If this be done there will remain no doubt but that Our Blessed Lord proclaims Himself to be the Bread of Life, the food of man's spiritual nature and being, which needs food quite as much as his physical and mental nature and being; that He ordained the Holy Communion to be the means and channel whereby we receive His flesh and blood, that is His very perfect life and nature, according to His promise as recorded in St. John VI. verses 48-58; and that St. Paul so understood its purpose and meaning.
Realizing that we are moving in the realm of the Spiritual and meditating upon the words of the Incarnate God, the very truth who can neither deceive or be deceived, we will not ask with the unbelieving Jews how can this man give us his flesh to eat, we will leave all questions as to the manner how where Christ Himself has left them, and with a most thankful heart will make the words of Hooker, the great Elizabethan Divine, our own, "What these elements are in themselves it skilleth not, it is enough that to me which take them they are the body and blood of Christ, His promise in witness hereof sufficeth, His word He knoweth which way to accomplish; why should any cogitation possess the mind of a faithful Communicant but this, O My God thou art true, O My Soul, thou art happy."
THE REASONABLE, HOLY AND LIVING SACRIFICE OF DISCIPLESHIP.
There is another purpose why Our Blessed Lord is present with us in Holy Communion. He is present as the Great Head of the Church, in order that we His members with Him and in Him may offer ourselves a living Sacrifice holy, acceptable unto God, which is our reasonable service (Romans XII. 1). We have sadly forgotten the real essential meaning of worship. What is worship? Surely self oblation. It is the offering of ourselves, our bodies, souls and spirits, our talents, our gifts, all we have and all we are to God for service. But this is just what we poor sinners cannot do of ourselves, it if only in Christ that we can give ourselves to serve God and humanity. And so Our Blessed Lord comes to us as the Head of the Church which is His Body, the living organism in which He lives and through which He carries on His work. He comes and pleads on our behalf the merits of His atoning death and Sacrifice once offered, He comes and applies to us the saving efficacy of His atonement, He feeds us with His Body and Blood, making us one with Himself so that He dwells in us and we dwell in Him, so that we are one with Him and He one with us; and then, in Him, in union with His eternal oblation of Himself, He offers and presents us, His Body, as living Sacrifices to the eternal Father, and sends us forth to do service for Him and our brethren, not in our own strength and power but in His to whom all power in Heaven and earth has been given.
The present era in the history of the Church and the world is one which calls for great power if Christ is to be brought to a distracted disorganized sin-laden, sin-weary world,—and if the world is to be brought to Christ its one and only possible helper and Saviour, its Saviour from present and future evils in the age that now is as well as in the ages to come. That power is in Christ and is made over to His followers when in simple faith they come to Him in a receptive attitude and with the determination to use it. The fundamental importance of the Holy Communion is, that it stands forth preeminently as the principal channel through which this power is bestowed.
May all those who bear His name and desire to do Him service realize what an inexhaustible treasury of Divine strength and power the Master has provided for us in this Sacrament of His Love. Just a few words in conclusion as to our use of it.
It is food, therefore, it must be received frequently and with regularity. It is food, therefore it presupposes life and at least a degree of health in those who take it. A corpse cannot receive food, the sick have no desire for it. The Holy Communion is for those who are Baptized and have received the life of the Risen Lord. It is for those who have been forgiven and who long to show their gratitude by becoming strong through the assimilation of Christ the Bread of Life to do Him service and perform His will.
It is food, therefore not a Spiritual luxury for good people, but the ordinary necessary food for us all, poor weak pardoned sinners, God's Children reconciled in Christ, who are trying to become good and to love Him who first loved us.
The realization of our own nothingness and the all sufficiency of Christ is the condition of heart and soul requisite for a good Communion. Repentance for the fact that it should be so with us, faith that He will supply all our needs, because He alone can and because He so wills, is the attitude of those who would really know what this Sacrament was meant to be and can be to those who come to Him "as sick to the Physician of Life, as unclean to the Fountain of Mercy, as blind to the Light of Eternal Splendour, as needy to the Lord of Heaven and earth, as naked to the King of Glory, as lost sheep to the Good Shepherd, as fallen creatures to their Creator, as desolate to the kind Comforter, as miserable to the Pitier, as guilty to the Bestower of pardon, as sinful to the Justifier, as hardened to the Infuser of Grace."