heir booths, and, as it is said in the end of
the chapter, "went every man to his own _house_." But on this great day
of the feast no water was drawn from the pool of Siloam. On each of the
preceding days the golden pitcher was in request, and the procession
that followed the priest who carried it praised God who had brought
water out of the rock in the desert; but on the eighth day,
commemorating their entrance into "a land of springs of water," this
rite of drawing the water ceased.

But the true worshippers among these Israelites had been seeing a
spiritual meaning in the water, and had been conscious of an uneasy
feeling of thirst still in the midst of these Temple services--an uneasy
questioning whether even yet Israel had passed the thirsty desert, and
had received the full gift God had meant to give. There were thinking
men and thirsty souls then as there are now; and to these, who stood
perhaps a little aside, and looked half in compassion, half in envy, at
the merry-making of the rest, it seemed a significant fact that, in the
Temple itself, with all its grandeur and skilful appliances, there was
yet no living fountain to quench the thirst of men--a significant fact
that to find water the priest had to go outside the gorgeous Temple to
the modest "waters of Siloah that go softly." All through the feast
these men wondered morning by morning when the words of Joel were to
come true, when it should come to pass that "a fountain should come
forth of the house of the Lord," or when that great and deep river
should begin to flow which Ezekiel saw in vision issuing from the
threshold of the Lord's house, and waxing deeper and wider as it flowed.
And now once more the last day of the feast had come, the water was no
longer drawn, and yet no fountain had burst up in the Temple itself,
their souls were yet perplexed, unsatisfied, craving, athirst, when
suddenly, as if in answer to their half-formed thoughts and longings, a
clear, assured, authoritative voice passed through their ear to their
inmost soul: "If any man thirst, let him come unto Me and drink. He that
believeth on Me, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water."

In these words Christ proclaims that He is the great Temple-fountain; or
rather, that He is the true Temple, and that the Holy Ghost proceeding
from Him, and dwelling in men, is the life-giving fountain.[32] All the
cravings after a settled and eternal state, all the longings for purity
and