an appetite for what is heavenly, a craving
to live on terms with God and with conscience; and this appetite will
infallibly lead them to Christ. Does Christ supply the wants of our
spirits? Can He show us the way to eternal life? Have men found in Him
all needed help to godly living? Have the most spiritual and ardent of
men been precisely those who have most clearly seen their need of Him,
and who have found in Him everything to satisfy and feed their own
spiritual ardour? Has He, that is to say, the words of eternal life? Is
He the Person to whom every man must listen if he would find his way to
God and a happy eternity? Then, depend upon it, men will believe in
Christ in every generation, and none the less firmly because their
attention is called off from non-essential and external evidences to the
simple sufficiency of Christ.

2. Peter was convinced not only that Jesus had the words of eternal
life, but that no one else had. "To whom shall we go?" Peter had not an
exhaustive knowledge of all sources of human wisdom; but speaking from
his own experience he affirmed his conviction that it was useless to
seek life eternal anywhere else than in Jesus. And it seems equally
hopeless still to look to any other quarter for sufficient teaching, for
words that are "spirit and life." Where but in Christ do we find a God
we can accept as God? Where but in Him do we find that which can not
only encourage men striving after virtue, but also reclaim the vicious?
To put anyone alongside of Christ as a revealer of God, as a pattern of
virtue, as a Saviour of men, is absurd. There is that in Him which we
recognise as not merely superior, but of another kind. So that those who
reject Him, or set Him on a level with other teachers, have first of all
to reject the chief part of what His contemporaries were struck with and
reported, and to fashion a Christ of their own.

And it should be observed that Christ claims this exceptional homage
from His people. The "following" He requires is not a mere acceptance of
His teaching alongside of other teaching, nor an acceptance of His
teaching apart from Himself, as if a man should listen to Him and go
home and try to practise what he has heard; but He requires men to form
a connection with Himself as their King and Life, as that One who can
alone give them strength to obey Him. To call Him "the Teacher," as if
this were His sole or chief title, is to mislead.

The alternative, then, as Peter