of Man ascend where He was before? It is the Spirit that quickeneth, the flesh profiteth nothing. The words that 1 speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life. The latter part of the sentence declares this speech to be, like so many others, figurative; but the reason for the introduction of His Ascension does not appear so plain. The meaning of it, however, I conceive, is conveyed by Cranmer, who says, that "He so spake, that they should not phantasy that they should with their teeth eat Him here present in earth; for His flesh so eaten, saith He, should profit them nothing. And yet so should they not eat Him, for He would take His body away from them, and ascend with it into heaven; and there by faith, and not with teeth, they should spiritually eat Him, sitting at the right hand of the Father." (Defence, vol. ii. p. 3.) The same meaning is suggested by Augustine. They thought He would deal out His own body to them, but He said, that He was about to ascend to heaven whole and entire. The commemoration of Christ's death had not yet been instituted, and allusion to it would have been at the time unintelligible; yet our Saviour addressed all ages, and as He spoke in this same Gospel of Baptism before its institution, we may assume that when He speaks of eating His flesh and drinking His blood, he means to speak of those who in faith partake of this Sacrament. I say in faith, for, to use Augustine's words incorporated into our 29th Article, " though the wicked, and such as be void of a lively faith, do carnally and visibly press with their teeth the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ, yet they are in no wise partakers of Christ," and so far are such from benefiting by the act, that, as we learn from the Apostle, those who do not discern in it the Lord's Body, cat and drink to themselves condemnation. Our Lord speaks therefore, we may affirm, of the worthy communicant. But with

f Tract. xxvii. in Evang. Joan.

Tract. in Evang. Joan, xxvi.

Waterland I would maintain, that the universality of the language forbids our limiting it to sacramental feeding; for as this eating is declared to be indispensable to salvation, we must assume such a spiritual eating, as will comprehend not only all sincere Christians, who have never enjoyed the opportunity of communicating; but the patriarchs and other holy men, who lived before Christ's coming in the flesh, who, in the words of the Homily on Faith, " though not named Christians, yet was it a Christian faith they had, for they looked for all benefits of God the Father, through the merits of His Son, as we do now;" and the Apostle assures us, that they did all eat the same spiritual meat, and drink the same spiritual drink. A careful examination of the discourse will remove the difficulty, for it will show that the strong metaphors of eating the Flesh of the Son of Man, and the Bread from Heaven, are equivalent to the simpler phrases of coming to Him, and believing in Him, and therefore, whoever believeth in Him, hath eternal life. At the same time, the metaphor guards the doctrine from abuse; for eating, involves the idea of the death of the person who is our food, and the belief intended, must not be a vague and general acquiescence in the precepts of the Gospel, but an influential belief in the efficacy of the Saviour's death as an atonement for sin, and a consequent partaking of the pardon it hath obtained, and of the grace of the Holy Spirit which it has purchased. According to Waterland, for the first four centuries, both in the Greek and Latin Church, this chapter was not interpreted of the Eucharist, but as the Eucharist was one way of participating of the Passion, it was sometimes applied, as it is by our Church, for explaining its nature, and exciting to a reception of it. This frequent applying of it came at length to make many interpret it directly so; and hence the practice, which arose in the beginning of the fifth century, of giving h Vol. 4. Review of the Doctrine of the Eucharist, chap. vi.

the elements to infants. Though the Romanists in general contend for the sacramental interpretation, many of them prefer the spiritual, influenced it may be both by the disuse of Infant Communion, and the denial of the cup to the Laity, neither of which can easily be vindicated upon the former. The Reformers in general, both our own and the foreign, reject this sense. Our Lord, as I have remarked, may allude to the future commemoration of His death, but to suppose that He will really give us His flesh to eat, and His blood to drink, is to substitute for a spiritual union with Him, a material feeding, which, were it possible to provide it, could only feed the body, without profiting the soul. Such is the error of the Roman Catholics, many of whom deduce from this discourse the dogma of the real corporal presence of Christ in the sacrament of the Lord's Supper, which is contrary to reason, and cannot be supported by the Scripture; and as our Lord speaks of dwelling in the believer, which has been always supposed to mean, not in person, but by His influence; so we conclude, that eating and drinking are not to be taken literally, but, as appears from the earlier part of the conversation, as equivalent to coming to, and believing in, Him'.

Many of His disciples forsook Him in consequence of this discourse, and He seems to have been left alone with the Twelve. He asked if they also wished to depart, intimating that He had no desire for reluctant followers. Peter, from the warmth of his disposition and his attachment, avowed, in the name of all, his full persuasion that Jesus was the Messiah,

For a complete refutation of the Roman Catholic exposition, and the vindication of that of Saint Augustine, I must refer to Mr. Faber's Christ's Discourse at Capernaum fatal to the doctrine of Transubstantiation, on the very principles of exposition adopted by the divines of the Roman Church. In this argumentative and learned work, in which he supports his statement by a series of theological writers, from Tertullian to Elfric, a Saxon of the tenth century, he may be said to have exhausted the subject.

the Son of the living God; and His reply, Thou hast the words of eternal life, shows, that he understood his Master's spiritual interpretation of the meaning of His speech. Now when we consider that they were as yet ignorant both of the fundamental fact upon which the propriety of our Lord's language rests, the fact that He was to be the sacrifice to atone for sin, and likewise of the nature of the feast by a participation in which the benefits of that sacrifice were to be communicated to the faithful; it appears that nothing but faith in Him, the gift of His Father, could have secured their adherence. To this confession He only thought fit to reply, that one of them was a devil, diáßoxos, that is, a false accuser, who would betray Him. As He did not name the traitor, the tendency of His speech was to check presumptuous self-confidence, and to lead them all to pray, that they might not enter into temptation.

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PART V.

66. Jesus gives offence to the Pharisees by condemning their neglect of the Law of God, in order to keep their own Traditions. Matt. xv. 1-21. Mark vii. 1—23.

OUR LORD appears, from prudence, not to have attended the Passover of this year; but the report of His miracles gave such uneasiness to the Scribes and Pharisees of Jerusalem, that some of them came down to Galilee in order to watch His conduct, and discover, if possible, matter of accusation against Him. Not finding that He and His disciples broke the Law, they objected to them their disregard of the Traditions. By this term, the Pharisees designated the precepts not recorded in the Pentateuch, which, they maintained, had been orally communicated in the mount by God to Moses, and had been handed down to them through successive generations. These, which exceed the former in bulk, and abound in minute instructions, have been since committed to writing, and have been declared by modern rabbies, who make them their principal study, to be lovely above the words of the Law", which indeed they have virtually superseded. Jesus was asked why His disciples did not, according to one of these traditions, wash their hands before meals. Instead of answering their question, He accused them of hypocrisy, applying to them the words of Isaiah, This nation honoureth Me with their lips, but their heart is far from Me. He continued, that their enforcing human ordinances, as of divine authority, rendered their very worship vain and unprofitable; for they not only did

aThis, and similar sayings, are cited by Whitby in his Commentary.