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You call these common things. Their excellence has occasioned their commonness, and their commonness corresponds to a common want in humanity.

I. LET US APPLY THIS SOCIALLY. Look on the greatest feast ever prepared. What are its delicacies? Simply an adaptation, decoration or adulteration of bread and water, and the seated guests are compelled to say, "This is well enough now and then, but only now and then," let us have something plain. Bread and water survive. Empires of soups, etc., which are the image and superscription of the cook's, who is bound like other fashionable slaves to produce something fresh, rise and fall; but bread and water are God's, and they endure.

II. THE APPLICATION OF THIS IS OBVIOUS IN THE HIGHER SPHERES OF CULTURE. Reading and writing are the bread and water of the mind. Your duty to your child is done when you have given this; let him get the rest for himself. But fine cookery is imitated in fine intelligence, and sometimes with like results — mental indigestion. Hence we have imperfect French, caricatured German, and murdered music, and the native tongue and history passed by. When will people learn to prize bread and water and see that it is better to know a little well, than to know next to nothing about a great deal?

III. THESE ILLUSTRATIONS PREPARE FOR THE HIGHEST TRUTH OF ALL, viz., that Jesus Christ is the bread and water, without which man cannot live. He never says that He is a luxury which the rich only can afford. An adventurer would not have seen in metaphors so humble a philosophy so profound.

1. Man needs Christ as a necessity and not as a luxury. You may be pleased to have flowers, but you must have bread. Jesus has often been presented as an ornament, a phenomenon; but He preached Himself, and would have others preach Him, as bread and water.

2. What has been the effect of omitting to declare Christ as bread and water? Leaving the simplicity of Christ, we have elaborated theological sciences, worked out a cunning symbolism, filled the Church with many coloured garments, and constituted splendid hierarchies. All this means that man is a fool, and prefers vanity to truth. Poor souls are left to believe that they can only get to Christ through priests, catechisms, and ecclesiastical mumbling. Take the pure Bible and read it for thyself, and thou shalt see the Lord and eat heavenly bread.

3. History furnishes a most graphic confirmation of these views. J.S. Mill says: "Let rational criticism take from us what it may, it still leaves us the Christ." Exactly: it leaves us bread. It modifies the theological cook and confectioner, but it leaves the living water. Men can't get rid of Christ, because they can't get rid of themselves. The Lord allows the chaff to be blown away, but saves every grain of wheat; yet nervous people think that the wheat is lost because the chaff is scattered.

(J. Parker, D. D.)

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KJV: Then said they unto him, Lord, evermore give us this bread.

WEB: They said therefore to him, "Lord, always give us this bread."