Master's life which have every appearance of being trustworthy.

Doubtless most Christians will prefer to believe that although the establishment of the Communion at the last meal cannot be proved by historic evidence, yet it is morally certain. To those who believe that the earthly life of Jesus was a revelation of divine purposes, the mere fact that the rite did arise in the early Church out of the Last Supper under the inspiration of the Spirit of Christ will be sufficient to invest it with a sacred character; and historic difficulties may, from this point of view, be set aside as irrelevant. It is an essential feature of divine inspiration that it works for the future and the essential. The historic embodiments of that inspiration are always mixed with what is imperfect and of temporary value.

I have said that the phrase "of the covenant" is probably an addition. The reason for so thinking is that it seems, when it first occurs in 1 Cor. xi. 25, to be a Pauline adoption of an Old Testament phrase. In making a covenant, blood was poured out to add a sanction. This aspect of the matter is dwelt on in detail by the writer of Hebrews (ix.). If the Last Supper was, as the Synoptists assert, the Paschal Feast, it would have been quite natural that some comparison between his own death and that of the Paschal lamb should have occurred to the mind of Jesus. But it is very doubtful whether the supper was not an ordinary meal.

Matthew adds to the phrase "This is my blood" the words" of the covenant, which is shed for many unto

remission of sins." Here, again, we can scarcely doubt that we have a doctrinal addition.

The Fourth Evangelist takes up a line in regard to the Last Supper which is very striking. Not only does he give an entirely different account of what took place at it, but he uses the phrases "This is my body; this is my blood" in quite a different connection. He enlarges upon them in his usual vein of allegory. He places in the mouth of Jesus the phrases "I am the bread of life," and "He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath eternal life." And he treats those phrases just as he treats the theses "I am the way," "I am the door of the sheep-fold," "I am the light of the world." The symbolism of all these phrases is manifest. It is the custom of the Evangelist to pour contempt upon those who take such phrases literally. He ridicules Nicodemus for taking literally the phrase that a man must be born again. "How can a man," says Nicodemus, "be born when he is old? can he enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born?" In the same way the woman of Samaria is represented as absurdly taking literally the phrase "He would have given thee living water": "Sir, thou hast nothing to draw with, and the well is deep; from whence then hast thou that living water?" And in just the same way does the Evangelist reprove those who take literally the phrases about eating the flesh and drinking the blood of the Son of Man. The Jews exclaim, with their usual blindness, "How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” Jesus proceeds to explain: "It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing." In another

place the Evangelist cites a fuller explanation. "My meat is to do the will of him that sent me, and to accomplish his work." In the opinion of the Evangelist, then, "to eat the flesh and drink the blood" of the Master is to continue his divine obedience on earth, to live in his spirit, and to do his works. The doctrine of salvation by faith in Christ is as fundamental to him as to St Paul.

This metaphor of eating and drinking for moral and spiritual nourishment is by no means new. "Those who eat me," says Wisdom in the book of the son of Sirach, “will always again hunger for me; those who drink me will always thirst for me again."

How far the Fourth Evangelist was thinking of the actual rite of the Lord's Supper when he wrote is a very difficult question. His mind is so passionately ideal, so careless as to fact, historic or contemporary, that it is often difficult to discern between what he means to be outward event and what he means to be inward experience. Of course in his time the rite was well known in the Churches, and it is hard to imagine that he entirely excluded it from his thought. Yet it seems quite impossible that he can have attached any great spiritual value to it. Jesus in the Johannine history does not command His followers to celebrate a rite of eating and drinking, but orders them to wash one another's feet as a proof of humility and a sign of solidarity in the Church. That later writers should attach the Johannine parable of eating and drinking Christ to the Christian Eucharist was of course unavoidable; but this does not enlighten us as regards

the intention of the Evangelist. It may be that he had no definite intention; but being full of inspiration of the spirit of Christ, he wrote words which became of great importance in the history of the Church. It was a struggling into utterance of a profound need and sentiment of the Christian society inspired by the spirit of the Church, whereas the extreme materialist perversion of the Communion may be matter for regret.

In my opinion the view of the Fourth Evangelist is the true view. The simple phrases uttered at the Last Supper were purely figurative. How indeed could they be anything else? Jesus, sitting in visible and fleshly form among his disciples could not in any literal sense have identified himself with the bread which he broke and with the wine which he passed. When a man at the crisis of his fate writes an intensely pathetic letter, he may say that he writes it not with ink but with his heart's blood. Can we imagine a person so dense as to examine the writing with a microscope to see whether it is really written with blood or with ink?

(c) The Pauline Translation.-Paul does not speak from the strictly historic point of view, which for him was almost non-existent, but from the practical and doctrinal. To him the Lord's Supper was an existing rite of the Church. And we cannot doubt that during the thirty years or so which had elapsed since the crucifixion the rite had tended to expand and to change its character. Of such change Luke in Acts says nothing. There are, however, belonging to the sub

Apostolic age, two important documents which help us with information on the subject. The first is the Didache, or Teaching of the Apostles, a work the date of which is somewhat doubtful, but which seems to preserve the Christianity of some Churches which lay away from the main stream of Christian development towards the end of the first century B.C. The description of the Eucharist is in this document very full. To discuss it at length would take me away from my subject. But a general similarity to the point of view of the Fourth Evangelist is clear. When the cup was given, the president was to give thanks to God for the gift of Jesus, who is spoken of as the vine of David. When the bread was broken, he was to give thanks to God for life and knowledge (wn and yvwois) made known to us through Jesus. At the end of the celebration, he was to thank God for knowledge and faith and immortality made known through Jesus; and to proceed, "Thou, almighty ruler, madest all things for Thy name's sake; Thou gavest men food and drink for enjoyment that they might be grateful to Thee; but to us Thou hast granted spiritual food and drink and eternal life through Thy Son."

It is evident that this service is but a somewhat varied version of ancient Jewish forms of thanksgiving: it is a Jewish grace baptized into Christ. But in the document there is no mention of the Last Supper, nor of any historic origin, and the phrases "This is my body; this is my blood" are conspicuously absent.

Very different in character is the other document of importance, the Apology of Justin the Martyr, a