5. The world has been greatly concerned about food for six thousand years. The gratification of the appetite has both blessed and cursed the race. Life has ever depended upon food; hence food has been the chief concern of man. During the history of the world the race has been ignorant of the processes of digestion and assimilation. They have known nothing of the chemistry of this source of life. They have gone on from age to age building up their bodies by taking food, wholly ignorant of the process by which it was done. The value of the thing eaten has never depended on a knowledge of the process by which it was assimilated. We thank God that it is thus with the bread of life. We may never expect to comprehend the "mystery of godliness" in this life. Just how the bread of life enables us to live forever, we are not concerned to know. It is enough for us to know that it is so. Let us, then, appropriate this rich provision of God's grace, and the blessing will be ours. NEW TESTAMENT VIEWS OF CHRIST. III.--CHRIST THE WATER OF LIFE. "Jesus answered and said unto her, Every one that drinketh of this water shall thirst again: but whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall become in him a well of water springing up unto eternal life" (John iv. 13, 14). "Now on the last day, the great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried, saying, If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink" (John vii. 37). "And did all drink the same spiritual drink: for they drank of a spiritual rock that followed them: and the rock was Christ" (I. Cor. x. 4). Twice was a rock smitten by Moses in the wilderness to supply the Israelites with water. The first was at Rephidim, in the wilderness of Sin, during the first year of their Exodus, before they came to Mount Sinai. The second was at Kadesh, in the wilderness of Zin, in the fortieth year of the Exodus. It is evident that the apostle refers to the first of these, though we can hardly think, with most commentators known to us, that he does so exclusively. The fact that the rock followed them, as a type of Christ, in their wilderness life, demands that it be from the beginning, rather than the end, of their journey. And the fact that many who drank of it fell in the wilderness, requires the same conclusion. But for reasons yet to appear, we think the two are considered as one. The miracle was in all respects the same in the second as in the first. There was the same dependence for life on the second as the first. There was the same necessity that the second rock or stream should follow them as there was of the first; for they were yet a long way from Canaan, with a waterless desert before them. We can, therefore, see no reason why the first should be a type of Christ and not the second.