In Remembrance

This do in remembrance of me.—Luke 22:19.

1. There are many ways in which we may think of the Holy Communion. For it is many-sided and rich in meaning. There are at least five aspects in which it may be profitably regarded.

(1) It is a command.—It is something that we are bidden to do. “This do.” We obey our Lord’s explicit command in meeting and celebrating the Holy Communion, by partaking of bread and wine together in memory of Him. There can be no sort of doubt that He did command His disciples to do this; and they have obeyed His command from the very beginning down to the present day. Whatever are its benefits, whatever other purpose it serves, it is an act of obedience, and as such it makes appeal to us.

(2) It is a commemoration.—We do this “in remembrance” of Christ. This is the aspect of the Holy Communion most strongly and prominently brought out in the Prayer-Book. It is the Lord’s Supper; this is its first title. We remind ourselves in the consecration prayer that our Lord “instituted, and in His holy gospel commanded us to continue a perpetual memory of His precious death.” When the bread is given to each one, he is bidden to take and eat in remembrance that Christ died for him. When the wine is given he is bidden to drink this in remembrance that Christ’s blood was shed for him. And as a commemoration it keeps ever before us the life and death of our Lord, it reminds us of His teaching, of His words, of His example, of His work for us.

(3) It is a thanksgiving.—This is expressed in the name Eucharist, which means thanksgiving. Our Lord in instituting this Sacrament began by giving thanks. “He took bread, and when he had given thanks, he brake it.” So from the very beginning we read that they brake bread, and “did take their food with gladness and singleness of heart, praising God.” By the very earliest writers outside the New Testament, if not in the New Testament itself, this service is called “the Thanksgiving,” the Eucharist.

(4) It is a fellowship.—This is implied in the very name Holy Communion. It ought to be to us a constant reminder that our Christian life is an association, not an isolated life; that some day the whole world shall be bound together with one heart and one mind, and jealousies, rivalries and competitions shall utterly cease. Every Christian congregation, and most of all its communicants, pledge themselves to strive to realize this temper, crushing out all the little quarrels and huffs and coldnesses and alienations that so often mar the peace of a congregation, merging minor differences of opinion in the grand unity of love and worship of Christ.

(5) There is also another fellowship.—“We have,” says St. John, “a fellowship with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ.” This fellowship or communion with God through Jesus Christ is by no means limited to the Holy Communion. Over and over again it is spoken of independently of that rite. The communion with God through Christ Jesus is having the same mind in us which was also in Christ Jesus. He is the Vine, and we are the branches; He is the Head, and we are the members. When we are called to be Christians, we are called into the fellowship of Christ; we are incorporated into Him. This union with God through Christ is a spiritual state, the slowly won result of prayer and self-denial, and of the love and following of Christ. But it is equally plainly taught that this fellowship with God is specially realized in the Holy Communion.

I do believe that you have partly misunderstood the meaning of the Holy Communion. Certainly it should be, it must come to be, the most intimate act of love between man and God; but it has also, surely, two other aspects at least for which one should cling to it through years even of uncertainty. First, it is offered to us as the vehicle of a spiritual Presence coming to work in us and for us, bound by no laws save those of Spirit, and so able to act as mysteriously as love (which indeed it is). It is not merely laid upon us as a duty, but let down to us as a hope; in it God meets us while we are yet a great way off, and teaches and changes us in ways we do not stop to notice and could not, perhaps, understand. And, secondly, it is the great means whereby we all realize our unity and fellowship one with another, in which we try to put aside for a little while our own special needs and difficulties and peculiarities, and throw ourselves into the wide stream of life with which the world is moving towards God. For these two uses I would cling, I believe, to the Eucharist, by God’s grace, through the loss of almost all else, even though mists and doubts were thick about me.1 [Note: Bishop Paget, in Life by S. Paget and J. M. Crum, 66.]

2. It is the second of these five ways of regarding the Supper that we are to consider at present. The Holy Communion is a commemoration. It is done “in remembrance.”

The desire to be remembered after death is almost universal in human nature. There may be some who can say—

Thus let me live unseen, unknown,

Thus unlamented let me die;

Steal from the world, and not a stone

Tell where I lie.

Or like Howard, who said, “place a sun dial on my grave, and let me be forgotten.” But nearly all men have the wish to live, after they are gone, in the thoughts and memories of others. They would fain have some kindly remembrances of themselves in some human bosoms, would fain know that those they leave behind think of them and remember them with some regret and esteem. There are few who

To dumb Forgetfulness a prey,

This pleasing anxious being e’er resigned,

Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day,

Nor cast one longing, lingering look behind.

On some fond breast the parting soul relies,

Some pious drops the closing eye requires,

Ev’n from the tomb the voice of Nature cries.2 [Note: R. Stephen, Divine and Human Influence, ii. 65.]

In being conscious of the greatness of His act He differed, says Carlyle, from all other men in the world. “How true also, once more, it is that no man or Nation of men, conscious of doing a great thing, was ever, in that thing, doing other than a small one! O Champ-de-Mars Federation, with three hundred drummers, twelve hundred wind-musicians, and artillery planted on height after height to boom the tidings of the revolution all over France, in few minutes! Could no Atheist-Naigeon contrive to discern, eighteen centuries off, those Thirteen most poor mean-dressed men, at frugal Supper, in a mean Jewish dwelling, with no symbol but hearts god-initiated into the ‘Divine depth of Sorrow,’ and a ‘Do this in remembrance of me’;—and so cease that small difficult crowing of his, if he were not doomed to it?”1 [Note: Carlyle, French Revolution, ii. bk. i. ch. ix.]

Let us remember Him (1) for what He has been, (2) for what He has done, and (3) for what He is.

I

For what He has Been

1. First of all, and in its simplest aspect, His memory is the memory of One who lived, among men, a human life like their own, and yet a life such as none else had ever lived before, or has ever lived since. Of that life the Sacrament is a memorial. It is a memorial of One who, at a time when the world was full of darkness and unrest, came into it saying that He came from God, and had a message from God for all whose hearts were weary, whose minds were dark, whose souls were full of doubts and fears; One who seemed to prove, by the very nature of His life, that what He said of Himself was true, for it was a life which shed a brightness and gladness around it, as from a light shining in a dark place. The little children came gladly to His side. The humble household brightened as He came, and bestirred itself to give Him heartiest welcome. Sickness and disease disappeared at His gracious presence; the blind eyes were opened to behold Him; the deaf ears were unstopped, so that their first sound of human speech should be His kindly words. Even the dead arose at His command, and re-entered the homes that they had left lonely, and went out and in among those whom their loss had made desolate and afflicted. His life was one that gladdened other lives, and bore about with it one living message of peace on earth and goodwill towards men.

When you recall the memory of the dead, it is their life you chiefly recall—all they were, how they looked and worked, what they said, and what they did, and what they were, all the incidents connected with them during the years you were together, the happy times you had in each other’s company, the sweet intercourse you enjoyed, the bright scenes and seasons of communion and pleasure, or the sad sorrowful times of suffering in your histories, all your hours of joy, or your hours of sadness and sorrow, all they did for you, all their ministries of thoughtfulness and kindness for your comfort and happiness, all that made them helpful to you, all that made them dear to you, all their gentleness and sweetness and tenderness, all their love, all their affection, all about them that made them lovable and beloved, and endeared and bound them to your heart.

Thus marvellous has been the power and influence of the memory of His life over men and the world. Down through eighteen hundred years, it has been the loftiest inspiration, and the greatest hope and comfort for human souls. The world has been made wiser and better and richer and nobler by it, for it has enlightened it, and reformed its laws and its institutions and its manners. Men and women have been made holier and purer by it, for it has exerted a transforming power over their whole-natures. The inner life it has cleansed, and the outward it has adorned. It has entered into and purified men’s hearts and feelings and desires and thoughts and tempers and dispositions. It has put down pride and vanity, and envy and jealousy, expelled impurity, and made untruth ashamed. It has cast out evil, and enthroned beauty and goodness in the soul, and made harsh and rugged and unseemly natures sweet and lovely with gentleness and meekness and patience and kindness and charity. It has sweetened enjoyments and brightened and given a new zest to pleasures. It has sanctified and glorified common work and duties. It has given patience and fortitude to endure persecutions and sufferings and martyrdom and death in all its awful forms. It has cheered men amidst struggles, and upheld them in difficulties and depressions. It has soothed in pain and sickness and weakness, and in agony of body and mind. It has sustained and calmed human nature in the bitterest and most heartrending sorrows. It has consoled amid disappointments and failures and baffled hopes, and given relief amid racking cares and anxieties. It has brightened the terrible separations of death with the hope and promise of immortality. In all the worst anguish of life it has been the power, and the only one, to save from despair; and in the last struggles of death it has taken out death’s sting, given solace and calmness and hope and peace, and made the night of mortality radiant with the splendours of redeeming love.

2. It is not simply that Christ is about to die and desires to be remembered. He has a great Messianic purpose in saying “This do in remembrance of me.” The law of the Passover had run, “This day shall be unto you for a memorial”; and our Lord simply puts Himself or His death in the place of the Passover and bids His followers remember Him. The confidence with which He does so is nothing short of majestic, Divine. In the popular mind He is a failure. His enemies consider that they have defeated Him and extinguished His pretensions and His hopes. His best friends are nervous and trembling with forebodings. In His own mind alone is there a clear perception of the actual state of matters; in Him alone is there neither misgiving nor hesitation. Far from hiding from His followers the ignominious end that awaits Him, He speaks of it freely. He knows they will in a few hours be scattered. He tells them so; and yet, so far from apologizing for leading them into difficult and discreditable circumstances, so far from bidding them forgive and forget Him, He actually bids them set aside the event which was most memorable to them as Jews, and remember Him instead. His death is to be more to them than their emancipation from slavery in Egypt. By their connexion with Him they were to have so complete and all-sufficing a life that they, prouder of their nationality than any other people, might forget they were Jews. The Passover had done its work and served its purpose, and now it was to give place and make way for the celebration of the real deliverance of the race. Picture Him standing there on the eve of His death, knowing that His influence on the world in all time to come depended on His being remembered by these half-enlightened, incompetent, timorous men, and you see that nothing short of a Divine confidence could have enabled Him to put aside the very core and symbol of the Jewish religion and present Himself as the hope of the world.

When I muse upon the Blest

Who have left me for their rest,

When the solitary heart

Weeps within itself apart,

When all thoughts and longings fail

E’en to touch the dark thin veil

Hanging motionless to screen

That fair place we have not seen;

Then I bless the Friend who left,

For the traveller bereft,

First, the Promise to His own,

“Thou shalt be where I am gone;

Thou, when I return to reign,

Shalt be brought with me again”;

Then, the sacramental Seal

Of their present, endless weal;

Of Himself, the living Bond

’Twixt us here and them beyond;

And of all the joys that burn

Round the hope of His Return:

’Tis the Feast of Heaven and Home—

“Do ye this, until He come.”1 [Note: H. C. G. Moule, In the House of the Pilgrimage, 64.]

3. But the memory of Christ is the memory of more than His beautiful and gracious human life. It is the memory of One who through that life revealed God; of One, who said, “I do not stand before you alone, and speak to you by My own wisdom merely. One is with Me—one whom you know not—even God, God whom you must know, whom you must love, through knowledge and love of whom your souls must live; and whom, that you may know Him, I have come to reveal to you, and that you may love Him, I have come to reveal to you as your Father who loves you, who forgives all your trespasses, who calls you into fellowship with Himself.” His memory is the memory of One who brought these glad tidings to men. They are glad tidings, in the knowledge of which we have been so trained, within the sound of which we have so habitually lived, that we cannot understand their fresh full life for those to whom they were a new revelation.

We live and move amid the glory and beauty of God’s fair world—in the clear air of heaven and the bright shining of the sun on high, and we never think of the priceless blessings of the blowing wind and the joyous sunshine, or of the loss that would be ours were we to be shut up from these in silence and darkness. But bring out the captive from the dungeon, where the air is thick and the light pale, and set him on the mountain’s brow, and he is unconscious almost of all else, save the glory and freedom of the wind and light. And so, could we whom use has hardened but transport ourselves for one hour from the society of men whose life, whether they will or not, is moulded by the principles of the revelation of Christ—from the atmosphere of a Christian land, from the knowledge of all Christian truth, from the offices of all Christian charity, from the neighbourhood of all Christian law, and custom, and culture—to a land where the name of Christ has never been heard, where the principles of His Church have never had even the feeblest recognition, where the Christian idea of God is utterly unknown, we should be able, in some sort, to realize the sense of light and liberty and confidence which must have filled the hearts of those who, waking from “the foul dream of heathen night,” or quitting the oppressive rites and ordinances of the Jewish Law, came into the presence of the Messenger of God, who said, “God is your Father. He is in Me, and I am in Him. You see Him revealed in Me. He loves you with an everlasting love. Believe this, and your soul shall live.”1 [Note: R. H. Story, Creed and Conduct, 114.]

4. How then are we to keep alive the remembrance of Christ? There is only one way that is entirely worthy, and that is to illustrate the noble spirit of the Sacrament in loving service. The best way to honour the memory of those we love is to live lives which they would approve. We are to interpret to the world the sacrifice of Christ by giving ourselves for others in some such way as He gave Himself for us. We best honour the memory of our dead soldiers by making the noblest use of the heritage which they purchased with their blood. Our praise would be hollow if we were false to our country and made merchandise of liberty and patriotism. We best honour the memory of Christ by exemplifying His spirit in our daily conduct.

Our Master was most human in the Upper Room, and with His last wish suggests irresistibly a mother’s farewell. She does not remind her children that she has done all things for them at sore cost, for this was her joy. Nor does she make demands of hard service now any more than in the past. But one thing the mother hungereth and thirsteth for, and desireth not with words only but with her eyes as she looketh round on those she can no longer serve, but will ever love. “Do not forget me”—how few and short the words, how full and strong are they written out at large. “Live as I would wish, believe as I have believed; meet me where I go.”1 [Note: John Watson, The Upper Room, 78.]

When I forget Thee, like a sun-parched land

Which neither rain nor dew from heaven hath wet,

So my soul withers, and I understand

Wherefore Thou gavest me this high command

Not to forget.

When I forget the death which is my life,

How weak I am! how full of fear and fret!

How my heart wavers in a constant strife

With mists and clouds that gather round me rife,

When I forget!

Ah, how can I forget? And yet my heart

By dull oblivious thought is hard beset,

Bred in the street, the meadow, or the mart:

Yet Thou my strength and life and glory art,

Though I forget.

I will remember all Thy Love divine;

Oh meet Thou with me where Thy saints are met,

Revive me with the holy bread and wine,

And may my love, O God, lay hold on Thine,

And ne’er forget.

And not to-day alone, but evermore

Oh let me feel the burden of the debt—

The load of sorrow that the Master bore,

The load of goodness that He keeps in store,

And not forget!2 [Note: Walter C. Smith, Poetical Works, 494.]

II

For what He has Done

The memory of Christ is the memory of One who closed His perfect life by the sacrifice of Himself; who sealed His testimony with His blood. It is indeed this, more than aught else, that the symbols which we use in this Sacrament bring home to us. It is to this that the words Christ uttered at His last supper chiefly point. “This,” said He, “is my body which is given for you. This is my blood of the new covenant, which is shed for many for the remission of sins.” A death for us, a body wounded, blood poured forth—this is what we are especially reminded of here. “Why was that body wounded? Why was that blood shed?” Does any one ask? He who asks will find plenty of excellent doctrines to give him abundant answer: but what appears always as the living centre of truth within all doctrine, and far above all, is the simple fact that that death was endured, that that sacrifice was offered; the simple fact that He who lived the perfect life and brought to us the saving message of a Father’s love knew that it was needful for our salvation that He should bow His head and die; knew that, without that death, sin in us could not be conquered, and death for us could not be overcome, and that therefore out of His true love to us He was content to die, that we through Him might live, that we, believing in His love and truth and seeing these to be stronger than even death itself, might thereby be rescued from the love and power of our sins, and might be reconciled to the Father, of whose love the Son’s self-sacrifice was the Divine expression.

It happened once that a family had a father who was a benefactor to the State and did such service that after his death a statue was erected in a public place to his memory, and on the pedestal his virtues were engraven that all might read his name and revere his memory. His children mingled with the people as they stood in that square and listened to their father’s praise with pride. But their eyes were dry. This figure with civic robes, cut in stone, was not the man they knew and loved. Within the home were other memorials more intimate, more dear, more living—a portrait, a packet of letters, a Bible. As the family looked on such sacred possessions, they remembered him who had laboured for them, had trained them from first years, had counselled, comforted, protected them. All he had done for the big world was as nothing to what he had done for his own. When they gathered round the hearth he built, on certain occasions they spoke of him with gentler voices, with softened eyes while the strangers pass on the street. This Father is Jesus, and we are His children whom He has loved unto death.1 [Note: John Watson, The Upper Room, 84.]

1. We commemorate His death.—He gives us as a remembrance of Him that which inevitably recalls Him as He died. It is His body broken, His blood poured out, that He sets before us. He does not give us a picture of Himself as He is now and as John saw Him in vision. He does not appeal to our imagination by setting before us symbols of unearthly majesty. He desires to be remembered as He was upon earth and in the hour of His deepest humiliation. And it is obvious why He does so. It is because in His death His nearness to us and His actual involvement in our life and in all our matters is most distinctly seen. It is because that is His most characteristic action; the action in which He uttered most of Himself, all that was deepest in Him and all that it most concerned men to know. And as we prize that portrait of a friend which brings out the best points in his character, even though it is old and he has changed much since it was taken, so do all the friends and followers of Christ think of Him as He was in His death. They believe He is alive now, and that now He is clothed with such manifest dignity and beauty as must attract boundless regard and admiration; but yet it is to the humble, self-sacrificing, bleeding Christ their thoughts persistently turn. It is there they find most to humble, most to encourage, most to win, most to purify, most to bind them to their Lord.

Those who have seen the Russian Pilgrims at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem have been impressed with the fervour with which they kiss the marble slab of anointing and other sacred objects connected with the Cross and Passion of our Saviour. So also in the shrines and churches at Moscow hundreds of peasants and ordinary business people can be seen at all hours of the day turning in to kneel for a few minutes and kiss some icon or picture of our Lord.1 [Note: F. S. Webster.]

2. We commemorate His death as the supreme act of His whole work of salvation.—The Supper is the symbol of Christ giving up His life for us not only as the highest expression of self-sacrificing love, but in a far deeper sense as the ground upon which our sins can be forgiven and the Divine life imparted to the soul. Christ’s suffering for us differs from our suffering for one another by the whole diameter of human experience. No amount or degree of mere human suffering can atone for sin. Christ’s suffering was unique in that it was redemptive. Like ours it was an example, but unlike ours it was a dynamic. Christ did not die for the world to show His love for it in the dramatic and useless way that Portia stabbed herself to show her love for Brutus; Christ died to save the world as none other ever did or could. We cannot fathom the depth of the mystery of Christ’s death for sin, but this we know, that by it our sins are forgiven and we are brought into oneness with God.

What was Christ’s death? It was a willing surrender of Himself into the hands of the Father, knowing at the same time that it was the Father’s pleasure to bruise Him. It was a willing pouring out of all the hopes of the flesh founded on the idea of the continuance of present things; it was an acknowledgment of the righteousness of the judgment of sorrow and death, which, on account of transgression, God had laid on the flesh of which He had become a partaker. And at the same time, while it was a surrender of Himself in filial confidence into His Father’s hands, it was also in full assurance that He was to be gloriously rewarded, by being raised triumphantly from the dead as the New Head and Fountain of life to the Race, by taking hold of whom every child of Adam might be saved.1 [Note: Letters of Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, i. 250.]

Only to be as the dust that His wounded feet trod,

Only to know and to hear

His love, like the deep-throbbing pulse in the bosom of God,

Slaying my sorrow and fear!

Lord, I remember the sins and the shadows, and yet

I remember the light of Thy face.

Let me but die at Thy feet, and the black trembling horror forget,

And only remember Thy grace—

Forgetting the darkness that walked with me all the way,

The shadow that froze me to see,

Only remembering the joy of the breaking of day

When my soul found Thee.2 [Note: L. Maclean Watt, The Communion Table, 16.]

3. We remember Him for what He has done in bringing us home to God.—In the Sacrament there is a meeting between God and the soul, and the soul is taught to find its satisfaction in God. It is taught to look out of itself, beyond itself, for all that can change, and bless, and exalt, and ennoble it, and give it happiness. It is not taught to depend upon its own feelings, its earnestness of faith, its power of hope, its strength of love, or even its utter abnegation of self. It is not left to imagine that it can raise itself from its fallen state, and effect its own union with God. No, it is presented as in a state of hunger in this mysterious feast, craving for God, longing for the powers that are in God to be exercised upon it, and depending upon God’s own act to unite Himself to the soul. And the soul knows that this union is possible, that it can be made one with God through God the Son having been made man, and having died, and risen, through the working of His life in itself. The faith of the communicant may be expressed in one single sentence, “Christ in me, the hope of glory.”

Jesus, in Browning’s beautiful phrase, “calls the glory from the grey”; from the heart of death itself He plucks the promise of life abounding. They shall come to see that His Body has been given “for them,” that His Blood has been the seal of a new friendship formed between them and their Father in heaven. In that holy feast they shall eat the one, and drink the other. Faith in Him will never die, while they do that.1 [Note: H. L. Goudge, The Holy Eucharist, 14.]

“He that dwelleth in me and I in him, eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood,” that is, becomes Christ Himself, is a faithful repetition of His life and spirit in another and individual personality, is so transformed into His spiritual image that he can say with St. Paul, “It is not I that live, but Christ that liveth in me.” This is no mysterious, magical statement, but one in deep accordance with the experience of the human heart. No one who has loved another, or lost one he loved, who has felt the profound intertransference that passion makes, but will understand and value it. It gives a real force, a natural meaning to St. Paul’s words, “the communion of the body of Christ.” The observance of the Lord’s Supper does not make that communion. It is the form among many others in which the idea of that communion is most visibly enshrined. But in enshrining that idea it enshrines another and a higher one—communion with God.2 [Note: Stopford A. Brooke, Sunshine and Shadow, 214.]

III

For what He Is

1. The mode of remembrance appointed by our Lord reminds us that it is to the same kind of personal connexion with Him as the first disciples enjoyed that we are invited. We have the same symbol of our connexion with Him as they had. We are no more remote from His love, no more out of reach of His influence. All that He was to them He can be to us, and means to be to us. Our outward circumstances are very different from theirs, but the inward significance of Christ’s work and His power to save remain as they were.

As, when our Blessed Lord made Mary Magdalene feel and know that He was really present with her, she poured out her whole heart in the burning fervour of that acknowledgment, “Rabboni.”—my Master, my Lord, my All—so by our every act and word we try to express to the Blessed Jesus what He is to us. Our whole soul fastens on Him. Our spirit has no eye for any one, or anything else. Our gaze is fixed on Him. He is with us, and we are with Him. We know what He is in Himself, how pure, how fair, how holy, how perfect. We know what He has been to us, how loving, how tender, how compassionate, how full of healing, and pardon, and peace. And so every hymn is full of His praises; and every gesture is an act of loving reverence to Him; and every sacred rite speaks of Him. We are in His court, and under His eye, and there is an interchange of love between Him and us. On our side there is the love of reverence. On His side there is the love of a gentle, fostering, soothing protection.

Above all, it was necessary for a right understanding, not only of Dr. Arnold’s religious opinions, but of his whole character to enter into the peculiar feeling of love and adoration which he entertained towards our Lord Jesus Christ—peculiar in the distinctness and intensity which, as it characterized almost all his common impressions, so in this case gave additional strength and meaning to those feelings with which he regarded not only His work of Redemption but Himself, as a living Friend and Master. “In that unknown world in which our thoughts become instantly lost,” it was (as he says in his third volume of sermons) his real support and delight to remember that “still there is one object on which our thoughts and imaginations may fasten, no less than our affections; that amidst the light, dark from excess of brilliance, which surrounds the throne of God, we may yet discern the gracious form of the Son of Man.”1 [Note: A. P. Stanley, Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, i. 32.]

2. Again, He bids us “Do this,” to remind us that we must daily renew our connexion with Him. He desires to be remembered under the symbol of food, of that which we must continually take by our own appetite, choice, and acceptance. We do not gather at the Lord’s Table to look at a crown, the symbol of a king who governs by delegates and laws and a crowd of officials, and with whom we have no direct connexion. We do not assemble to view the portrait of a father, who gave us life, but of whom we are now independent. We do not come to garland a tomb which contains the mortal part of one who was dear to us and who once saved our life. But we come to renew our connexion with One who seeks to enter into the closest relations with us, to win our love, to purify our nature, to influence our will. It is by maintaining this connexion with Him that we maintain spiritual life; by taking Him as truly into our spirit by our affections, by our choice, and by our faith as we take bread into our body.

Soon, all too soon, from this blest Sacrament

Back to the glare of day our feet are bent;

Soon wakes the week-day sun, and brings along

The cares and clamours of our human throng;

The world’s loud laughter, threats, or whisper’d spells,

Life’s battles, burthens, weeping, songs, and knells.

But we who from that Paschal Chamber come

Still in its shadows find our quiet home,

Safe in its precincts, near our Master’s heart,

’Midst all the stress of travel, school, and mart.

And still that Cross goes with us on our way;

We feast on that great Sacrifice all day.

The sealing Symbol comes but then and there;

The Truth is ever ours, and everywhere;

Faith needs but stretch her hand and lift her eyes,

And ready still for use her Banquet always lies.2 [Note: H. C. G. Moule, In the House of the Pilgrimage, 68.]

3. And the Holy Supper had its heavenly counterpart. The Jews were wont to picture the felicity of the Kingdom of Heaven under the image of a glad feast. “This world,” said the Rabbi Jacob, “is like a vestibule before the world to come: prepare thyself in the vestibule that thou mayest be admitted into the festal chamber.” And it is written: “Blessed is he that shall eat bread in the kingdom of God.” “Many shall come from the east and the west, and shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of heaven.” “Blessed are they which are bidden to the marriage supper of the Lamb.” And the feast of the Passover was a foreshadowing of that heavenly banquet. It commemorated the exodus from the land of bondage, but it was more than a commemoration. It was a prophecy, and when the worshippers sat at the holy table, they thought not merely of the ancient deliverance but of the final home-gathering.

It is an ancient and abiding thought that the visible world is the shadow of the invisible, and everything which it contains has its eternal counterpart. This thought runs all through the Holy Scriptures. It finds its highest expression in the teaching of our Blessed Lord. In His eyes earth was a symbol of Heaven. He pointed to human fatherhood and said: See there an image of the Fatherhood of God. “If ye, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?” And each familiar thing—the lamp, the net, the seed, the flowers, the birds, the wandering sheep—served Him as a parable.

For, nowise else,

Taught He the people; since a light is set

Safest in lanterns; and the things of earth

Are copies of the things in Heaven, more close,

More clear, more intricately linked,

More subtly than men guess. Mysterious,—

Finger on lip,—whispering to wistful ears,—

Nature doth shadow Spirit.1 [Note: D. Smith, The Feast of the Covenant, 177.]

From Mentone, where he spent the first winter of his illness, Dr. Robertson wrote to his congregation at home:—

“By the time this may be read to you, your Spring Communion will be over. Again, from the hands of the officiating elders, or rather, as I trust, from Christ’s own pierced hand, you will have received the symbols of His sacrifice, and said, as you received Himself afresh into your hearts, ‘This we do in remembrance of Thee.’ Again, the Great High Priest, King of Righteousness, and therefore also King of Peace, has brought down the bread and wine from the altar of His atonement to feed you, returning, weary from the battle, but I trust victorious over the evil; and in the strength of that meat may you go onward, conquering the evil, and battling for the right, and good and true, so as at last to have an entrance administered to you abundantly into the Kingdom, as part of the victorious ‘Sacramental host of God’s Elect.’ ”1 [Note: A. Guthrie, Robertson of Irvine, 287.]

In Remembrance

Literature

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