hand out to us its truth in a compact solid mass, like a sledgehammer, with which instantly to strike down all doubt or gainsaying; or if it caused it to rise before us in one exact definite column of light, with no intermingling of light and shade, no gradations towards darkness. But this would be contrary to all God's methods of conducting moral training in other departments. It would save trouble if conscience always led us magisterially, like a sheriff taking one by the collar and conducting him through the street. Doubtless it would be easier for parents always to be told authoritatively the best way of dealing with their children. Doubtless it would greatly abridge our inquiries and anxieties if full divine intimations were flashed on all questions of social duty. But God nowhere trains us in that way, the way of spiritual dwarfage. He leads us along dizzy heights overhanging bottomless abysses, where we must be on the alert. His method is to provide enough light for those who seek and accept it, but in a measure to veil it from others. Is it strange, then, that we find the Bible in harmony with this style of training? Is it strange that it must be studied and interpreted as from within itself, by a mind in sympathy with it; that many of its meanings gradually dawn on the soul, as they are needed and welcomed; and that, all the way along, it is at once a test and an instrument of moral training? Is it strange that, while most of its central and practical teachings are plain enough, taking it as a book no one can put his mind on the exact living messages of God in it in their fulness, only as he is spiritually led and enlightened in a process of grand moral awakening and enlargement? At any rate, whatever may be our theories on the subject, this, historically, is the nature of the book; and it is not a question of choices with us what kind of a Bible we would like, but what kind we have, and of duty to recognise the fact, and harmonise our beliefs, habits, and defences with it.

It may be objected, further, that this view leaves the impression that the exterior and structural element is the prominent one, and that the valuable part lurks vaguely somewhere in diminutive and intangible places in the book. Just the opposite is true.

It must be remembered that in products that spring up from an inner principle, giving it support and body, the formal is

Pre-eminence of the Vital.

161

the prominent part, while the energy which makes that what it is, pervading and animating it, remains out of sight. It must be felt out and divined by the seeing spirit, rather than seen by the bodily eye. Take the marvellous Divine Word himself. To many minds all that is to be seen of him is the outward man, the historic Jesus, the visible dweller in Palestine. The external details cover and exhaust the conception. But to a deeper insight there appears, back of that outward life, back of that phenomenal humanity, a fulness of Divine Energy, Love, Personality, that pervades, saturates, and overflows every step, act, and moment of the historic career and the visible personage. When we see the Being and the life, interiorly, not outwardly alone, we discover that the spiritual and Divine not only vitalises the external in every part, but infinitely transcends it in worth and glory. So, at first sight, the outward element of Scripture may seem, to persons of little spiritual insight, as they make the distinction and glance over the subject, to be the more prominent; but when we come in true sympathy to weigh the permeating truths, relating to the wondrous redemption, God's being and government, man's nature, needs, possibilities, and perils; the outlook into moral and spiritual principles; the horoscope of the future of humanity here and beyond, in the volume; when we take in the interior living element, the Bible within the Bible, and see these grand, wide-reaching, fadeless realities pervading and outreaching the book, as the Divine pervades and outreaches the apparent in the life of Christ; when our vision is anointed grasp and estimate the spiritual side, we realise that the formal retires to an obscure and inconsiderable position, and that the vital rises in a halo of glory above and crowns it.

to

I. E. DWINELL,

ART. VIII.—The Lord's Supper.1

IN the remarks which we propose to make upon this subject, we have in our view the needs of the great body of private members of the Church rather than the needs of the ministers 1 From the Southern Presbyterian Review,

VOL. XXIX.-NO. CXL

L

of the gospel; although we are not without hope of being able to say something which may serve to impart additional clearness to the views of some ministers who have not made the subject a matter of special study. Observation and experience have convinced us that there is not a little confusion, if not some error, in the notions entertained by many intelligent Presbyterians in regard to the nature and design of this ordinance, and to the mode in which it conduces to the sanctification of believers. Fatal errors in regard to it were taught in the Church for ages; and so inveterate have these errors become, so thoroughly had they poisoned the life of Christians, that even the great men who were raised up by Divine Providence and employed as its instruments in the work of reform in the sixteenth century, failed to reach any harmony of views among themselves concerning it; and an ordinance which had been established by the Saviour as the most impressive symbol of the union and communion of his people, became the occasion of bitter contentions and divisions. Its mission, like the mission of the Redeemer himself, seemed to be that of bringing a sword, not peace, on the earth. The history of the Church scarcely records anything better suited to humble us and make us distrustful of our unaided understandings, than the debates at the colloquy of Marburg, and especially the obstinate weakness of Luther in defending a position as utterly untenable as that of the Papists themselves. The cask preserves the odour of the first liquor that is put into it; and the error of Luther still lingers in the noble Church which has been called by his name. But are Presbyterians free from error in regard to this ordinance? Their doctrinal standards are, as we believe; but we also believe that the ghosts of the departed errors of Popery still linger about the Communion-table even in our own Church. This is our apology, if apology be needed, for the present writing.

We have in the New Testament four several accounts of the institution of the Supper. The last of these is found in the eleventh chapter of Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians; and being the last in the order of time, as well as the most complete, it was doubtless designed by the Saviour to be the chief directory for the Church in celebrating this ordinance.

'Directory' of the Lord's Supper.

163

So the instinct of the Church seems to have decided; and we shall be guided in what follows by this directory.

I. In the first place, it must be borne in mind that this ordinance was instituted by the Lord himself. "For I have received of the Lord," says the apostle, "that which also I delivered unto you" (verse 23). It is no ordinance of man, but an ordinance of God in Christ. It is a positive institution, not moral; that is, the obligation to observe it rests not upon. "the nature of things"-the nature of God, the nature of man, or the relations of God and man as modified by the gospelbut upon the sovereign appointment of God. Given a knowledge of the gospel and of those new relations which the death of our Lord Jesus Christ has constituted betwixt him and us redeemed sinners, then the obligation to remember his death, with the liveliest emotions of gratitude, faith, and repentance, immediately arises and suggests itself. The relations cannot be recognised, without feeling the obligation. This is the moral side of the matter. But to remember him and commemorate his death in this particular method, to wit, by assembling before a table, and eating bread and drinking wine together, would never have suggested itself to us in the way of duty. No obligation would have been felt, and none would have existed. But the moment the command is given-“ Do this in remembrance of me"-the obligation arises. It is created by the command. This is the positive side of the matter.

There are some inferences of immense importance to be drawn from this fact, that our Lord by his own sovereign will ordained this feast.

1. If it be an expression of his sovereign will, and no reason exists for celebrating the Supper but the bare command, then a refusal to go to the Lord's table involves the guilt of rebellion. Rebellion differs from other crimes in this, that while other crimes are transgressions of particular laws or commandments, this crime is aimed at the very source of all law, the authority itself upon which all law rests and by which alone it can be enforced. Murder may be committed by one who is thinking of nothing but the gratification of a private purpose or impulse of cupidity, lust, ambition, or revenge; but rebellion is always an attempt to subvert the government itself,

or, at the very least, a denial of allegiance to it. Such was the crime of our first father in Eden. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil was of the nature of a positive institution. The prohibition, "Thou shalt not eat of it," and that alone, created the difference between it and the other trees of the garden, as to man's right of enjoyment. It was the expression and the symbol of God's sovereign right to control his creature. To eat of the fruit of that tree, therefore, was to deny that sovereign right, and to say as plainly as an act could say, "I will not have this God to rule over me." It was not the transgression of a single commandment; but a comprehensive repudiation of man's whole allegiance, an exhaustive denial of God's right to issue any command at all. So here the refusal to obey this command, "Do this in remembrance of me," on the part of any one who understands the case, is equivalent to a rejection of the whole authority of Jesus Christ. It is a very solemn and emphatic way of saying, "I will not have this man to reign over me." Let this be pondered by those who say that they can be as good Christians out of the visible Church as in it.

2. If this ordinance be a symbol of Christ's supreme authority in the Church, and there is no valid reason for observing it but his command, it will follow that he who goes to the Lord's table, with the consciousness of being impelled, only or mainly, by the desire to obey him, to remember him and his death, in the way that he himself has appointed, has good reason to look for a blessing. His obedience, as such, will be rewarded. We do not mean that a mere mechanical compliance with the law of this ordinance, or of any other, will entitle a man to receive a blessing; much less are we believers in what has been called in the Papacy the opus operatum, that the sacraments produce their appropriate effects whenever administered, unless some bar is opposed to prevent their operation. Our meaning is, that beside the effects which an ordinance is adapted in its own nature to produce, a special manifestation of God's favour may be expected to follow the essential spirit of obedience itself; and that where the spirit of obedience exists, the other effects, which have been alluded to, may be more confidently expected to take place. To illustrate: the memorials of a Saviour's broken body and of his blood shed, are