last answer is GOD--GOD HIMSELF. It is no mere bit of drapery of the
prophet's imagery, this well-spring of salvation; it is something much
more substantial, much deeper than that. You remember the old psalm,
'With Thee is the fountain of life: in Thy light shall we see light';
and what David and John after him called life, Isaiah and Paul after him
calls salvation. And you remember too, no doubt, the indictment of
another of the prophets, laying hold of the same metaphor in order to
point to the folly and the suicide of all godless living: 'My people
have committed two evils: they have forsaken Me, the fountain of living
waters, and they have hewn out for themselves broken cisterns.' They
were manufactured articles, and because they were made they could be
cracked, but the fountain, because it rises by its own inherent energy,
springing up into everlasting life, is all-sufficient. God Himself is
the well-spring of salvation.

If I had time to enlarge upon this idea, I might remind you how nobly
and blessedly that principle is confirmed when we think of this great
salvation, past, present, and future, negative and positive, all-
sufficient and complete, as having its origin in His deep nature, as
having its process in His own finished work, and as being in its essence
the communication of Himself. That last thing I should like to say a
word or two about. If there is a man or a woman that thinks of salvation
as if it were merely a shutting up of some material hell, or the dodging
round a corner so as to escape some external consequence of
transgression, let him and her hear this: the possession of God is
salvation, that and nothing else. To have Him within me, that is to be
saved; to have His life in His dear Son made the foundation of my life,
to have my whole being penetrated and filled with God, that is the
essence of the salvation that is in Jesus Christ. And because it comes
unmotived, uncaused, self-originated, springing up from the depths of