THE LORD'S SUPPER. CHAPTER I. ON EXTERNAL ORDINANCES. GOD is a Spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth. The bended knee, the sacramental sign, the worded formulary and stated service were not devised for Him. He knows what we want before we ask, and needs not that any man should tell him. He knows what we are before it has been manifested in thought, or word, or deed-before one thought betrays the yearning of our affectionsone word confesses the persuasion of our minds -or one act exposes the principle that reigns within us. Nay, the mere voiceless consciousness of the soul is not necessary to Him: He knows our love or hate before it knows itself: He knows how much! that we have never known, of the heart from which He requires this spiritual worship. "When thou wast under the fig-tree I saw thee."-Saw what? not the man Nathanael in the act, as he probably was, of prayer; this would not have surprised Nathanael into an immediate recognition of his diety. Jesus saw under the fig-tree a chosen disciple who had not yet known his Saviour, unconsciously made ready to choose him and confess him when he appeared. Rabbi, thou art the Son of God." All the discovery was on Nathanael's part; the Master had known his servant under the fig-tree-and long-how long before! "Before I formed thee in the womb, I knew thee."-" According as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world." He sees the love that never saw itself, and accepts the unconscious service. "Lord, when saw we thee an hungered and fed thee?" He feels the hatred that knows not its own object: "Who art thou, Lord?" "I am Jesus of Nazareth, whom thou persecutest." He accepts the faith that doubts of its own existenceminute as a grain of mustard-seed; and how he estimates the guilt of sins unconsciously committed, is apparent in the sacrifices appointed for them under the Mosaic dispensation. It is not for Deity, then, that the manifestations and expression of devotions are required. It is not for himself God has appointed forms and places and symbolic signs, nor to himself he has adapted them. Mark here the pride and absurdity of human reasoning. We hear it said, "What does God care for forms and ceremonies? What can it signify to Him, who reads the heart, whether I pray in one place or another, or any where at all, if I live under a sense of dependence upon Him? Is there any charm in the posture of the body, in the sprinkling of water, and muttering of words, and setting apart of days and sanctifying of places?— Every man is before God what he is in his heart, in spite of creeds, and formularies, and institutions of religion; irrelevant all to the nature of the Eternal Spirit; and what have they to do with the spirit of a man?" We answer, no more than the paper on which our words are written, and the characters in which they are expressed, have to do with the thoughts and feelings they convey from the mind of him who writes, to the mind of him who reads. Religious ordinances are the medium of communication God has appointed between himself and us, suited, not to His nature, but to ours. In earthly language, by material images and with sensible signs, the Deity holds communion with his earth-born creatures, and chooses to receive communications back again. It was left for the intellect of fallen man to discover that they are superfluous, contemptible -to mock at the simple machinery of the forbidden fruit, by which the first movement of sin was to be detected: to cavil at the similitude of earthly passion ascribed to the mind of the impassible God, of joy, and grief, and anger, and repentance; above all, to pour out the full vial of his scorn, the very spleen of his indignant reason, against that great device, that mys tery of godliness-God manifest in the flesh. Were we informed what was the necessity of submitting Deity to mortal sense, of working out redemption with material instruments amid sensible things, rather than in mental and spiritual abstractions, it might help us to discover why God had joined, and required us to join, the outward and visible sign of devotion with the inward and spiritual grace, alone essential, and alone acceptable to Him. Meantime it is enough for the submitted intellect to know, that He has so appointed-that He does so require-and that He accepts, not the ordidances, but our spiritual worship in them: or rather all in Christ-apart from whom the emotions of the heart and the adoration of the understanding, are of no more value than the flexions of the knee and the utterance of the lips. From the beginning God has instituted sacramental signs; material emblems of spiritual things; memorials and witnesses between himself and man; pledges of promise, and tests of obligation. Hard by the tree of knowledge, which tested his obedience, stood the tree of life, its blessing and reward. The lusting eye, the profaning hand, transgressing instruments of the guilt-stirred spirit, should have been instruments of prevention; for there, within touch and sight, stood the pledge and emblem of the life they were to forfeit. Those senses through which the criminal desire was engen |