missed it, and, though it is undoubtedly there, he made his map
without it. Now let us suppose a similar case--for it must often
have happened in early days--and this time we will say it was the
Hudson, or some river of that magnitude. A later explorer came, and
where the map showed a shore without a break, he found a huge inlet
or outlet. Was it an arm of the sea, a vast bay, or was it a great
river? A very great deal depended on which it was, and the first
thing was to determine that. There were several ways of doing it.
One was to sail up and map the course. A quicker way was to drop a
bucket over the side of the ship. The bucket, we may be sure, went
down; and it came up with fresh water; and the water was an instant
revelation of several new and important facts. They had discovered,
first of all, that where there was an unbroken coast-line on the
map, there was nothing of the kind in reality; there was a broad
waterway up into the country; and this was not a bay, but the mouth
of a river, and a very great river indeed; and this implied yet
another discovery--that men had to reckon with no mere island or
narrow peninsula, but an immense continent, which it remained to
explore.

Jesus Christ was in himself a very great discovery for those to whom
he gave himself, and the exploration of him shows a somewhat similar
story. Men have often said that they see nothing in him very
different from the rest of us; while others have found in him, in
the phrase of the Apocalypse (Rev. 22:1), the "water of life"; and
the positive announcement is here, as in the other case, the more
important of the two. The discovery of the volume of life, which
comes from Jesus Christ, is one of the greatest that men have made.
Merely to have dipped his bucket, as it were, in that great stream
of life has again and again meant everything to a man. Think of what
the new-found river of the New World meant to some of those early
explorers after weeks at sea--

Water, water everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink--

and they reach an immense flood of river-water. It was new life at
once; but it did not necessarily mean the immediate exploration of
everything, the instant completion of geographical discovery. It was
life and the promise of more to follow. The history of the Church is
a record, we may put it, both of the discovery of the River of Life
and of the exploration of its course and its sources, and of what
lies behind it. But the di