t truly thirst for it.

If the inquiry be more closely pressed, and if it be asked what this
Samaritan woman would find to be living water to her, what it was which,
after Christ had gone, would daily renew in her the purpose to live a
better life and to bear her burden cheerfully and hopefully, it will be
seen that it must have been simply the remembrance of Christ; the
knowledge that in Christ God had sought her, had claimed her in the
midst of her evil life for some better and holier thing, had, in a word,
loved her through all her sin, and sent deliverance to her. It is
still, and always, this knowledge which comes with fresh exhilarating
power to every disconsolate, despairing, fainting soul. The knowledge
that there is One, the Holiest of all, who loves us, and who will be
satisfied with nothing short of the purest blessedness for us; the
knowledge that our God follows us, forgives us, elevates and purifies us
by His love, this is living water to our souls; this revives us to the
love of goodness, and braces us for all effort. It is not a little
cistern that soon runs dry. To the end of a Christian's life this fact
of God's love in Christ comes as fresh and as reviving to the soul as at
first; to us this day it has the same power of supplying motive to our
life as it had when Christ spoke to the woman.

He further defines the gift as "a well of water _in the soul_ itself
springing up to everlasting life." This peculiarity of the water He
would give was remarked upon here for the sake of contrasting it with
the well outside the city to which the woman in all weathers had to
repair; often wishing, no doubt, as she went out in the heat or in the
rain, that she had a well at her door. The source of spiritual life is
within; it cannot be inaccessible; it does not depend on anything from
which we may be separated. And this is man's victory and end when within
himself he has the source of life and joy, so that he is independent of
circumstances, of position, of things present and things to come. It was
a commonplace even of heathen philosophy, that no man is happy until he
is superior to fortune; that his happiness must have an inward source,
must depend on his own spiritual state, and not on outward
circumstances. Similarly Solomon thought it a saying worthy of
preservation that "the good man is satisfied from himself;" that is, he
shall not look to success in life, or to comfortable circumstances, or
even to domestic