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SECTION VII.

THE SACRAMENT OF THE LORD'S SUpper.

It must ever betray a most poor and narrow conception of the nature of Christianity as a whole, to suppose that the question of Christ's presence in the Eucharist may be settled by a few texts of scripture, taken in an isolated way, and without regard to the general revelation of which they form a part. It is not in this way, that the true weight of the scriptural evidence for any great truth is to be reached. The doctrine of the Trinity for instance is never exhibited under any such formal, categorical statement, as we find employed for the purpose in our modern catechisms and confessions. We may say the same thing of the doctrine of Original Sin. The Unitarian in the one case, and the Pelagian in the other have taken advantage of this circumstance to create distrust with regard to both. So very momentous and fundamental as these points are allowed to be, how is it to be accounted for, they have asked, that they have not been so plainly and directly affirmed, as to cut off at once and forever all room for scepticism or cavil? The objection is specious; but we need only to go deeper into the true idea of the Christian revelation, to feel its utter worthlessness. Christianity we have seen already to be a Life. Its form is the spirit that maketh alive, and not the letter that killeth. Its revelations are not theorems but facts; not facts in the form of mere tradition, but actually subsisting, always enduring facts; not disjointed, fragmentary facts, but a glorious system of facts, organically bound together and growing out of each other, as a single supernatural whole. A theology that builds all its doctrines upon mere abstract texts, may arrogate to itself the character of biblical, in the most eminent sense; but it can never have any good claim to be considered so in reality. It belongs to the very genius of sect, to magnify itself in this way. It always affects to be biblical, in the highest degree. It will stand upon the bible, and upon nothing but the bible. In the end however, its biblicity is found to resolve itself invariably into such a poor, circumscribed conception of revealed truth, as is now described. Isolated texts, viewed through the medium of some particular sect hobby, are made to exhaust the whole proof, whether for or against the position on which they are made to bear. But no use of the scriptures can well be more truly unbiblical than this.

Christianity is not a skeleton, nor yet a corpse for the use of the dissecting room. The bible is not to be understood, by fragments, and as seen from any and every point of view where the beholder may happen to stand. All turns on the position of the beholder himself, and his power of observing and comprehending the revelation as a whole. He must stand in the truth, have sympathy with it, feel the authority that belongs to it in fact, in order that he may have power to do justice at all to its presence. What could such a spirit as that of Voltaire, be expected to understand of the apostle Paul? Who would trust the rationalism of Priestley, or the abstract spiritualism of the Quaker, in any exegetical judgment, bearing on the question of our Lord's divinity in the first case, or on the true idea of the Church in the second? All turns on the stand-point of the interpreter, and the comprehensive catholicity of his view. He must be consciously within the horizon, and underneath the broad canopy, of the new supernatural creation, he is called to contemplate; and then each part of it must be studied and expounded, in full view of its relations to every other part, and to the glorious structure in which all are comprehended as a whole. This is the true conception of biblical theology. Only under this form, can bible proof, as it is called, in favour of or against any doctrine, be entitled to the least respect.

So in the case before us, the sacramental question can never be settled by the formula of institution, This is my body, This is my blood, separately considered; nor by any other single text under the same abstract view. The interpretation of every such text, depends invariably and necessarily on the theological position, from which its bearings and relations are observed. Hence it means one thing to the Romanist, another thing to the Lutheran, and something different altogether to the rationalistic Socinian. The idea of settling the sense of the eucharist by the words of institution separately taken, is perfectly quixotic.

It has been said indeed, that this ambiguousness constitutes itself a strong presumption against the idea of any special mystery in the ordinance; since more care must have been employed, on this supposition, to guard the institution from being misunderstood. But every such judgment, proceeds on a wrong theory of the Christian revelation itself, as we have already attempted to show. Why is not the doctrine of the Trinity categorically asserted? Why have we not the constitution of Christ's person, succinctly described as in the Westminster Catechism? Why is it not taught in so many words that infants are proper subjects for baptism, and that the first day of the week was to be substituted for the seventh, as the Christian sabbath? Simply, we answer, because the Christian revelation is constructed on a

wholly different plan, infinitely more worthy of its author, and infinitely better adapted for the accomplishment of its own glorious end.

The Lord's Supper can never be understood, except as viewed in its relations to the whole system of truth, which has been brought to light by the bible. The view we have already taken then, of the new creation in Christ Jesus, and his mystical relation to the Church, has all served only to open the way for placing the ordinance in its true and proper light.

The great difficulty here is, in rising to a full, abiding sense of the truth and reality of Christianity itself, as a supernatural constitution permanently established under this character in the world. We are too prone, to restrict the idea of supernatural interposition in this case, to the single historical person of Jesus Christ himself; an error that tends directly to throw a certain magical, docetic character, over the whole fact of the incarnation, and to sink Christianity at the same time to the form of a mere abstract spiritualism in the sphere of the flesh. For it is one thing to be spiritualistic in the flesh, and quite another thing to be divinely real in the Spirit. We must not sunder the supernatural in Christ, from the life of his body which is the Church. Christianity is strictly and truly a new creation in Christ Jesus; a supernatural order of life, revealed and made constant and abiding, in the midst of the course of nature as it stood before. As such, it includes resources, powers, divine realities, not only peculiar to itself, but altogether transcending the common natural constitution of human life. All this, at the same time, under a true historical form. The supernatural has become itself natural; not in the way however of putting off its own distinction, as compared with what nature had been before, and still is under any other view; but by falling into the regular process of the world's history, so as to form to the end of time indeed its true central stream. To question the presence of such supernatural resources and powers in Christianity, when we look at it properly, is to question in fact the revelation of the supernatural in Christ himself. Either we must fall back at best to the old Ebionitic stand-point of Christian Judaism; or we must allow that the power of a truly divine life, the constitution of the Spirit as distinguished from the constitution of mere nature, is in the Church, not transiently and sporadically as under the old Testament, but with real immanent constancy, as forming the inmost character of the Church itself.

The supernatural, as thus made permanent and historical in the Church, must, in the nature of the case, correspond with the form of the supernatural, as it appeared originally in Christ himself. For it is all one and the same life or constitution. The

Church must have a true theanthropic character throughout. The union of the divine and human in her constitution, must be inward and real, a continuous revelation of God in the flesh, exalting this last continuously into the sphere of the Spirit.

Let all this be properly apprehended and felt, and it cannot fail at once to exert a powerful influence over our judgment with regard to the Lord's Supper. For it is plain, that this ordinance holds a central place in the general system of Christian worship. The solemn circumstances under which it was originally instituted, the light in which it has always been regarded in the Church, and the very instinct, we may say, of our religious nature itself, which no rationalism can effectually suppress, all conspire to show, that it forms in truth the inmost sanctuary of religion, and the most direct and close approach we are ever called to make into the divine presence. The mystery of Christianity is here concentrated into a single visible transaction, by which it is made as it were transparent to the senses, and caused to pass before us in immediate living representation. No matter how poor may be the general view entertained of the gospel, even for the lowest rationalistic spiritualism itself, the Lord's Supper, (if it be not discarded entirely, as with the unhappy Quaker,) constitutes the most significant and impressive exhibition of the grace of the New Testament; the most graphic picture, at least, if nothing more, of the salvation which has been procured for us by the Saviour's sufferings and death. All that is wanted, then, to make it a true sacrament to our view-the seal as well as the sign of the invisible grace it represents-is that we should have a true and full persuasion of the supernatural character of Christianity itself, as a permanent and not simply transient fact in the history of the world. Low views of the sacrament betray invariably a low view of the mystery of the incarnation itself, and a low view of the Church also, as that new and higher order of life, in which the power of this mystery continues to reveal itself through all ages. Those who entertain such views may claim the credit of more than common spirituality; it may be their object professedly to exalt the character of Christ, by sinking the thought of all that is outward and material, in order to make more room, as they dream, for his being honoured in a higher form. So indeed it has ever been. The enemies of the sacraments have always affected to be more spiritual than others. And who were such sticklers for the highest order of spirituality in the early Church, as the Gnostics, who at the same time turned the whole fact of the incarnation itself into a mere docetic abstraction. Such spiritualism, as it begins in the flesh in fact, and never gets beyond it, even in its highest flights, is sure to end in it also palpably at the last. On the other

hand, let the great fact of the incarnation be apprehended with full faith, as a world fact-the centre of all history-the fountain of a new creation, which is still present and progressive, not fantastically, but in the way of actual human, historical development, in the Church; let it be felt that the Church is, in very deed, the depository and continuation of the Saviour's theanthropic life itself, and as such a truly supernatural constitution, in which powers and resources wholly transcending the common order of the world are constantly at hand, involving a real intercommunion and interpenetration of the human and the divine; let all this, I say, be felt, and it is easy to understand how naturally and necessarily, at the same time, we must be led to see the mystery of the Holy Eucharist, epitome as it is of the mystery of the Christian salvation itself, in a corresponding light.

And is not this, it may be asked, the only true and right position for coming to any just judgment in the case? Is not Christianity in fact such a supernatural constitution, under a true historical form in the world? And may the man be trusted to interpret the sense of its mysteries, who does not feel this? Shall I go to the spiritualistic Gnostic, or Anabaptist, or Quaker, to learn the manner of Christ's presence in the Church? Shall I ask the rationalist Ammon, or Wegscheider, or Paulus, or some rationalizing Grotius or Macknight, to explain to me the words of institution, in the sacrament of Christ's body and blood? Just as reasonably might I study Paul at the feet of Voltaire. The very first and most indispensable condition to a safe and sound judgment here, is that we should stand in the full sense of what is comprehended in the idea of Christianity itself, as a true and real revelation of the supernatural in the flesh. This is of more account in the case, than all exegetical helps besides. This was emphatically the position of the primitive Church; and it was this right standpoint in relation to divine truth no doubt, more than any thing else, which served in the case of the first Christians, to set both the doctrines and institutions of Christianity in proper view, if not at once for the understanding, at least for the heart and the inward life. They saw in Christ a new order of life, divine and yet most perfectly human at the same time, really active in the flesh by the Church, and destined to triumph, (in a very little while, as they supposed,) in the form of a true earthly millennium, over the entire state of the world as it stood before. They felt that in the sphere of this new creation, they were mystically joined to the Saviour himself, by the power of the Holy Ghost, so as to participate in his very nature and life. And how then was it possible, that they should look upon the communion of his body and blood in the Lord's Supper as a mere sgn or token, in the common acceptation of these terms? In