You say, an ignorant woman could not enter into such a mystery as this. But there were mysteries that she could enter into. '_Jesus said unto her, Go, call thy husband, and come hither._' It was a curious and startling break in the conversation. What had it to do with Jacob's well, or with the living water which she could not find there? Very much indeed. '_The woman said, I have no husband. Jesus answered and said, Thou hast well said, I have no husband: for thou hast had five husbands; and he whom thou now hast is not thy husband: in that saidst thou truly._' Here were facts concerning her past and her present history; here was a revelation of something that concerned her own very self. With _this_ there was no trifling. It was not of Jacob's well, or of another well, that the Stranger was discoursing now. He was speaking of _her_,--He was telling her what she was. '_In Him was life, and the life was the light of men._' She confessed it in her way,--'_Sir, I perceive thou art a prophet_.' All was not quite right with her;--He knew it, and He made her know it. She had offended the Power above,--perhaps He could tell her, also, how she might appease Him. Her fathers might have taught her wrongly. She would like to know. She would rather like, moreover, to make the discourse more general, less personal. A wish for truth, and a fear of it, light and darkness, in her, as in all of us, fought for the mastery. She said, '_Our fathers worshipped in this mountain_,'--this venerable Gerizim,--'_and ye say, that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship_.' Whether or not she would have been ready at the bidding of a Jewish prophet to repair her errors, and earn the favour of God by giving up her Samaritan faith, and becoming a proselyte of the Temple, she had not perhaps asked herself; how much she would have gained by the exchange, our Lord's words in another Gospel, about those who became proselytes from heathenism, may partly tell us. But He who had sat by the well did not ask this proof of her desire for reformation. '_Woman_,' He said, '_believe me, the hour cometh when ye shall neither in this mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem, worship the Father_.' All she had asked--all that most Samaritans or Jews would have disputed about--was _where_ they ought to worship. The thought upon which Jesus fixes her mind, is the Being to be worshipped. That new name, which John said the Son was come to reveal, is now proclaimed in the ears of a separatist and a sinner. He speaks not of the God of Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, but of the _Father_. Such a name the woman might or might not have heard, as one of the names of Him who dwelt on Gerizim. At all events, it would be but one of them--one that would be lost amidst the various titles by which He was invoked--carrying no special significance to the mind of the worshipper. Still, far down in that mind there was that which responded to the word Father, which would awake up at the sound when