e.

cause them to enjoy for ever the immortal food with which I will sustain them in heaven, If any "man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever; and "the bread that I will give is my flesh, which "I will give for the life of the world." oft bas And now, dearly beloved, though many points in this great subject are left untouched, we must draw to a practical conclusion; and we call upon you to mark forcibly the words, "If any man eat of this "bread, he shall live for ever." ever." Now to" eat "of this bread" clearly means, practically to believe in Christ's atonement; to embrace him as the Redeemer, and spiritually to unite ourselves to him by every act of duty and fellowship which he has enjoined; so that the "living for ever" (i, e. with Christ in heaven) depends upon a man's own choice, whether he will or will not eat of this bread. The raising of his dead body, indeed, is a consequence of Christ's Resurrection, which no act of mortal can annihilate but whether a man will let his soul still suffer a spiritual famine, when he has the offer of Emmanuel to feed it; whether he will continue to live upon the swinish husks of sin, when his Father invites him to his own table, and comes forward, oh! with more than the fatted calf, and the robe, and the ring; whether he will fling aside the marriage garment, and thus unfit himself for sitting down at the everlasting feast this simply depends upon his own free choice. Christ will not feed us. against our will; the Israelites might either gather

up the manna, or reject it and perish. But the living bread has come down, and millions have eaten, and are now living for ever. The same living bread,” dearly beloved, is offered to you, and the offer is enforced with an argument more deep, and solemn, and piercing, than any which ever fell from the lips of inspiration : 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

66

life, and I will raise him up at the last day."

We have been speaking of realities: the act of Christ giving his flesh for the life of the world is the reality of the atonement; and the act of a man taking this doctrine to his heart, and placing his sole dependance upon it for salvation, and thus feeding his soul upon it by faith, is the reality of a believer's practical reception of it.

Are we all believers, then, in these realities? do we each take gladly our part and share in this atonement? are we really (as the Apostle says) "members of his body, of his flesh, and of his "bones ?" if we are-do we, as living members, communicate with our living head? has not He, who is the living bread," pointed out the way and the special method of communicating with him? has He not put into our hands the very image of the text, the bread of nature which we all eat, figuratively to represent "the living bread "which came down from heaven ?" and if the

Lord's Supper be a commemoration of the realities we have been describing, and if Christ left a dying command that we should keep it, surely those who believe in the reality are bound, to the commemoration. But when the greatest blessing is positively attached to it-when it is clearly evident, that through this special channel Christ will spiritually communicate Himself and His Holy Spirit to us, and allow us to hold the sublimest communion with him; that he will form a strong fellowship and alliance between the members and the Head, stronger than all the confederacies of sin, and thus feed our souls with the " living bread," and permit our souls by faith to feed upon him-can we refuse any longer to accept the invitation? Let us approach at once, and spiritually eat this " living "bread which came down from heaven;" and by so doing we shall be preparing for the time, when, in the strength of " that everlasting meat," we shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more; for we shall spring up, as on the pinions of eagles, to Him who is the resurrection of the body and the life of the soul.

"Jesus answered and said unto her, If thou knewest the gift of God, and who it is that saith to thee, 'Give me to drink; thou wouldst have asked of him, and he would have given thee living water.'"

You cannot avoid being struck with the great variety of language through which our Lord always takes occasion to illustrate the vital doctrine of the Atonement. He takes up every object which is most familiar to the eye of his hearers, and seizes oftentimes the most incidental and apparently trivial circumstance to carry home to the heart, through the avenue of the senses, that truth without which man cannot be saved. Our Saviour clearly pointed to the Atonement, when he compared his own person to a good shepherd

laying down his life for the sheep; and in the same chapter (viz. the tenth of St. John), where he com pares himself to the door of the sheepfold, there Liss an evident allusion to the opening of the kingdom of heaven, and access to the Father through the blood of the Mediator: and again, in the sixth chapter (as we explained in the last discourse) immediately after our Lord had miraculously fed the famishing bodies of the five thousand, and an allusion was made to the manna with which God marvellously fed the Israelites, he instantly took| up both the occasion and the figure of speech to convey strongly his own doctrine, in the words, "I am the living bread which came down from "heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall "live, for ever; and the bread that I will give is my

flesh, which I will give for the life of the world." You may remember our pointing out the peculiarity of the doctrine-that Christ declared himself to be the living bread, not merely because he gave moral and spiritual instruction, like Moses and other teachers, but because his own flesh was to be sacrificed for the life of the world; and since the world, meaning mankind, could only live for ever through that Atonement, Christ might truly repre sent himself as the " living bread." We call this to your remembrance, in order that you may observe, the strong similarity between that text upon "the "living bread," and our present upon the “living "water."