THE EUCHARIST. IN a former number of this Review I published a few remarks on three celebrated passages of the New Testament, which had become the groundwork of the ecclesiastical idea of Absolution. I propose in the present essay to suggest similar remarks on two classes of passages which have in like manner become the groundwork at least of one aspect of the institution of the Eucharist. Of that sacred ordinance there are many other aspects, historical, poetical, devotional, but as in the case of the phrases of binding and loosing,' so in the case of the most important words connected with the Eucharist, it may be worth while to inquire into the Biblical meaning of the expressions 'the body' and the blood of Christ,' both as they occur in the Fourth Gospel, without express reference to the Eucharist, and as they occur in connection with the Eucharist in the three Gospels and the Epistles. I. The words in St. John's Gospel (vi. 53-56) are as follows:'Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you. Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him.' It is said that a great orator once gave this advice to a younger speaker who asked his counsel: You are more anxious about words than about ideas. Remember that if you are thinking of words you will have no ideas; but if you have ideas, words will come of themselves.' That is true as regards ordinary eloquence. It is no less true in considering the eloquence of religion. In theology, in religious conversation, in religious ordinances, we ought as much as possible to try to get beneath the phrases we use, and never to rest satisfied with the words, however excellent, until we have ascertained what we mean by them. Thus alone can we fathom the depth of such phrases ; thus alone can we protect ourselves against the superstition of forms and the idols of the market-place;' thus alone can we grasp the realities of which words and forms are the shadow. The passage under consideration in St. John's Gospel at once. 1 Mr. Pitt to Lord Wellesley. Reminiscences of Archdeacon Sinclair, p. 273. contains this principle, and also is one of the most striking examples of it. It is one of those startling expressions used by Christ to show us that He intends to drive us from the letter to the spirit, by which He shatters the crust and shell in order to force us to the kernel. It is as if He said: 'It is not enough for you to see the outward face of the Son of man, or hear His outward words, or touch His outward vesture. That is not Himself. It is not enough that you walk by His side, or hear others talk of Him or use terms of affection and endearment towards Him. You must go deeper than this: you must go to His very inmost heart, to the very core and marrow of His being. You must not only read and understand, but you must mark, learn, and inwardly digest, and make part of yourselves, that which alone can be part of the human spirit and conscience.' It expresses, with regard to the life and death of Jesus Christ, the same general truth as is expressed when St. Paul says: Put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ--that is, clothe yourselves with His spirit as with a garment. Or again: Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.' It is the same general truth as when our Lord Himself says: 'I am the Vine; ye are the branches.' In all the meaning is the same; but, inasmuch as the figure of speech of which we are now speaking is stronger, it also expresses more fully and forcibly what the others express generally. It is the figure, not altogether strange to Western ears, but more familiar to the Eastern mind, in which intellectual and moral instruction is represented under the image of eating and drinking, feasting and carousing, digesting and nourishing. 'I,' says Wisdom in the book of Ecclesiasticus-am the mother of fair love, and fear, and knowledge, and holy hope: I therefore, being eternal, am given to all my children. Come unto me, all ye be desirous of me, and fill yourselves with my fruits. memorial is sweeter than honey, and mine inheritance than the honeycomb. They that eat me shall still hunger for more; they that drink me shall still thirst for more.' 3 It is no doubt a remarkable, to modern culture a repulsive,' metaphor, but it is the same which has entered into all European languages in speaking of the most refined form of mental appreciation-taste. If we ask how this word has thus come to be used, it is difficult to say. • All that we know about the matter is this. Man has chosen to take a metaphor from the body and apply it to the mind. "Tact" from touch is an analogous instance.' This general usage is sufficient to justify the expression without going back to the more barbarous and literal practices in which, in savage tribes, the conquerors devour the flesh of a hostile chief in order to absorb his courage into themselves, or that For my This is well put in an early sermon of Arnold on this passage, vol. i. Sermon XXIV. Ecclesiasticus xxiv. 18-21. Cf. Prov. ix. 5. See also Sayings of Jewish Fathers, by C. Taylor, quoted in Philochristus, p. 438. 4 See Foster's Essays. Sydney Smith, Lectures on Moral Philosophy, pp. 153, 154. the parents feed their children with the flesh of strong or spirited children in order to give them energy. II. We pass to the kindred but yet more famous words of the Synoptic Gospels in the account of the Last Supper (Matt. xxvi. 26, 28; Mark xiv. 22, 24; Luke xxii. 19, and (with a slight variation) 22). And these same words, long before the composition of the earliest of the present Gospels, are recorded by St. Paul in his narrative of the same event (1 Cor. xi. 24 and (with the same variation as in St. Luke) 25), and thus form the most incontestable and the most authentic speech of the Founder of our religion: This is My body; this is My blood. Two circumstances guide us to their historical meaning before we enter on them in detail. The first is that, on their very face, they. appear before us as the crowning example of the style of Him whose main characteristic it was that He spoke and acted in parable, or proverb, or figure of speech. The second is that though the words of the text, as recorded in St. John's Gospel, could by no possibility have a direct reference to the Last Supper, which, at the time of the discourse at Capernaum, was still far in the distance, and to which, even when recording the sacred meal, the author of that Gospel makes no allusion, the probability is that they both contain the moral principle that is indicated in the outward act of the Eucharistic ordinance. What this general truth must be we have already indicated: namely, that, however material the expressions, the idea wrapped up in them is, as in all the teaching of Christ, not material, but spiritual, and that the conclusion to be drawn from them is not speculative, but moral and practical. All the converging sentiments of reverence for Him who spoke them, all our instinctive feeling of the unity of the Gospel narratives, would lead us in this direction even without any further inquiry into the particular meaning of the separate phrases. In this general sense the meaning of the two words is indivisible, even as in the older Churches of Christendom the outward form of administration confounds the two elements together-in the Roman Church by representing both in the bread, in the Greek Church by mixing both in the same moment. But there is nevertheless a distinction which the original institution expresses, and of which the likeness is preserved in all Protestant Churches by the separate administration of the elements. Following, therefore, this distinction between the two phrases, we will endeavour to ask what is the Biblical meaning, first of the body' and then the blood' of Christ. What are we to suppose that our Lord intended when, holding the large round Paschal cake in His sacred and venerable hands,' He brake it and said 'This is my body'? And secondly, what are we to suppose that St. Paul meant when he said, speaking of the like • Herbert Spencer, Sociology, vol. i. pp. 259, 299, 300. action of the Corinthian Christians, 'The bread which we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ'? ד 8 6 6 1. It is maintained in the Church of Crete that the original bread is there preserved in fragments, and that This' is the literal perpetuation of the first sacramental body.' But such a belief is confined to Crete. In all other Churches the bread used can only by a dramatic figure be supposed to represent the original subject of the words of institution. The main question is the meaning, in the Gospels, of the word 'body.' As in other parts of the Bible, the hand, the heart, the face of God are used for God Himself, so the body, the flesh of Christ are used for Christ Himself, for His whole personality and character. The body, the flesh,' the bone,' was the Hebrew expression for the identity of any person or any thing. 'The body of heaven' meant the very heaven, the body of the day' meant the selfsame day, the body of a man meant his full strength. Even if we were to suppose that He meant literally His flesh to be eaten-even if we adopted the belief which the Roman heathens ascribed to the early Christians, that the sacrament was a cannibals' feast-even then, unless Christianity had been the most monstrous of superstitions, this banquet of human flesh could have been of no use. It would have been not only revolting, but, by the nature of the case, unprofitable. What is external can never, except through the spirit, touch the spirit. To suppose that the material can of itself reach the spiritual is not religion, but magic. As in the communion with our actual friends it is not the countenance that we value, but the mind which speaks through the countenanceit is not the sound of the words, but the meaning of the words, that we delight to hear-so also must it be in communion with One who, the more we know and think of Him, can have no other than a moral and spiritual relation to us. 'After the flesh we know Him no more.' It is, as the English Prayer Book expresses it, His one oblation of Himself once offered.' It is not the mere name of Jesus' which sounds so sweet to a believer's ear,' but the whole mass of vivifying associations which that name brings with it. The picture of Jesus which we require is not that fabled portrait sent to King Abgarus, or that yet more fabled portrait impressed on the handkerchief of Veronica, but the living image of His sweet reasonableness, His secret of happiness, His method of addressing the human heart. When, some years ago, one of the few learned divines of the Church of France, the Père Gratry, wished to correct some erroneous representations of Christ, he sought for the true picture-le vrai tableau -not in the traditions of his own Church, nor in the consecrated wafer, but in the grand and impressive portrait drawn by the profound insight of the foremost of Protestant theologians in the closing 9 Job xxi. 23. 6 volumes of Ewald's History of the People of Israel. The true 'sacred heart' of Jesus is not the physical bleeding anatomical dissection of the Saviour's heart, such as appeared to the sickly visionary of France at Paray-le-Monial in the seventeenth century, but the wide embracing toleration and compassion which even to the holiest sons and daughters of France at that time was as a sealed book. The true cross of Christendom is not one or all of the wooden fragments, be they ever so genuine, found, or imagined to be found, by the Empress Helena, but, in the words of Goethe, the depth of divine sorrow' of which the cross is an emblem. It is,' as Luther said, 'that cross of Christ which is divided throughout the whole world not in the particles of broken wood, but that cross which comes to each as his own portion of life. Thou therefore cast not thy portion from thee, but rather take it to thee-thy suffering, whatever it be-as a most sacred relic, and lay it up not in a golden or silver shrine, but in a golden heart, a heart clothed with gentle charity.' Perhaps the strongest of all these expressions is the Spirit' applied to the innermost, most immaterial part alike of God and of man. It is breath, wind.10 On one occasion we are told that our Saviour actually breathed on His disciples. But that breath, even though it was the most sacred breath of Christ, was not itself the Spirit-it was, and could be, only its emblem. 6 And as the cross, the picture, the heart, the breath of Christ must of necessity point to something different from the mere outward form and symbol, so also the body,' which is represented in the sacramental bread or spoken of in the sacramental words, must of necessity be not the mere flesh and bones of the Redeemer, but that undying love of truth, that indefatigable beneficence, that absolute resignation to His Father's will, by which alone we recognise His unique personality. The words that He spoke (so He Himself said) were the spirit and the life of His existence-those words of which it was said at the close of a long and venerable career by one who knew well the history of Christianity, that they, and they alone, contain the primal and indefeasible truths of the Christian religion which shall not pass away. That character and those words have been, and are, and will be, the true sustenance of the human spirit, and the heavenly manna of which it may be said, almost without a figure, that he who gathers much has nothing over, and even he who gathers little has no lack.' Such, amidst many inconsistencies, was the definition of the body of Christ' even by some of the ancient fathers, Origen, Jerome, even Gregory called the Great. Such, amidst many contradictions, was the nobler view maintained at least in one remarkable passage even in the Roman Missal which states that where the sacrament cannot be had 'sufficit vera fides et bona voluntas-tantum crede et manducasti '— 10 Sydney Smith, Lectures on Moral Philosophy, p. 12. |