Practical Observations.

1. Too many seek Christ for the loaves and fishes. Persons often choose a church to improve their social condition, or to secure a professional practice, or to build up a trade. It is said that A. T. Stewart, when starting in business, carefully selected out a church that he thought would furnish him patronage in business. Such motives are sordid and carnal.

2. The Lord has made it needful that we should labor for food, but this should not be the great object of life. The body and its food will perish; the soul can abide forever. We should work to procure the food that will enable it to enjoy eternal life. 107

3. God hath sent down the Bread of Life from heaven. Nothing else will satisfy the soul. It may feed on the husks of pleasure, or applause, or show and pride, and yet perish with hunger. Why should ye seek that which is not bread and satisfies not?

4. “If any man be idle and gluttonous, and careth for luxury, that man worketh for the meat that perisheth. So, too, if a man by his labor should feed Christ, and give him drink, and clothe him, who is so senseless and mad as to say that such an one labors for the meat that perisheth, when there is for this the promise of the kingdom that is to come and its good things? This meat endureth forever.”—Chrysostom.

5. That is food which sustains life. Bread, as the great life sustainer, is called the staff of life. To the hungry nothing is so precious. Once a hungry Arab on the desert sought a spring of which he knew to quench his thirst. As he rose he saw a bag, dropped by some traveler, and he joyfully exclaimed, “Here is food.” Eagerly he tore it open, and then in bitter disappointment he cried, “Alas, it is only pearls!” Nothing will feed the soul but Christ. To the hungry soul he is more precious than the gems of Golconda.

6. To feed on the Bread of Life we must come to Christ. We come by hearing and believing upon him. The evidence of our real belief upon him is the surrender of our lives to his will. Those who thus believe, he will never cast out; he invites all such to his arms; they feed upon him by faith and make his life their life. They have eternal life for he will raise them at the last day.

7. Bread is a dead thing in itself; the life it supports it did nothing to originate. But the bread from heaven brings with it the life it afterwards sustains.—Hanna.