23. This is so sacred a hunger and thirst, that none but God alone can satisfy it, and he only, by his love. This is that spiritual fulness with which the saints are satiated, according to the words: “Eat, O friends, drink, yea, drink abundantly, O beloved.” Song of Sol. 5:1. These spiritual enjoyments the Lord bestows on his friends, in order to unite them the more closely to himself, and to make them the sooner forget the perishing things of this world. A few crumbs of this bread, a few drops pressed from this heavenly vine, ought to excite our desires after that plentiful and abounding fountain, which shall flow for us hereafter. 24. In order that the Lord might excite in us so sacred a thirst, and that he might make us long the more earnestly after such heavenly objects as these, it was expedient that he should first himself thirst upon the cross for our sakes. John 19:28. As he himself satisfies and quenches our hunger and thirst, so ought we again to satiate his thirst and ardent desire of loving. He more fervently thirsts after us, than we do after him; according to that which he hath himself declared: “My meat is to do the will of him that sent me, and to finish his work” (John 4:34): and the will of God was, to save men from everlasting destruction. If we but thirsted after him as he thirsts after us, we should then drink so plentifully of his Spirit, that even “rivers of living water would flow from our bodies” (John 7:38): that is, nothing should be seen in us, but what is spiritual, lovely, and consolatory. Nay, he would make us overflow, as it were, with a torrent of divine goodness and consolation, so that soul and body, and all that is within us, should triumphantly rejoice in the living God. For nothing is of so great and so divine an amplitude as a man’s soul, after it has gained true freedom and liberty. Such a soul comprehends God, heaven, and earth. And again, nothing is less than a man’s soul in its nothingness and humiliation, when it humbles itself under God and all his creatures. Chapter XXXVII. He Who Does Not Follow Christ In Faith, Holiness, And Continued Repentance, Cannot Be Delivered From The Blindness Of His Heart, But Must Abide In Eternal Darkness; And He Cannot Have A True Knowledge Of Christ, Or Fellowship With Him. _God is light, and in him is no darkness at all: if we say we have fellowship with him, and walk in darkness, we lie, and do not the truth: but if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another._—1 JOHN 1:5-7. That we may the better understand the nature of light and darkness, it is necessary first to give heed to the description of the light, as it is originally.