His work : His power of raising the dead to 
 life, and His power of preserving the living 
 from death. " I am the Resurrection . . . 
 he that believeth in Me, though he were 
 dead, yet shall he live." "I am the Life 
 . . . whosoever liveth, and believeth in Me, 
 shall never die." 
 
 I. The Resurrection. 
 
 This name implies and takes into account 
 the great fact of death — a fact never to be 
 lightly passed over. If some of the heathen 
 moralists were wont to bestow too much 
 thought on death, that was better far than 
 belittling or ignoring it. It is told of the 
 127 
 
The Sevenfold I AM 
 
 Sultan Saladin that when he sat in state, sur- 
 rounded by banners and trophies, there was 
 hung above them all the banner of Death, 
 with the words, "Saladin, king of kings — 
 Saladin, victor of victors — Saladin must die." 
 While it is morbid to be always dwelling on 
 death, it is good for us at times, as Samuel 
 Rutherford put it, to " forefancy our death- 
 bed." And our Lord's words were not 
 spoken with any indifference as to death. He 
 who spoke them wept, groaned, was troubled, 
 ere He could perform His work of mercy 
 and power. Even in the moment of lighten- 
 ing the world's sorrow He felt deeply what 
 that sorrow was. " It is not with a heart of 
 stone that the dead are raised." That very 
 fact gives additional significance to His 
 words. Death is mighty, but Christ is 
 mightier. We can realise the mingled fear 
 and joy of those who first heard that He 
 could not be holden of death — that He was 
 the living, the risen Lord. For it is on His 
 own Resurrection that the very existence of 
 His Church depends. "If Christ be not 
 risen, then is our preaching vain, and your 
 128 
 
Christ and Our Deadness 
 
 faith is also vain." His work did not end 
 with the Cross. He was no mere martyr 
 suffering at the hands of wicked men. There 
 was a Divine purpose in His sacrifice, and that 
 sacrifice was not complete until His victory 
 over sin and death had been accomplished. 
 
 As Christ is "The Resurrection" in 
 virtue of having personally overcome death, 
 He is also " The Resurrection " as the 
 pledge of immortality in His followers. 
 " He that believeth in Me, though he were 
 dead, yet shall he live." " If we believe," 
 writes St. Paul, " that Jesus died and rose 
 again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus 
 will God bring with Him." There have, it 
 is true, been hopes of immortality apart from 
 Christ. Men have felt that the powers God 
 has given them are too good to be allowed 
 to perish as if they had never been ; that the 
 love which cements the hearts of husband 
 and wife, brother and sister, parent and child, 
 will not be left without its final satisfaction. 
 But not until Christ had overcome death was 
 the foundation laid of that firm trust which 
 can look calmly and confidently through the 
 I 129 
 
The Sevenfold I AM 
 
 gate of death to the undiscovered country be- 
 yond. A firm belief in God and a firm hope 
 of immortality go hand in hand ; and the 
 same Lord who revealed the face of God as 
 it had never been revealed before, showed 
 I man also his own true dignity as born to 
 i hold eternal fellowship with God. Hence 
 the appropriate symbols on a Christian tomb 
 are not the urn, the death's head, or the 
 broken column, signifying nothing but cor- 
 ruption and decay, but rather the shield of 
 faith, the anchor of hope, the cross of redemp- 
 tion ; and their most becoming inscriptions 
 are not those which extol the virtues of the 
 departed, but those which speak of belief in 
 I a world to come. The Christian hope 
 centres in the Person of Christ. He pro- 
 claims Himself here as the embodiment of 
 that hope, and by His own Resurrection the 
 promise was sealed. We date our assurance 
 of immortality from the hour 
 
 When from the grave He sprang at dawn of morn, 
 And led through boundless air thy conquering road, 
 Leaving a glorious track, where saints, new-born. 
 Might fearless follow to their blest abode. 
 130 
 
Christ and Our Deadncss 
 
 \ But the name "Resurrection," as applied 
 to Christ, covers more than His victory over 
 physical death, either for Himself or for 
 / His followers. In His teaching, especially 
 as interpreted by St. John, death is scarcely 
 ever thought of in a purely physical sense. 
 He sometimes even discouraged the use of 
 the word to signify the dissolution of the 
 body, preferring to employ the term " sleep." 
 It is not, then, merely from death of this 
 sort that Christ delivers His people. He 
 has come to raise men from the spiritual 
 j death in which they are involved, and to 
 / make them partakers of the divine life of 
 \ fellowship with God. Those who hear Him 
 and believe in God are described as having 
 " passed from death unto life " ; and St. 
 John uses the same expression in his first 
 Epistle to indicate those who, by their love 
 to the brethren, show that they have under- 
 gone the same change. All His saving of 
 the lost — all His response to our needs and 
 sicknesses — all His work as the Way, the 
 Bread, the Door, the Light, the Shepherd — 
 may be regarded as part of the Resurrection- 
 131 
 
The Sevenfold I AM 
 
 work of Christ. In all that we do to raise 
 men from a life of sin to a life of righteous- 
 ness — from trust in themselves to union 
 with Christ — we are aiding Him in the same 
 work. "He that believeth in Me, though 
 he were dead, yet shall he live.'* 
 
 2. The Life. 
 
 i 
 
 Resurrection is an act ; Life a condition. 
 Resurrection points back to a previous state 
 of life ; it is life re-assumed after temporary 
 withdrawal. Christ is the Restorer of life 
 because He is the Giver of life ; and He is 
 the Giver of life because He has life in Him- 
 self. " In Him was life ; and the life was 
 the light of men." His Resurrection was 
 but His re-assumption of what was His from 
 the beginning. Wondrous fact though it 
 was, it was not the greatest and most cardinal 
 fact Greater still is His possession from 
 eternity of the Divine life. Life is the most 
 difficult of all things to define, and many 
 have been man's attempts to explain its 
 meaning and origin. The Christian view 
 places the source of all life in God. " The 
 132 
 
Christ and Our Deadness 
 
 system," writes Professor Flint, "of which 
 the first word is. In the beginning there was 
 nothing except space and atoms, has for its 
 last word. Eternal Death ; as the system of 
 which the first word is, In the beginning 
 God created the heavens and the earth, has 
 for its last word. Eternal Life." God is the 
 source of all personality and life, and all the 
 fulness of God's life is present in Christ 
 
 "I am the Life . . . whosoever liveth 
 and believeth in Me, shall never die." As 
 Christ can restore the dead to life, so He 
 can preserve the living from death. As salt 
 has at once a quickening and a preserving 
 power — a power to maintain as well as a 
 power to bestow — so Christ, the Life, can 
 make us partakers of His life, and preserve 
 us from death. The life of the believer In 
 Christ is ever striking its roots deeper and 
 deeper, ever getting nearer and nearer to the 
 source of life. Jesus can truly say, therefore, 
 that such a man shall never die ; for while 
 his life on earth must end, the higher life by 
 which he is united to Christ is immortal. 
 When we fully realise what life in Christ 
 ^33 
 
The Sevenfold I AM 
 
 may mean, it will seem almost absurd to 
 think that the close of earthly existence can 
 terminate it. 
 
 From this it is obvious that Life, like 
 Resurrection, cannot possibly be used here in 
 any merely physical sense. It must transcend 
 any such idea as the mere prolongation of 
 existence. While the promise of Christ 
 doubtless includes immortality, it includes 
 far more. It means life on a higher plane, 
 life hid with Christ in God. It means 
 fellowship with God, and participation in 
 His nature. It unfolds the idea dimly 
 present to the mind of Abigail when she 
 said to David, " The soul of my lord shall 
 be bound in the bundle of life with the Lord 
 thy God." Christ draws a line, not so 
 much between present and future, as between 
 higher and lower. The gulf between this 
 world and the next is less wide than that 
 which here and now separates life with God 
 from life without God. " He that hath the 
 Son hath Life ; and he that hath not the Son 
 of God hath not Life." 
 
 Thus, if the act of turning to Christ is 
 
 134 
 
Christ and Our Deadness 
 
 necessary for our restoration to life, the 
 condition of abiding in Him is equally 
 necessary for the preserving of our life. As 
 the Way is to the Door, so is Life to Re- 
 surrection. If many of us feel the need of 
 being raised up by Christ from our state 
 of spiritual deadness, there are others who 
 feel their chief need to be that of preserving 
 the life that they have, lest they lose it or 
 fall from it. For such it is good to remember 
 that Christ is not only the Resurrection, but 
 the Life ; that Resurrection, indeed, is only 
 the entrance into Life ; that He who said 
 « Come unto Me,'* said also "Abide in Me." 
 
 What our Lord promises us here, then, 
 is Life under two aspects — its renewal and its 
 continuance. He is the Resurrection ; there- 
 fore the dead who believe shall live. He is 
 the Life ; therefore the living who be]ieve 
 shall not die. The two Sacraments of the 
 Church afford illustrations of the same two- 
 fold truth. Baptism, the first sacrament, 
 speaks to us of renewal, of the new birth, of 
 our burial with Christ, and our rising with 
 
 135 
 
The Sevenfold I AM 
 
 Him to newness of life. "God," says St. 
 Peter, " hath begotten us again unto a lively 
 hope by the Resurrection of Jesus Christ 
 from the dead." And again, "The like 
 figure whereunto Baptism doth also now 
 save us ... by the Resurrection of Jesus 
 Christ." It accordingly takes place but once ; 
 it is a single act ; it symbolises the conferring 
 of the new life. But if Baptism answers to 
 the one claim, "I am the Resurrection," 
 the Lord's Supper answers to the other and 
 fuller claim, "I am the Life." It represents 
 to us a perpetual communion with the living 
 Christ ; the possession of Him within us 
 as the source and means of life. " He that 
 eateth of this Bread shall live for ever." It 
 is no single act, performed only once on 
 each individual, as Baptism is ; it represents 
 a continuous process, like the assimilation 
 of food ; an abiding and progressive life. 
 The one is the lighting of the flame, the 
 other its tending and feeding. The one is 
 the birth, the other the growth. The one 
 speaks of regeneration, the other of sancti- 
 fication. In His sacraments, then, as in His 
 136 
 
Christ and Our Deadness 
 
 words, we have pledges of the Eternal Life 
 which Christ imparts. They are signs and 
 seals attesting the twin truths that Christ is 
 always able to revive us if we are dead, and 
 to sustain us if we are alive. And it is this 
 quickening and sustaining power that we all 
 want. Deadness is our chief curse, life our 
 most pressing need. Amid all the deadness 
 of our spiritual state, there is hope for us if 
 only we lay hold on Christ. " In Him, he 
 who is dead is sure of life, and he who lives 
 is sure never to die." 
 
 "I am the Resurrection and the Life" 
 closes our series of meditations on the / 
 arns of our Lord. It will be noticed that 
 these have not been treated in the exact 
 order in which they appear in Scripture. 
 But if any apology be needed for this, one 
 can point to the precedent set by the author 
 of the Fourth Gospel himself, who arranged 
 his material in such a way as would best 
 serve the end he had in view — the presenta- 
 tion of Jesus to the world as Christ the Son 
 of God. The purpose aimed at in this little 
 137 
 
The Sevenfold I AM 
 
 book (to compare small things with great) 
 has been to present what may be called a 
 ladder of spiritual progress, by climbing the 
 several steps of which the follower of Christ 
 may experience His response to each suc- 
 cessive need. The order of such experience 
 is not, of course, the same in every case ; 
 it is capable, indeed, of infinite variety. But 
 the order followed here would seem to be 
 one in which our Lord often presents Him- 
 self to His people, as affording a gradually 
 increasing satisfaction for needy souls. We 
 are in darkness, and He reveals Himself as 
 a Light that we may see, and follow, and 
 possess. This Light, however, serves but to 
 show the poverty of our estate ; and accord- 
 ingly His next offer is that of a Door to 
 shelter us ; a home where we can remain 
 and dwell with Him. But even this resting- 
 place reminds us that we have still far to 
 travel ere we reach our journey's end ; and 
 our cry for direction is met by a Way — a 
 way of Truth and Life by which we shall at 
 length reach the Father. Even on the way, 
 however, we are helpless ; we wander from 
 
 138 
 
The Sevenfold I AM 
 
 It, we faintj we are scattered abroad ; we 
 want a living guide, a Good Shepherd who 
 will give His very life for us, and who 
 knows us all by name. Scarcely is this want 
 in its turn supplied, when we are conscious 
 of yet another ; the need of a strength within 
 as well as without ; something that will make 
 us less like sheep and more like men. This 
 we find in the Bread of Life ; Christ within 
 us as our strength and hope. Then the 
 union between Him and us becomes closer 
 still ; we begin to work for Him as well 
 as He for us ; we become branches of the 
 True Vine, abiding in it and bringing forth 
 fruit. And finally. He, who has done all 
 else for us, destroys that last enemy which is 
 death ; gives Himself to us as the Resurrec- 
 tion and the Life ; confers upon us, main- 
 tains in us, an eternal fellowship with God. 
 Thus, leading us on from strength to 
 strength, does Christ fulfil for us the great 
 / am of the Apocalypse, inclusive of all the 
 rest — " I am Alpha and Omega, the First 
 and the Last." 
 
 139 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 Some Additional Reading 
 
 These sayings of our Lord are treated with 
 more or less fulness in the various exegetical 
 works on St. John's Gospel. Among them 
 may be mentioned the commentaries by 
 Milligan and Moulton, Godet, and Marcus 
 Dods ; and (more popular in character) 
 Maclaren in Bible - Class Expositions y and 
 Campbell Morgan in The Analysed Bible. 
 
 More special treatment is given to the 
 various titles of our Lord in Westcott's 
 Revelation of the Father^ Spurgeon's The 
 Messiahy Warfield's The Lord of Glory, 
 Miss Annie Small, in her recent illuminative 
 little book, Studies in the Gospel of St. John^ has 
 a chapter entitled "The Sevenfold ^I Am.' " 
 
 Of the individual names and titles, The 
 Light of the Wo'^ld has been oftener used than 
 141 
 
Appendix 
 
 any of the others as a title for works dealing 
 with our Lord's Person and work. In many 
 cases, however (as In Sir Edwin Arnold's 
 poem, and the able collection of essays en- 
 titled Lux Mundi)y the reference is rather to 
 His whole personality than to this particular 
 aspect of it. His claim and its justification 
 are well stated in Row's Manual of Christian 
 Evidences, Part I. ch. i. See also Phillips 
 Brooks's sermons, " The Light of the World," 
 " The Candle of the Lord," " The Mystery of 
 Light." — T/ie JVay, the Truth, and the Life 
 receive careful if somewhat laboured treatment 
 inDr. Hort'sHulsean lectures published under 
 this title. See also Paget's Christ the Way. 
 But the best commentary on the "Way" 
 is The Pilgrim s Progress. — On The Good 
 Shepherd there are sermons by F. W. 
 Robertson (2nd series) and Newman (vol. 
 viil. p. 230). The specially pastoral work 
 of Christ is ably dealt with in Latham's 
 Pastor Pastorum, — The Bread of Life is treated 
 of in many manuals on the Holy Communion. 
 See also John Macleod Campbell, Christ the 
 Bread of Life ; James M. Campbell, The 
 142 
 
Appendix 
 
 Christ in Man ; and sermons by Newman 
 (vol. vi. p. 136), and by Phillips Brooks 
 {^The Candle of the Lordy p. 232 — "Christ 
 the Food of Man ").— On The True Vine, see 
 Macmillan, Bible Teachings in Nature, p. 74 ; 
 A. Murray, Abide in Christ ; and, for a 
 beautifully developed allegory of the Vine, 
 Mrs. Hamilton King's poem. The Sermon in 
 the Hospital'' — The Resurrection and the Life 
 will be best studied in connection with our 
 Lord's Resurrection and its bearing on our 
 own. On this subject Professor William 
 Milligan's Resurrection of our Lord, and the 
 same author's Resurrection of the Dead^ will 
 be found of value. 
 
 143 
 

 INDEX 
 
 
 
 
 A. SCRIPTURE PASSAGES 
 
 
 PAGE 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I Sam. XXV. 29 . , . 
 
 134 
 
 St. John vi. 5 ... 86 
 
 2 Sam. XV. 21 . . . . 
 
 72 
 
 vii. 37, 38. 
 
 
 7 
 
 Ps. XXV. 10 .... 
 
 50 
 
 ix. 34-38 . 
 
 
 25 
 
 „ xlvi. I . . . . 
 
 31 
 
 „ x. 10 . . 
 
 
 59 
 
 ,, Ixxvii. 19 ... . 
 
 §2 
 
 XV. 15 . 
 
 
 
 56 
 
 „ Ixxx. I . . . , 
 
 68 
 
 ,, xvm. 37 
 
 
 
 54 
 
 » xcy. 7 
 
 68 
 
 Acts X. 17 . . . 
 
 
 
 58 
 
 „ cxix. 105 .... 
 
 16 
 
 „ xvii. 23 . . 
 
 
 
 57 
 
 Prov. XX. 27 . , , 
 
 19 
 
 Rom. xii. 5 
 
 
 
 81 
 
 Isa. ix. 2 
 
 5 
 
 2 Cor. iii. 17 , , 
 
 
 
 33 
 
 „ xxviii. 10, 13 . 
 
 1^ 
 
 ,, iv. 10 . . 
 
 
 
 99 
 
 „ xl. II 
 
 „ liii. 6 . ... 
 
 Ezek. XV. 3, 4. . . 
 
 ,, xxxiv. 2, 3 . . 
 
 ,, xxxiv. 23 . . 
 
 68 
 
 77 
 107 
 
 75 
 68 
 
 Eph. v. 13 . . , 
 
 Phil. iii. 13, 14 . 
 
 „ iv. 13 . . 
 
 I Thess. iv. 14 . 
 
 
 
 10 
 
 62 
 
 117 
 
 129 
 
 Zech. xi. 5 ... 
 
 75 
 
 Heb. i. 1-3 . 
 
 
 
 . 56 
 
 St. Matt. vii. 13, 14 . 
 
 43, 44 
 
 I Peter i. 3 . 
 
 
 
 . 136 
 
 „ xi. 28 . . 
 
 . 135 
 
 „ iii. 21 
 
 
 
 . 136 
 
 St. Luke i. 79 . . 
 
 5 
 
 „ v. 2, 4 
 
 
 
 69,76 
 
 „ ii. II . . 
 
 . 68 
 
 I John i. 5 . . 
 
 
 
 4 
 
 St. John i. 4 . . . 
 
 . 132 
 
 „ ii. 17 . 
 
 
 
 . 96 
 
 „ i. 4, 5, 9 . 
 
 5 
 
 „ Y. 12 . 
 
 
 
 . 134 
 
 „ i. 18 . . . 
 
 . 57 
 
 Rev. i. II . . 
 
 
 
 . 139 
 
 „ iii. 19-21 . 
 
 12 
 
 „ iii. I . . 
 
 
 
 . 115 
 
 „ iv. 14 . . 
 
 . 89 
 
 „ iii. 20 .... 24 
 
 B, SCRI 
 
 PTURE 
 
 : CHARACTERS 
 
 Abel, 67. 
 
 
 David, 67, 68, 72, 134. 
 
 Abigail, 134. 
 
 
 Demas, 38. 
 
 Amos, 67. 
 
 
 Ittai, 72. 
 
 Blind Man, The, 25, 
 
 
 Jacob, 67. 
 
 Cornelius, 58. 
 
 
 John, St., 18. 
 
 K 
 
 I 
 
 +5 
 
 
 
 
Index 
 
 Judas, 38. 
 
 Laban, d*], 
 
 Martha, 126. 
 
 Moses, ()*]. 
 
 Paul, St., 58. 
 
 Peter, St., 48, 58, 69. 
 
 Philip, St., 49, Zd, 
 
 Pilate, 54. 
 
 Shepherds of Bethlehem, The, 
 
 67. 
 
 Thomas, St., 48, 49, 51. 
 Wise Men, The, 16. 
 Woman of Samaria, The, 88, 
 Zacharias, 5. 
 
 C. SUBJECTS 
 
 Abiding in Christ, 113-117. 
 Acceptance of Christ, 93. 
 Baptism, 135-136. 
 Campbell, John Macleod, 26. 
 Confidence, Mutual, 78-79. 
 Cross, The, 28. 
 Death of Christ, 77-79, 96- 
 
 99. 
 Decision, 38-39. 
 Du(E VicBf 52. 
 Following Christ, 15- 1 6, 
 
 71-72. 
 Fox,X^eorge, 17. 
 Freedom, 32-35. 
 Fruitfulness, 109-113. 
 Holy Spirit, The, 56, 60, 114. 
 Illumination, ia-12, 16-18. 
 Immortality, 129-130. 
 Individuality and Unity, 80. 
 Janus, Temple of, 23. 
 Kedron, Valley of, 106. 
 
 Life, 58-60, 92-100, 131-137. 
 
 Nurture, 35-37. 
 
 Pascal, 112. 
 
 Persia, Religion of, 4. 
 
 Pirate^ The^ 30. 
 
 Progress, 45, 61. 
 
 Quakers, Early, 17. 
 
 Refuge, 30-32. 
 
 Revelation, 10-12, 54-57. 
 
 Sacrifice of Christ, 77-79, 
 
 96-99. 
 Saladin, 128. 
 Sanctuary, 30-32. 
 Sardis, Church of, 116. 
 Shorthouse, J. H., 112. 
 Siloam, Fountain of, 6. 
 Supper, The Lord's, 59, 98, 
 
 99, 106, 136. 
 Tabernacles, Feast of, 6, '^, 
 Watts, Isaac, 117. 
 Wesley, John, 112. 
 
 D, QUOTATIONS 
 
 Augustine, St., 46. 
 Bernard, St., 46. 
 Browning, 39. 
 Bunyan, 16. 
 Calvin, 47. 
 Carlyle, 1 10. 
 Clephane, E. C, 78. 
 Cumming, Dr. Elder, 29. 
 Dante, 52. 
 Doane, G. W., 47. 
 Dods, Marcus, 36, 92. 
 
 146 
 
 Flint, Professor, 133. 
 
 Froude, J. A., iii. 
 
 Gladstone, 113. 
 
 Godet, F., 61. 
 
 Keble, 32, 130. 
 
 Kempis, Thomas ^, 46-47. 
 
 King, H. E. Hamilton, 105, 
 
 107. 
 Luther, 47, 100. 
 Milman, Dean, 31. 
 Milton, 17, 74, III. 
 
Index 
 
 Mott, J. R., 14. 
 Newman, Cardinal, 16. 
 Patrick, St., 94- 
 Robertson, William, 72. 
 Rutherford, Samuel, 128. 
 Savonarola, 26. 
 Shakspere, 18. 
 Shorter Catechism, 60. 
 
 Socrates, 59. 
 Spenser, 71. 
 Stone, S. J., 98. 
 Tennyson, 15, 7 1. 
 Toplady, A. M., 32. 
 Wesley, Charles, 32. 
 Whitfield, George, 117. 
 Wilberforce, William, 1 1 
 
 147 
 
THE 
 
 SHORT COURSE SERIES 
 
 EDITED BY 
 Rev. JOHN ADAMS, B.D. 
 
 This Series is designed to encourage a healthy reaction in 
 the direction of expository preaching. Leading expositors in 
 all the Churches have kindly promised assistance; and the 
 Series, to be issued at the uniform price of 60 cents net per 
 volume, will furnish a sufl&ciently large variety for individual 
 selection. 
 
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 A CRY FOR JUSTICE: A Study in Amos. 
 
 By Prof. J. E. McFadyen, D.D., U. F. C. College, 
 Glasgow. 
 
 THE BEATITUDES. 
 
 By Rev. Robert H. Fisher, D.D., Edinburgh. 
 
 THE LENTEN PSALMS. 
 
 By the Editor. 
 
 THE PSALM OF PSALMS. 
 
 By Prof. James Stalker, D.D., Aberdeen. 
 
 THE SONG AND THE SOH.. 
 
 By Prof. W. G. Jordan, D.D., Kingston, Ontario. 
 
 THE HIGHER POWERS OF THE SOUL. 
 
 By Rev. George M'Hardy, D.D., Kirkcaldy. 
 
 JEHOVAH-JESUS. 
 
 By Rev. Thomas Whitelaw, D.D., Kilmarnock. 
 
 THE SEVENFOLD I AM. 
 
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 SCENES FROM THE LIFE OF DAVID. 
 
 By Prof. H. R. Mackintosh, D.D., Edinburgh. 
 
 A MIRROR OF THE SOUL : Studies in the Psalter. 
 
 By Rev. Canon Vaughan, M.A., Winchester. 
 
 STUDIES IN THE BOOK OF JOB. 
 
 By Rev. Charles F. Aked, D.D., San Francisco. 
 
 THE PROPHECY OF MICAH. 
 
 By Principal A. J. Tait, M.A., Ridley Hall, Cambridge. 
 
 THE EXPOSITORY VALUE OF THE REVISED 
 VERSION. 
 
 By Prof. G. Melligan, D.D., University of Glasgow. 
 
 A PREFACE TO THE GOSPEL: An Exposition of 
 Isaiah 55. 
 
 By Rev. A Smellie, D.D., Carluke. 
 
 THE SON OF MAN. 
 
 By Prof. Andrew C. Zenos, D.D., Chicago. 
 
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 By Prof. W. Emery Barnes, D.D., Cambridge. 
 
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 By Principal A. E. Garvie, D.D., New College, London, 
 
BELIEF AND LIFE: Expositions in the Fourth 
 Gospel 
 
 By Principal W. B. Selbie, D.D., Mansfield College, 
 Oxford. 
 
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 By Prof. Robert Law, D.D., roronto, 
 
 THE OVERTURES OF JESUS. 
 
 By Rev. Newell D wight Hillis, D.D., Brooklyn. 
 
 IN THE UPPER ROOM. 
 
 By Rev. D. J. Burrill, D.D., LL.D., New York. 
 
 THE SEVEN WORDS FROM THE CROSS. 
 
 By Rev. A. B. Macaulay, M.A., Stirling. 
 
 THE PRAYERS OF ST. PAUL 
 
 By Prof. W. G. Griffith Thomas, D.D., Toronto. 
 
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 By Rev. A. Boyd Scott, B.D., Glasgow. 
 
 THE HOLY SPIRIT. 
 
 By Rev. F. Stuart-Gardiner, B.D., Kingstown, 
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 THE REDEMPTION OF GOD. 
 
 By Prof. T. B. Kilpatrick, D.D., Toronto. 
 
 STUDIES IN THE APOCALYPSE. 
 
 By Prof. W. T. Davison, D.D., Richmond. 
 
 EXPOSITORY STUDIES. 
 
 By Prof. Arthur S. Peake, D.D., Manchester. 
 
 SOCIAL STUDIES. 
 
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