the nature of the case, they could see in it nothing less than a real communication of the Saviour's life itself; and they understood, of course, and interpreted, the words of institution accordingly, as conveying the assurance of this supernatural grace, to be perpetuated in the ordinance to the end of time.

As Christianity finds a general adumbration in the religion of the Old Testament, so its sacraments in particular are specifically prefigured in the types of Circumcision and the Passover. In the case of the Lord's Supper, a still more remote analogy is presented to our view by Paganism itself, in those sacred feasts which it has been customary in all ages to hold in connection with sacrifices. Under all systems of worship, religion has ever been made to centre in the altar and the offering of sacrifice; while, by partaking of what was thus offered, the worshipper was supposed to come into the nearest communion with the object of his worship. The sacrifice, to serve its purpose in full, must be eaten, and thus united in the most intimate and living way with the person of him, who sought to propitiate the favour of heaven by its means. Whatever of value or merit it comprehended, became available through an actual participation of the sacrifice itself, in communion with the altar. The same idea, variously modified, may be said to run through the entire sacrificial system of the Old Testament. It is most strikingly exhibited, however, in the institution of the Passover.

The Passover was instituted (Ex. xii. 1-27) in connection with the memorable deliverance of the children of Israel, on the night when the Lord smote the first-born of the land of Egypt ; and was ordained to be observed afterwards perpetually in commemoration of this event. The offering in the case was required to be a lamb without blemish. The victim must be slain, as an offering for sin, and its blood sprinkled on the door posts; where it became an atonement or satisfaction, in view of which the plague was not permitted to enter the dwelling thus protected. "The blood shall be to you for a token upon the houses where ye are; and when I see the blood, I will' pass over you, and the plague shall not be upon you to destroy you, when I smite the land of Egypt." But it was not enough that this outward exhibition of the blood should take place, the ordinance made it necessary also that the sacrifice should be eaten. In this case at least, more was intended by this than an act of general communion with God. It represented the necessity of a true, living conjunction with the sacrifice itself. The lamb whose life was poured out as an offering for sin, must be itself incorporated as it were with the life of the worshipper, to give him a fair and

*Scheibel. Das Abendmahl des Herrn, chap. 1.

full claim on the value of its vicarious death. It became to him an atonement, by entering really into his person. It lay in the very nature of the economy itself, that all this should be in a merely outward way. The atonement itself was only a type or shadow; and the union with the victim now mentioned was but relative and imperfect in like manner. All formed an adumbration simply of the glorious mystery of redemption, as it was afterwards to be revealed in Christ.

For it is allowed on all hands, that the Passover, as it continued to be observed afterwards, was more than a mere commemoration of the deliverance in Egypt. This event was itself a grand type of the spiritual deliverance, which has since been accomplished for the world by the death of Christ; and the paschal celebration accordingly, in calling it continually to mind, involved a prophetical reference continually by its means to the coming of this great salvation. It involved an acknowledgment of spiritual need, with a profession of faith in God's covenanted grace, as it was to be revealed in due time for the removal of sin; and for the true Israelite, it carried in it a sure pledge at the same time that the atoning grace it represented would avail to preserve him personally from the power of the destroying angel. All this however on the ground of an actual union with the sacrifice itself, in the way which has been already noticed. In the end, the shadow found its full sense in the presence of the substance. The death of Jesus formed the proper end of all the sacrifices, and of the paschal offering in particular. "Behold," said the Baptist, when he pointed him out to his disciples, "the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world!" Paul calls him expressly our Passover, who has been sacrificed for us (1 Cor. v. 7). This is still more expressively signified however by the Saviour himself, in the institution of the Holy Supper. By his own appointment, the one sacrament was formally substituted for the other. Thus was it distinctly signified, that the Passover had looked forward from the first to the sacrifice of Christ as the true atonement for sin; and that it ceased accordingly to have any meaning, when this sacrifice was offered. The sacrament of the Passover was at once abolished and fulfilled, in the sacrament of Christ's body and blood.

So

The two institutions then are to be considered of parallel character, and as having in some sense the same significance and force. Both look directly to the broken body and shed blood of the Redeemer, as the great and only true propitiation for the sins of the world. Their relation to each other however, is like that of the two Testaments in general. The one is relatively only, what the other is absolutely. The sacraments of the Old Testament are no proper measure, by which to graduate

directly the force that belongs to the sacraments of the New. We have seen already, that the Old Testament made nothing perfect. Its ordinances and ministrations were all more or less shadowy and incomplete. The substance of their sense is revealed only in Christ. To make Baptism no more than Circumcision or the Lord's Supper no more than the Passover, is to wrong the new dispensation as really, as we should do by attributing to the levitical priesthood what is to be found only in him who is a priest forever after the order of Melchisedek. The Passover was at best but an unreal adumbration of the grace that is exhibited to us in the Lord's Supper. It was a picture or sign only of what it was intended to represent; not a sacrament at all indeed, in the full New Testament sense, but a sacrament simply in prefiguration and type. Still, as such a type, it is well adapted to illustrate the true force of the higher institution, in which ultimately it came to its end.

The Lord's Supper was instituted under circumstances, which show clearly that it was intended to take up into itself, (as the comprehension of the whole idea of Christianity,) the full typical import of the Old Testament, which might be said to find its central representation in the Passover. Through this sacrament in particular all looked forward to the great sacrifice of Calvary, as the end in which its shadows were to become real. That sacrifice was now ready to be offered. On the night in which he was betrayed at the close of the paschal feast-with his sufferings in full view, and the full consciousness at the same time of the relation in which he stood to the old dispensation now ready to pass away in his person-our Saviour solemnly took bread, blessed and brake it, and gave it to his disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body, which is given for you :-and then again the cup, saying, This cup is the new testament in my blood which is shed for you, drink ye all of it, (Matt. xxvi. 26–29, Luke xxii. 15-20). Thus was instituted the sacrament of the Lord's Supper, in the room of the Jewish Passover, for the use of the Church in all following time. Now it is only necessary to have some actual sense of the immeasurable solemnity of the occasion itself, to feel how perfectly frigid and rationalistic every view must be that can find nothing more in the words of institution, than that this ceremony was to be a simple conventional memorial to all ages of the Redeemer's sufferings and death. We may not indeed take the words in their strictly literal sense, as is done by the Church of Rome; but we have just as little right on the other hand, to resolve them into the merest common-place in the way of pretended figure. The occasion is too solemn, the phraseology too strikingly pregnant, for that. Let due regard be had to all the circumstances of the transaction,

and it will be impossible to avoid the feeling that it requires to be understood in a higher sense.*

What the Passover signified prophetically, and in the way of shadow, is here exhibited under the character of a real and actually present salvation. For the paschal lamb, Christ solemnly substitutes himself. The Old Testament sacrament is made to i give way to the power and glory of the actual grace, it was employed to foreshadow. Participation in the promise, is to become now particpation in the fact itself. "This is the Lord's Passover," said Moses to the Jews at the time of its institution; and so as it was observed, from year to year in subsequent time, this word was still repeated, "It is the sacrifice of the Lord's Passover who passed over the houses of the children of Israel in Egypt, when he smote the Egyptians and delivered our houses!" (Ex. xii. 11, 27). This did not mean of course, that the paschal elements were themselves this ancient deliverance. But it did mean, that they were something more than a mere Fourth of July commemoration in the case. They were, in pledge and seal, the very covenant itself, such as it was, which that occasion served to ratify, as the shadow of blessings to come. In contrast

*To estimate at all the force of our Saviour's words, in the case of this solemn institution, it is above all things necessary, of course, that we should have present to our minds, in a lively way, the circumstances under which all took place. That most wretched rationalist, Paulus of Heidelberg, resolves the whole transaction into the poorest common-place; by supposing that Jesus, his thoughts full of the violence he expected to suffer shortly after, whilst handing round to his disciples the broken bread, took occasion to say, mournfully, of the suggestive symbol, It is my body. The affecting words made an indelible impression on the minds of all present; and so it came to pass "very psychologically," we are told, that as long as they lived, when they afterwards broke bread together, the simple association served powerfully to recall him to their thoughts, &c. Comin. in Matt. xxvi. 26. And yet Paulus affects to be graphic, too, in painting the scene as it was, in order to show us how natural the symbolical and hyperbolical must be considered in the case! At such exegesis, we may well shudder. But may we not fear that there is oftentimes an approximation towards the same rationalistic stand. point, where the ordinance is spoken of in much more respectful terms, while at the same time its whole significance is tried by the measure of common or merely human relations? No occasion could well be more solemn, than that which gave birth to the holy institution. Let the circumstances be felt. Let the truths of overwhelming interest, presented by our Lord in his last dis. course with his disciples, be present to the soul. Let the calm, divine selfpossession of the Son of Man, the past and the future all in clear vision before him, be distinctly apprehended. Let it be felt, that a new creation was in fact comprehended in his person; and that the shadows of all past time were now to be made actual in the reality they foretokened. Let it be remembered that the idea of the atonement, the great central truth of Christianity, had never yet been distinctly enunciated by Christ himself; but was here first proclaimed, just before the sacrifice was to take place, under a form intended to lodge it in the heart of the Christian worship to the end of time. Let all this be considered and felt, and then how poor and jejune does the interpretation become, which can find nothing beyond a cold logical figure in the actions and words of Christ, as presented to us in this perpetual sacrament of his body and blood!

with all this, and in fulfilment of its true meaning at the same time, Christ, with direct reference to his own expiatory death now immediately at hand, makes himself over to his disciples in the sacrament of the Supper. "This is my body, broken for you-this cup is the new covenant in my blood, shed for many, for the remission of sins." Did he mean that the elements themselves were his body and his blood, literally taken? Of course not. Did he mean then only, that they were a figure of a certain truth, comprehendedi n his sufferings and death, which the mind was to be assisted in contemplating and embracing in this way? More, undoubtedly, than this. Under the elements here exhibited, was offered truly and really the substance itself of which the Passover was only a type—that is, the new covenant in Christ's death, as that in which was verified and fulfilled all that lay included as promise merely in the old. This is the Lord's Passover in its last and most true sense-not the sacrifice of a typical lamb simply, but my body, my blood-not the pledge and seal of blessings to come, but the new covenant itself, the pledge and seal of blessings already come, and now comprehended in this sacramental transaction, as ordained for the use of the Church, to the end of time. All of course however in the way of a living connection with the sacrifice itself. The bread and wine are not Christ's flesh, and blood as such; they are only, (but this in a real objective way), the new covenant in his death, made actual by pledge and seal under this outward form; still a participation in the covenant, requires and implies, in the nature of the case, a participation in the very life, by which alone the expiatory value of the covenant can have any reality or force. The paschal lamb must be eaten, physically incorporated with the life of the worshipper, to give him part in the covenant of which it was the seal. A fleshly shadow of the true life union, on the ground of which, and by the power of which alone, we can ever have part in the blessings of the new covenant in Christ's blood. Communion with the covenant, involves of necessity communion with the sacrifice. All fleshly conceptions are to be of course excluded. The case calls for something higher than popish transubstantiation, or the kindred doctrine of the old Lutheran Church. "It is the Spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing." But the idea of a true participation in Christ's life, as the necessary condition of an interest in his sufferings and death, runs clearly through the whole transaction. The bread is given to be eaten; the wine must be drunk. To quote the words of another: "The breaking of the bread serves to bring into view Christ's death; the eating of the broken bread is a symbol that this death is appropriated in the way of a living union with the Saviour himself. As however Christ, in giving