ne. How much that should fill us with assurance of God's love, yet how
fearfully we live. How much to make us admire self-sacrifice and fill us
with earnest purpose to live for others, and yet how little of this
becomes in very deed _our_ life. God sees in Him all that can make us
complete, all that can fill and gladden and suffice the soul, and yet
how bare and troubled and defeated do we live.[24]

6. The mode of distribution was also significant. Christ gives life to
the world not directly, but through His disciples. The life He gives is
Himself, but He gives it through the instrumentality of men. The bread
is His. The disciples may manipulate it as they will, but it remains
five loaves only. None but He can relieve the famishing multitude. Still
not with His own hands does He feed them, but through the believing
service of the Twelve. And this He did not merely for the sake of
teaching us that only through the Church is the world supplied with the
life He furnishes, but primarily because it was the natural and fit
order then, as it is the natural and fit order now, that they who
themselves believe in the power of the Lord to feed the world should be
the means of distributing what He gives. Each of the disciples received
from the Lord no more than would satisfy himself, yet held in his hand
what would through the Lord's blessing satisfy a hundred besides. And it
is a grave truth we here meet, that every one of us who has received
life from Christ has thereby in possession what may give life to many
other human souls. We may give it or we may withhold it; we may
communicate it to the famishing souls around us or we may hear
unconcerned the weary heart-faint sigh; but the Lord knows to whom He
has given the bread of life, and He gives it not solely for our own
consumption but for distribution. It is not the privilege of the more
enlightened or more fervent disciple, but of all. He who receives from
the Lord what is enough for himself holds the lives of some of his
fellows in his hand.

Doubtless the faith of the disciples was severely tried when they were
required to advance each man to his separate hundred with his morsel of
bread. There would be no struggling for the first place then. But
encouraged in their faith by the simple and confident words of prayer
their Master had addressed to the Father, they are emboldened to do His
bidding, and if they gave sparingly and cautiously at first, their
parsimony must soon ha