flesh and blood disjoined from his Spirit; but of the one life which is the union of both — Spirit in such connections seems to stand not for the Holy Spirit, but for the divine nature of Christ, for the life of Christ is not the union of the Holy Spirit with his humanity — and in virtue of which the presence of the one must ever involve in the same form, and to the same extent, the pres- ence of the other. What we receive is therefore his whole life, as a single undivided form of his existence, by one and the same process. The participation of Christ's life in the sacrament is in no sense corporeal, but altogether spiritual, as the necessary con- dition of its being real. It is the soul or spirit of the believer that is immediately fed with the grace which is conveyed to it mystically in the holy ordinance. But this is in fact a fruition which belongs to the entire man, for the life made over to him under such central form, becomes at once in virtue of its own human character, and of the human character of the believer himself, a renovating force which reaches out into his person on all sides, and fills with its presence the totality of his nature. The same system substantially is unfolded by Ebrard in his " Christliche Dogmatik." What is taught concerning the Lord's Supper presupposes what is taught of the nature of man and of the person of Christ. In the sacrament of the supper we are united to Christ; but the nature of our union with Christ de- pends upon the nature of the parties to that union. Humanity as a generic life developed from Adam as its root and centre, be- ing corrupted by sin, is healed by its union with the divine nature in the person of Christ, or according to Ebrard's mode of repre- sentation, by the Logos becoming a man by a process of self-lim- itation. Every man from the first moment of his existence pos- sesses " ein substantielles Centrum seines mikrokosmischen Lebens, .... ein Centrum, welches da war, ehe der Mensch bewusste Gedanken hatte, und welches bleiben wird, wenn der Leib dem Tode verfallt, welches also an sich weder Gedanke (mens) noch materieller Stoff ist." 1 That is, every man has from the com- mencement of his being " a substantial centre of life, which pre- cedes conscious mental activity, and which will remain when the body dies, and therefore in itself is neither mind (mens) nor mat- ter." This life-centre is instinct with a force which develops itself as mind and body, physically and psychologically. It is the Ego, the personality. It is the seat of regeneration which consists in introducing into this substantial centre of our being a new organic
1 Christliche Dogmatik, in. iii. 2, § 444; Konigsberg, 1852, vol. ii. p. 316.