ch I shall give
him shall be in him a well of water, springing up to everlasting
life.' Just as the manna also was a type of him, as he himself
declared, when the Jews talked to him of the manna; 'Our fathers did
eat manna in the desert, as it is written, He gave them bread from
heaven to eat.' Then Jesus said to them, 'Verily, verily, I say
unto you, Moses gave you not that bread from heaven.' No: but only
a type and picture of it. 'My Father giveth you the true bread from
heaven. For the bread of God is he which cometh down from heaven,
and giveth life unto the world. . . . I am that bread of life.'

My friends, herein is a great mystery. Something of what it means,
however, we may learn from that wise and good Jew, Philo, who was
St. Paul's teacher according to the flesh, before he became a
Christian; and who himself was so near to the kingdom of God, that
St. Paul often in his epistles uses Philo's very words, putting into
them a Christian meaning. And what says he concerning the Rock of
living waters?

The soul, he says, falls in with a scorpion in the wilderness; and
then thirst, which is the thirst of the passions--of the lusts which
war in our members--seizes on it; till God sends forth on it the
stream of his own perfect wisdom, and causes the changed soul to
drink of unchangeable health. For the steep rock is the wisdom of
God (by whom he means the Word of God, whom Philo knew not in the
flesh, but whom we know, as the Lord Jesus Christ), which, being
both sublime and the first of all things; he quarried out of his own
powers; and of it he gives drink to the souls which love God; and
they, when they have drunk, are filled with the most universal
manna.

So says Philo, the good Jew, who knew not Christ; and therefore he
says only a part of the truth. If you wish to learn the whole
truth, you must read St. John's Gospel, and St. Paul's Epistles,
especially this very text; and again, the opening of the Epistle to
the Ephesians; and again, that most royal passage in the opening of
the Colossians, where he speaks of the Everlasting Being of Christ,
who is before all things, and by whom all things consist--in whom
dwells all the fulness of the Godhead bodily, and in whom are hid
all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.

Therefore he is rightly called the Rock, the Rock of Ages, the
Eternal Rock; because on him all things rest, and have rested since
the foundation of the world, being made, and kept