CRYING AFTER CHRIST.

"The Canaanitish Woman."-MATTHEW XV. 21-28.

THIS is one of the conversations of Jesus which, I think, derives a peculiar interest from the character and situation of the person with whom the conversation was held. Jesus generally confined Himself to the land in which the chosen people were settled. Galilee and Judea were the scene of most of His miracles and teaching. But once or twice He went across the border into that region near Jerusalem which never had been really conquered, but had always remained in the possession of the Canaanites and their descendants. It was on such an occasion that He met the woman with whom this conversation took place. She, in a general way, represented that great mass of mankind which lay outside the Jewish nation.

We often wonder how it was possible for Jesus, with all the great thought of humanity in His soul, to confine Himself to the little country of the Jews, to a people who were certainly not the most promising of the human race, yet to whom almost all His teachings were given and His mighty works shown. It seems to me that the position in

which Jesus constantly worked is not unlike that in which a great many of us are compelled to work. We find ourselves living our life and doing our work in the midst of a little set of people and a various round of circumstances. Yet there are always pressing upon us the great multitudes of interests that lie outside, and we grow dissatisfied with life.

As nearly as it was possible for dissatisfaction to enter into the soul of Jesus, there must have been in Him something of the same feeling. How did Jesus meet that feeling? Surely He must have been able to see in them, as sometimes we, too, in our better moments, see in the few people who come within our touch, how representative they were of the great human race. He must have been able to realise that in them He touched the humanity which, separated as widely as it may be, is still one humanity from end to end. He knew that if His Spirit could go abroad and reach the furthest ends of the earth He would find still the same humanity with which He was dealing there; so that He did touch, and knew that He was touching, the great human race.

Then I think there is the great thought of the patience of Jesus Christ. He was the Lord of eternity. The few years He was living here upon earth were but an episode in His eternal service to the souls of men. He looked forward to the centuries and centuries which should pass

after He had gone away from the sight of men, and knew that still He would be labouring for the souls of men. So He was infinitely patient. He knew there was time enough in His eternal life for the work which had been given Him to do. When these two great convictions come to us that were in the soul of Jesus; when we know that, touch human life as we may, we are touching the whole of it, and that no man can do any good work for his brother in any little region of the world and the most foreign and distant region of the world not be the better for it, and when we come to have something of the patience of Jesus, knowing that long after our work is past away His work will be going on, and we shall work in Him, then we shall work as Jesus worked. There comes contentment in the limited lot of life. If it ever oppresses and torments us that our lives are shut in, that there is so much work to do that we cannot touch, let us remember how the Divine Master lived those precious years of His life within the narrow walls of Judaism, and hardly laid His finger upon the multitudes of humanity lying outside, always present to His vision, yet shut out from the immediate work which He had come to do.

Yet it is interesting to notice how Christ did sometimes cross the border. It gives us some valuable suggestions. One of them, I think, is here.

We can well believe that one who has been

dealing with a nation which had received a peculiar preparation for His teachings would find a certain kind of freshness when He went abroad and encountered those who required the reiteration of first principles. It was as it is now, when one goes from preaching in our Christian America and begins preaching to the heathen nations who have never heard anything of Christianity. I can well believe that one would find a certain return to the first questions which spring out of the real depth of the human mind, and which do not belong to the more superficial conceptions, if he went and preached to the heathen and came in contact with fundamental and primeval humanity.

I think we can see something of that kind in the fifteenth chapter of Matthew. There are two parts to that chapter. In the earlier part Jesus is speaking to the Pharisees. They have a miserable little question about washing the hands before eating meat. They said to Jesus, "Your disciples are not orthodox. Look at them! They have not washed." Jesus had to tell the Pharisees that they themselves had made the commandments of God of none effect by their traditions.

Then, after this dispute, which I think must have been wearisome to Jesus, He crosses the border and encounters a simple human nature. A woman cries after Him with the cry of necessity. It is not something wrought out in the elaboration of ecclesiastical instruction, which demanded this

and that arbitrary thing of His disciples. It is the cry that comes forever from the bottom of the human heart. This cry it was that came to Jesus when He went into the coasts of Tyre and Sidon. There is a certain sort of wildness, freshness, primariness about the cry of this woman. There was something deeper there than any question about washing hands before meat. Jesus is put to the test, not as to whether he would confirm the traditions and conditions of a single system, but whether He would meet the everlasting wants of human nature. There was the test by which He must ultimately claim and possess the world.

There are two sorts of Christian evidence. They are both true; but one is so much greater than the other. Sometimes we are pointed to the Old Testament, and told of certain prophecies which Christ fulfilled. We are pointed to a certain verse in Isaiah and another certain verse in Matthew; and we are told how one fulfils the other. We are bidden to observe how the whole system of prophecy in the Old Testament and the fulfilment in the New Testament correspond, part to part. There is an evidence of Christianity there; but it is not the great evidence. The human soul learns to believe in Jesus because of the way in which His presence comes to the immediate needs of the human soul. I believe in Jesus because He fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah; I believe in Jesus so much more because He fulfils