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The Jews were accustomed to regard themselves as a fountain of righteousness, the only one in the earth; their country an oasis made glad by these beneficent and hallowed waters, while all the rest of the world was a wilderness; and Jerusalem as the blessed spot where heaven and earth met together and held one another in a fond embrace. At no time were they more tenacious of these views than when the Son of God dwelt among them, drinking his daily cup of ignominy. His credentials showed that he had come to earth for the salvation of all nations. A word spoken against him, a hand lifted in opposition to him, was therefore not only the most transcendent outrage offered to the Deity, but the fearfulest crime against all the dwellers upon the earth. Yet the Jews rejected him; this is saying little; they put him to the most shameful and most cruel death conceivable.

But that which filled up the measure of the iniquity of man was used by infinite grace as a means for the most surprising manifestation of itself. The disciples were commanded to begin at Jerusalem, in the proclamation of the Gospel. Then did the Jews discover that their pre-eminence over the nations was a pre-eminence of guilt; and having been brought, many of them at least, into a posture of deep self-condemnation and self-loathing, they discovered the fountain of divine grace, drank thereof, and washed their sins away in it's purifying waters. It was then that Jerusalem attained to a pre-eminence above the nations immeasurably more honorable than any it had previously enjoyed; then, in that little season which intervened between the first successes of the Gospel and its publication in other places. Solomon with all the glory of his court could not so ennoble Jerusalem, as the little company of believers did, who were all of one heart and of one soul.

We faintly remember to have read in some book of imagination of a fountain having marvelous properties, and this among the rest - that a few drops taken from it to any distant place and there poured out, would immediately cause a similar fountain there to spring up. Christ told the woman of Samaria that the water that he would give her, would be in her a well of water, springing up to everlasting life. Whosoever comes to him and drinks, not only finds his own thirst assuaged, but discovers in himself a wealth of waters sufficient to slake the thirst of numbers. Thus the fountain opened up to the house of David and the people of Jerusalem in that little company of believers, has been repeated and repeated, until now there is hardly any place under the sun where this fountain of divine grace is not accessible. How tame and puerile the efforts of man's fancy in comparison with the actual products of God's beneficence! " Thou art a God that doeth wonders." In order to discourse of wonders, men suppose themselves driven from the actual world into the world of sheer imagination. But they forsake the world of wonders when they forsake the world of truth. Be it that they conceive a fountain most beautiful to behold; the eye is not satisfied with seeing; or, streaming with gold; there are a thousand ills of life that mock at gold; or, communicating health; health is merely a deliverance from one class of sufferings. But a fountain which sheds abroad the love of God in the heart; which gives the best of light to the understanding; elevates the affections; banishes sin; gives everlasting life; and reveals a world worthy of that everlasting life: this is surely beyond all comparison. The Wonderful Fountain.

Bible Verses: Zechariah 13:1

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