4. The past, however sweet and precious, is not enough for any soul to live upon. And so this memorial rite, just because
1 Canon Furse.
PROCLAIMING THE LORD'S DEATH
it is memorial, is a symbol for the present. That is taught us in that great chapter — the sixth of St. John's Gospel — which was spoken long before the institution of the Lord's Supper, but expresses in words the same ideas as it expresses by material forms. The Christ who died is the Christ who lives, and must be lived upon by the Christian. If our relation to Jesus Christ were only that " Once in the end of the world hath he appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself " ; and if we had to look back through lengthening vistas of distance and thickening folds of oblivion, simply to a historical past, in which He was once offered, the retrospect would not have the sweetness in it which it now has. But when we come to this thought, that the Christ who was for us is also the Christ in us, and that He is not the Christ for us unless He is the Christ in us ; and His death will never wash away our sins unless we feed upon Him, here and now, by faith and meditation, then the retrospect becomes blessedness. The Christian life is not merely the remembrance of a historical Christ in the past, it is also the present participation in a living Christ with us now.
He is near each of us that we may make Him the very food of our spirits. We are to live upon Him. He is to be incor- porated within us by our own act. This is no mysticism, it is a piece of simple reality. There is no Christian life without it. The true life of the believer is just the feeding of our souls upon Him — our minds accepting, meditating upon, digesting the truths which are incarnated in Jesus; our hearts feeding upon the love which is so tender, warm, stooping, and close ; our wills feeding upon and nourished by the utterance of His will in commandments which to know is joy and to keep is liberty ; our hopes feeding upon Him who is our Hope, and in whom they find no chaff and husks of peradventures, but the pure wheat of " Verily ! verily I say unto you " ; the whole nature thus finding its nourishment in Jesus Christ.
^| " \jTft pror.kim t,he Lord's death." By the very fact of so doing we proclaim_als^^is_^loriousr^esent life, His victory over the grave, His spiritual presence" with" His "people, His gift of Himself to be their life indeed. Never, let us be quite sure of this, would the first believers have kept festival over their Master's death, had not that death been followed by a triumph over the grave which at once and for ever showed His dying
i CORINTHIANS xi. 26 333
work to be the supreme achievement which it was. Only the risen Christ can explain the joy of the Lord's Supper. Without Him it would have been a funeral meal, kept for a while by love in its despair, and then dropped for ever. From the very first till now it has been a feast of life and of thanksgiving. It is a contemporary and immortal witness to the risen One. And the risen One is alive for ever more. And in His eternal life He is our life, here and now. Feed on Him as such, feed every- where and always upon Him. Eat Him and drink Him, that you may live because of Him. Such is the message of the festal Meal of the Church, spoken straight from her Lord to the heart of every member of His Body.1
Tf What would be the value of the Holy Supper if it were simply a memorial of a Divine visitation long ago, and not a pledge and a discovery of the Lord's abiding presence? John Knox called it " a singular medicine for all poor sick creatures, a comfortable help to weak souls"; and he "utterly condemned the vanity of those that affirmed sacraments to be nothing else but bare and naked signs." I fear there are few among us in these days who thus esteem them. The truth is that the Sacraments are the very heart of Christian worship, and their neglect, their perfunctory and slovenly administration, is a sore impoverishment of the Church, and proves how very low the tide of our spiritual life has ebbed. True worship is essentially sacramental, and I warmly sympathize with old Gilbert of Sempringham, the friend of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, when he says: "All doctrine is suspect with me, and surely despised, which introduces no mention of Christ, which neither renews me with His Sacraments, nor informs me with His precepts, nor inflames me with His promises." 2
U A communion was held at Pesth, in Hungary, on the 1st of January 1843, being the Lord's Day. We met in an upper room, at night and in secret — " for fear of the Jews," and to escape the eye of an intolerant Government. From the moment that the service began, the place where we were assembled seemed to be filled with a mysterious presence. Indeed, the risen Lord had entered by the closed door, and stood, as at Jerusalem, in the midst of His disciples. Deep silence fell on the little company as they realized His nearness, a silence interrupted only at intervals by the deep-drawn sigh of some bursting heart. The dividing wall which separated heaven and earth seemed for the time removed, and that fellowship between both was ex-