impossible that such a state of things could have existed if it had been the belief of the primitive Church that the sacramental Rite was the mystic medium of Salvation. St. Paul relates the original Institution of the Service, in order to recall them to a sense of its spiritual purposes, and of the gross irreverence of confounding it with a festal occasion,—of representing by symbols the divine Life and self-sacrificing Love of Christ, and then profaning, by disunion and intemperance, the emblemed Body and Blood. It is not necessary to suppose that St. Paul had a separate Revelation of the particulars of this Memorial Service; nor indeed will the words of the original naturally bear this construction. St. Paul had received through the sources of Apostolic testimony the words and purport of the Lord, and he relates them in almost verbal agreement with the statements in the Gospels. One point this whole passage does determine, — namely, that this Memorial Service was not confined to those who witnessed it, and that it had a fitness and application out of Judea, and beyond the circle of the first Disciples. It is the only symbolic Service, in its character of a Church, which Christianity possesses; and one sometimes wonders that those who are ready to complain of the bareness of our worship, coldly hold themselves apart from the breathing spirit of this Memorial Act. And how full of significance, of deep life, are those spiritual symbols! To show forth the Lord's death until he come! Can we pass a day, righteously, mercifully, meekly, resignedly, without the spirit of the Lord's Death! Are we sure that it might not be good to watch with him one hour, as in a spiritual Gethsemane, before, in the world, we incur the risk of deserting him at the Cross? Might it not be well to bear about with us the Dying of the Lord Jesus, that the Life also of the Lord Jesus might be made manifest in our mortal flesh? Sad at least it is, that a Memorial Act designed by Christ to symbol spiritual Union should become an occasion in which disunion is displayed! |