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beginning we read that they brake bread, and " did take their food with gladness and singleness of heart, praising God." By the very earliest writers outside the New Testament, if not in the New Testament itself, this service is called " the Thanksgiving," the Eucharist.
(4) It is a fellowship. — This is implied in the very name Holy Communion. It ought to be to us a constant reminder that our Christian life is an association, not an isolated life ; that some day the whole world shall be bound together with one heart and one mind, and jealousies, rivalries and competitions shall utterly cease. Every Christian congregation, and most of all its communicants, pledge themselves to strive to realize this temper, crushing out all the little quarrels and huffs and coldnesses and alienations that so often mar the peace of a congregation, merging minor differences of opinion in the grand unity of love and worship of Christ.
(5) There is also another fellowship. — "We have," says St. John, "a fellowship with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ." This fellowship or communion with God through Jesus Christ is by no means limited to the Holy Communion. Over and over again it is spoken of independently of that rite. The communion with God through Christ Jesus is having the same mind in us which was also in Christ Jesus. He is the Vine, and we are the branches; He is the Head, and we are the members. When we are called to be Christians, we are called into the fellowship of Christ ; we are incorporated into Him. This union with God through Christ is a spiritual state, the slowly won result of prayer and self -denial, and of the love and following of Christ. But it is equally plainly taught that this fellowship with God is specially realized in the Holy Communion.
^ I do believe that you have partly misunderstood the meaning of the Holy Communion. Certainly it should be, it must come to be, the most intimate act of love between man and God ; but it has also, surely, two other aspects at least for which one should cling to it through years even of uncertainty. First, it is offered to us as the vehicle of a spiritual Presence coming to work in us and for us, bound by no laws save those of Spirit, and so able to act as mysteriously as love (which indeed it is). It is not merely laid upon us as a duty, but let down to us as a hope ; in it God meets us while we are yet a great way off, and teaches and changes
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us in ways we do not stop to notice and could not, perhaps, understand. And, secondly, it is the great means whereby we all realize our unity and fellowship one with another, in which we try to put aside for a little while our own special needs and difficulties and peculiarities, and throw ourselves into the wide stream of life with which the world is moving towards God. For these two uses I would cling, I believe, to the Eucharist, by God's grace, through the loss of almost all else, even though mists and doubts were thick about me.*
2. It is the second of these five ways of regarding the Supper that we are to consider at present. The Holy Communion is a commemoration. It is done " in remembrance."
^ The desire to be remembered after death is almost universal in human nature. There may be some who can say —
Thus let me live unseen, unknown,
Thus unlamented let me die; Steal from the world, and not a stone
Tell where I lie.
Or like Howard, who said, " place a sun dial on my grave, and let me be forgotten." But nearly all men have the wish to live, after they are gone, in the thoughts and memories of others. They would fain have some kindly remembrances of themselves in some human bosoms, would fain know that those they leave behind think of them and remember them with some regret and esteem. There are few who
To dumb Forgetfulness a prey. This pleasing anxious being e'er resigned. Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day, Nor cast one longing, lingering look behind. On some fond breast the parting soul relies, Some pious drops the closing eye requires, Ev'n from the tomb the voice of Nature cries.*
Tl In being conscious of the greatness of His act He differed, says Carlyle, from all other men in the world. " How true also, once more, it is that no man or Nation of men, conscious of doing a great thing, was ever, in that thing, doing other than a small one! 0 Ohamp-de-Mars Federation, with three hundred
* Bishop Paget, in Life by S. Paget and J. M. Crum, 66, ^ R. Stephen, Divine and Ruman Influence, ii. 65. ST. LUKE — 28
434 IN REMEMBRANCE
drummers, twelve hundred wind-musicians, and artillery planted on height after height to boom the tidings of the revolution all over France, in few minutes ! Could no Atheist-Naigeon contrive to discern, eighteen centuries off, those Thirteen most poor mean- dressed men, at frugal Supper, in a mean Jewish dwelling, with no symbol but hearts god-initiated into the 'Divine depth of Sorrow,' and a * Do this in remembrance of me ' ; — and so cease that small difficult crowing of his, if he were not doomed to it ? " ^