To the woman of Sychar He spoke of water, for she had come to draw water. To these Galilæans He spoke of bread, for they had been eating of the loaves. Neither to one nor the other would He speak of the spiritual gift without speaking of the sensible gift,--without making them feel that that also was from God. He addresses the people of Capernaum as men working for their food ordinarily, though for once they had received it without working for it: and He bids them believe that there is another nobler work which is appointed for them,--a work, however, which does not prevent the fruit of it from being a gift. They were earning, by the sweat of their brow, a food which sustained their lives from day to day,--God endowing them with both the power to toil and the reward of toil. They might toil for a bread that would sustain another different kind of life in them,--a life not of hours and instants, but eternal. This bread, He says, the Son of Man will give. After what I said last Sunday of His use of this title,--of His assertion that the Son of Man must be the judge of men, must be the life-giver to men,--I have no need to dwell upon it here. I would only lead you to notice how exactly this application of it accords with that in the dialogue at Jerusalem, and yet how suitable it is to the Galilæans whom He is teaching. In both cases we find men brought directly into contact with One who knows them, who reads their hearts, who is the source and the standard of all that is human in them. In both, this Son of Man leads them to a Father from whom He has proceeded, from whose life His is derived, who has given Him His authority, whose will He has come to do. The words, we saw, were most provoking to the Pharisees of the holy city. Their inhumanity made it impossible for them to enter into the revelation of a Son of Man; their sense of distance from God, and their conception of Him as a mere Lawgiver, made the name of Father monstrous and incredible. With these ignorant labourers it was otherwise. A Son of Man,--a King who was yet a Brother,--they secretly longed for; half their wild acts were done in the struggle to find such a one. The thought of God was more terrible;--oftentimes they would have wished to hide themselves from Him under any hills and mountains; oftentimes they might have been glad to be told that there was no such Being. But there was that in them which owned Him as the Giver of all that they had; as worthy of the trust which their fathers put in Him; as associated with the graves of their parents and the faces of their children. To hear Him called a Father,--however little they might understand in what sense He could be a Father,--to hear that there was One whom He had sealed as a giver of Life to men,--this answered to some of the dreams which they had dreamed in their happiest hours: to some of the necessities which had been awakened within them in their saddest hours.