ngs; not by his ability or disability to
believe this or that, or to prove that his belief is well grounded, but
by his aspirations, by the real bent of his heart. We should feel that
there was something very far wrong if our faith depended upon proofs
that not every one could master, and if thus the clever man had an
advantage over the humble and contrite. "The evidence must be such that
spiritual character shall be an element in the acceptance of it." And
such we find it to be. The reality and the significance of the
revelation of God in Christ are more readily apprehended by the
spiritually than by the intellectually gifted. Persons who are either by
nature humble and docile, or whom life has taught to be so, persons who
feel their need of God, and deeply long for an eternal state of peace
and purity, these are the persons to whom God finds it possible to make
Himself known. And if it be thought that this circumstance, that simple
and docile spirits are convinced while hard-headed men are unconvinced,
throws some suspicion on the reality of the revelation, if it be thought
that the God and the eternity they believe in are but fancies of their
own, it may fairly be replied, that there is no more reason for such a
thought than for supposing that the rapture of a trained musician is
fanciful and self-created, and not excited by any corresponding reality,
because it is not shared by those whose taste for music is unawakened.

Convinced that Jesus was a prophet, the woman proposes to Him the
standing subject of debate between Jews and Samaritans. Her statement of
it is abrupt, and offers some appearance of being intended to turn the
conversation away from herself; but this does not harmonise with her
simple and direct character, and it is quite possible that in the midst
of her confused and disappointed life she had sometimes wondered whether
all her misery did not arise from her being a Samaritan. She knew what
the Jews said of the Samaritan worship. She knew that they mocked at the
Temple which stood on the hill over against Jacob's well; and when she
found how very little her worship had helped her, she may have begun to
suspect that there was truth in the Jewish allegations. Evidently the
aspect of the Messiah, which had chiefly struck her, was His power to
lead men into all truth, to teach them all things. Persons in her
station, and quite as much overborne by sin as she, often retain their
hold upon religious teachin