of those who hear us.* "The preacher," says an able writer, whom I have before had occasion to quote, "who is intent upon carrying his point, should use all such precautions as are not inconsistent with it, to avoid raising unfavourable impressions in his hearers."+ Our Saviour's object in his discourses to the Jews, was to gain them over to the doctrines of Christianity, and he, therefore, must be supposed to propose those doctrines in the manner most likely to gain their attention, and conciliate their esteem. At least, it is repugnant to suppose him selecting the most revolting images, wherein to clothe his dogmas, disguising his most amiable institutions under the semblance of things the most wicked and abominable in the opinion of his hearers, and inculcating his most saving and most beautiful principles, by the most impious and horrible illustrations. Yet, in such manner must we consider him to have acted, if we deny him to have been teaching the doctrine of the real presence, and suppose him to have been simply inculcating the necessity of faith. For, the ideas of drinking blood and eating human flesh, presented something so frightful to a Jew, that we cannot allow our Saviour, if a sincere teacher, to have used them as images for consoling and cheering doctrines; nor, in fact, to have used * Page 39, † Dr. Whately's " Elements of Rhetoric,” p. 152. them at all, under any other circumstances than an absolute necessity of recurring to them, as the most literal method of representing his doctrines. 1. Drinking blood, even though of a clean animal, was, in the Jews' idea, a weighty transgression of a divine precept, given originally to Noah,* and frequently repeated in the law of Moses. Indeed, the most awful form of threatening ever employed by God, is uttered against those who eat blood:"If any man whosoever of the house of Israel, and of the strangers that sojourn among them, eat blood, I will set my face against his soul, and will cut him off from among his people." Hence, we find the drinking of blood, or the eating of meat with which blood was mixed, ever mentioned in Scripture as a most heinous crime. When the army of Saul slaughtered their cattle on the ground, it was reported to him, "that the people had sinned against the Lord, eating with the blood. And he said, You have transgressed."§ Ezechiel is commanded to proclaim-" Thus saith the Lord God: you that eat with the blood.... shall you possess the land by inheritance?" Indeed, no necessity was supposed to justify the drinking of the blood of an animal, as appears from a passage in Judith,For drought of water they are already to be 66 * Gen. ix. 4. † Levit. iii. 17; vii. 26; xix. 26. Deut. xii. 16; xv. 23. Levit. xvii. 10. § 1 Reg. (Sam.) xiv. 33. Ezech. xxxiii. 25. counted among the dead. And they have a design even to kill their cattle, and to drink the blood of. them... therefore, because they do these things, it is certain they will be given up to destruction."* If, then, it was reckoned so guilty among the Jews to taste the blood of even a clean animal, in a case of necessity, how impious must it have seemed to them to drink the blood of man? 2. The drinking of blood, and, more especially, the feeding upon human flesh and blood, is always mentioned in Scripture as the last and most dreadful curse which the Almighty could possibly inflict upon his enemies:-" For, instead of a fountain of an ever-running river, thou gavest human blood to the unjust," says the book of Wisdom. The same is mentioned in the Apocalypse :-" Thou hast given them blood to drink, for they have deserved it." In Isaiah, we have the eating of flesh joined to the drinking of blood :—" I will feed them that oppress thee, with their own flesh, and they shall be drunk with their own blood;"§-that is, with the flesh and blood of one another. The fourth book of Esdras, though apocryphal, bears unexceptionable testimony to the same idea.They shall eat their own flesh, and drink their own blood, for hunger of bread and thirst of water."|| In fine, Jeremiah mentions, as a plague which 66 Judith, xi. 10, 11, 12. † Wisd. xi. 7. + Apoc. xvi. 6. 4 Esd. xv. 58. should astonish all men, that the citizens should -be obliged to "eat, every man the flesh of his friend."* While the Jews attached two such dreadful ideas as these to the eating of human flesh, and the drinking of human blood, while they considered them a crime and a curse, it is repugnant to suppose, that our Blessed Saviour, anxious to draw them all to himself, should have clothed doctrines, no ways repulsive, under imagery drawn from such an odious source. As well might we suppose him inculcating the necessity of belief in his death, by figures drawn from murder; and imagine him saying, "Amen, amen, I say unto you, unless you slay or murder the son of man, you shall not have life in you," as suppose him to clothe the same doctrine under the figure of eating his flesh and drinking his blood. For, as to the correctness of the metaphor, the revolting one which I have just given would have been equally appropriate, or much more so; while the one he used was as repugnant to Jewish feelings, as the other would be to ours. As, therefore, we could not have supposed him, or any other sincere teacher, to use imagery so revolting as this, if addressing us, so neither can we allow Jesus to have used the other when addressing the Jews. Nothing, consequently, but the absolute necessity of using such phrases, could justify the recurrence to them. Now, there could be no necessity, save * Jer. xix. 8, 9. their being the most simple way of conveying his doctrine. But any other doctrine, except that of receiving as food the body and blood of Christ, could have been literally expressed in other terms; or, if a figure was to be preferred, a thousand other metaphors were at hand, which might have been adopted; and therefore, we must conclude, that our Lord used these expressions, because it was his wish to teach the doctrine which they literally convey, that of the Real Presence. It may be objected to this line of reasoning, that our Saviour, on other occasions, clothed his lessons in figures almost equally odious to his hearers. For instance, how frequently does he inculcate the necessity of patient suffering, under the repulsive image of carrying the cross,*—an instrument used in the execution of the meanest culprits, and intimately connected with hateful bondage to strangers. But I must deny all parallel between the cases. 1. The cross might be ignominious, and as such odious-but it was not necessarily criminal. To eat blood was considered essentially wicked; and to teach a doctrine figuratively, by ordering a person to commit what he deems a heinous crime, is very different from telling him to submit to what is merely disgraceful. 2. I have never said that our Saviour was bound to soften his doctrines in teaching them to the Jews, only that he could not * Matt. x. 38, xvi. 24. Mar. viii. 24. Lu. 1x. 23, xiv. 27. |