FEW to-day will dispute that the Lord's Supper was given to the Church by our Lord Himself, and formed the centre of the worship of the Church in New Testament times.¹ Some there are who will question whether it was our Lord's intention that the institution should be permanent within His Church; and some who will even go so far as to deny that such was His intention. In passing, it should be remembered that the answer to this denial is to be found not only in the historical evidence--which both inside and outside the New Testament is all against it--but also in the meaning and necessity of the Lord's Supper itself. But the questions which are being asked to-day are not, "Was this instituted by Christ?" "Was this intended to be a permanent ordinance of the Christian Church?" but rather, "What is its value?" "What possible good can come from it?" and the related question as to whether those who attend are any better than those who do not. To those devout souls who are really convinced that Jesus instituted this Feast, and made it a perpetual obligation to His followers, the discussion of these questions will have but little [190] interest. But, after all, attendance at the Lord's Supper is not a mere ritual observance, by which we sign a passport for entry into heaven; and once let men begin to realise that it has no value, that it conveys no grace, that it meets no fundamental need of their nature, and they are going to question its validity. These questions as to the value of the Lord's Supper must therefore be answered--not only as to its value, but as to its reasonableness also.

      A great many of the objections which are being raised to institutionalism can be traced to false teaching with regard to this subject in the past. Many of our systems of theology really amounted to teaching that God ordained the Christian religion out of harmony with man's nature. Institutions have been presented as "stumbling-blocks" placed by God to test and trap us. What a conception of God! It is out of harmony with all His laws of creation, and we refuse to believe that the Lord's Supper was set in the Church because it satisfied no need of man's soul; but rather was based upon principles fundamentally contrary to the nature with which God had endowed him. No! the very permanence of the Church and the communion of His Body and Blood are based upon the fact that they are both designed to meet deep and constant needs of those who have been regenerated by the power of His Cross. And here we must insist, and that with every assurance, that the language of these institutions can only be understood by those who have had this spiritual experience. There is a real mystery about language and especially about the language of the soul. "In man the emotion of [191] vague longing roused by objects of surpassing beauty or sublimity may produce a fervour of desire incommunicable, because it touches the deep spring of other associated instincts."²

      The very form of the question, "What is the value of the Lord's Supper?" demands an answer based on experience, and those who ask the question must not therefore demur if we appeal first to the realm of Christian experience. The fact that the Lord's Supper has lived through nineteen centuries of progress in civilisation, and still makes its appeal felt to thousands of devout Christians, proves that it meets and satisfies a fundamental need of man's soul. The Roman and the Greek Catholic, the majority of Anglicans, and the Plymouth Brother all alike find here the highest source of their inspiration, as well as the closest contact with God. And there are evidences in all the Churches, which positively prove that the highest intellectual development has not robbed man of the instinct of soul which drives him to seek his God through Christ in this divine ordinance. But what has taken place in those Churches where preaching has been substituted for the "fellowship meal"--where the pulpit has taken the place of the Lord's Table? One of two results has been inevitable; either extreme sentimentalism or pure intellectualism. Are not Churches suffering from these things to-day? The danger has been that the man and the sermon [192] might take the place of God in worship. This institution is a sure defence against such a danger, and wherever it has been practised as the central act of worship it has proved this point. Preaching and edifying have their place, but the chief purpose of the Church assembly is dependent for its satisfaction upon no single individual nor upon any message that he may deliver.

      Perhaps no greater emphasis could be given to the value of the Lord's Supper with its associations, as the satisfying service of the Church, than to reflect on what would happen in most of our Free Churches if the popular preacher were to be removed.³ We cannot help feeling that in most cases it would spell disaster. Is this as it should be? Preaching has its use; but are Christian people to be mainly dependent upon it for their spiritual growth? If so, there are hosts of Christians who are placed in a grossly unfair position. Surely there is some more permanent, more easily accessible, more silent witness to His presence. This the Friends have found in their sacrament of silence; but thousands of others have found it with greater assurance when in the fellowship company they have experienced the "communion of the Body and Blood of Christ."

      But there are those who will not be convinced by evidence drawn from experience; they desire some real and satisfying explanation of the process. [193] "How can the Lord's Supper satisfy a need?" is the question they ask. They are not satisfied with the evidence that it does, but desire some philosophic basis for the contention. Curiosity is one of our most potent instincts, and demands satisfaction. It is our purpose, therefore, to show that the Lord's Supper has within itself certain objective realities; which have their subjective counterparts in man; that, after all, there is an explanation of how it, meets a need of man's nature, and will always prove a satisfying bond of union between man and God. The Christian faith is built upon the fact of the Incarnation--God was manifest in the flesh, and we must insist that the ordinances, Baptism and the Lord's Supper, and the Church herself, are but extensions of the principle of the Incarnation. If, as we believe, the Incarnation was a fact, what was its explanation?--for in that we shall find the explanation of the Lord's Supper, as well as of Baptism and the Church. In discussing the problem of immanence and transcendence, Professor Seth Pringle-Pattison has said: "But I say that in the nature of the case we can have no knowledge of God except in relation to the world of His creatures,"⁴ and would it not be true to say that we can have no perfect knowledge of God except in relation to the Perfect One? Visibility is one of the conditions of life as we know it. Nihilianism began its growth in the very early days of Christianity, and it is amazing how for centuries it has clouded our views of the Incarnation. Under the influence of this philosophy the Church came to regard Jesus [194] as a kind of Olympian Deity, and the conception of the writer to the Hebrews--He was tempted in all points like as we--soon disappeared. But even to-day we are not free in our thoughts of Jesus from the view expressed in Nihilianism. In many directions we still fail to see that the manifestation of God does not destroy the human channel through which it comes; and that in the Perfect Manhood of Jesus we have a perfect revelation of the Godhead of the Father. The doctrine of Transubstantiation is no more than the outcome of Nihilianism.⁵ There can be no Real Presence without a change in the elements, is its fundamental proposition. But the fact that Jesus was God did not obliterate the fact that He was Man to the people who sojourned with Him--there was the visibility of the reality of His Manhood. So in the Lord's Supper the fact that we are vouchsafed some special blessing, such as came to us in the Incarnation, does not mean, of course, that we shall see anything different from bread and wine with our physical senses--there is no transubstantiation. But to those who have learnt the truth and value of the Incarnation this does not lessen the reality of the spiritual blessing which is surely conveyed.

      One of the.objections raised to both Baptism and the Lord's Supper as means of grace is: "They are mere bodily acts." Of course, the contention is untrue. Neither Baptism nor the Lord's Supper [195] are mere bodily acts, even if such things are possible. But whence comes this contempt for the body and its actions? Surely it has paraded long enough as a Christian doctrine, and it is time the Church began to recognise that--whether it finds its expression in Puritanism or Monasticism--it formed no part of the teaching of Jesus. In spite of the fact that H. G. Wells has been blinded with this ancient pagan philosophy so far as to paint Jesus as an ascetic,⁶ we must maintain that Jesus never, either in teaching or practice, showed contempt for the body. He did teach denial of the body, but even that was not for the purpose of saving one's own soul, but for the sake of rendering service to humanity.⁷ The fact that He took upon Himself a body should be sufficient to guard us against contempt for bodily acts. We are creatures of body and spirit, and we do not yet know the secrets of the influence of the one upon the other. To deny such influence is to be arrogant in the extreme, for its existence is now proved beyond doubt.

      The ultimate realities are truth, beauty, and goodness; and religion must be concerned with all of these. We cannot sum up God in terms of [196] intellect alone. The emotional and conative sides of our nature demand satisfaction. In keeping with this Christianity claims that its Founder is the Truth, the Life (beauty), and the Way (goodness); and on the spiritual side of our nature these correspond to the states of intellect, emotion, and will. If the Lord's Supper as a religious rite is to prove efficacious, it must appeal to these three states of mind. And this it does.

      Everyone is aware of the important part played by memory, and it is perhaps through memory that the cognitive states wield their greatest influence on the practical issues of life. Höffding maintains that the forces determining action are "purely a question of what thoughts and memories are excited by the idea connected with the impulse, and what strength of feeling these can command." Why do we keep photographs and relics of dead friends? Why, everywhere in the human race, as contrasted with all other living creatures, is there a tendency to symbolise those who have passed from the sphere of visibility? A religion which failed to perform this task would fail to satisfy an impulse of human nature which is found in the lowest tribes, and is as virile in the highest forms of civilisation. "The words, the elements, the acts, carry us back directly to the supreme crisis of His life. No one can be present at the rite with a serious purpose without thinking vividly of Him. And, putting aside the question as to how the case may stand with departed friends, we are concerned here, not with one who is dead and gone, but with One who is alive and spiritually present. [197] To think earnestly and lovingly of Him is to realise His presence, to be with Him, to open the heart to all the influence which comes from contact with His Spirit, to be in Him and He in us. All this is not metaphor, but experience, widespread and in direct line with similar though lower experiences which come from intercourse with human personalities. Let it not be supposed that such a view is purely 'subjective,' that it is a case of faith creating its object. The whole point is that there is something, or rather Someone, really there. Faith or the receptive mind under the influence of the associations of the rite, realises and appropriates to itself the Presence which is there independently."⁸ We shall do well to rest with assurance upon the Divine injunction, "Do this in remembrance of Me." Human nature demands some visible symbol, and Christ has provided it.

      The more we study ourselves, the more we realise how thoroughly our actions and our thoughts are linked to our feelings and emotions, and no religious rite can be of value if it fails to make its appeal to the emotions. Now the language of the soul is not always the language of words: it is far more often the language of action. Even laughter and tears, which so often express the soul's deepest emotions, are sometimes inadequate.

      Feeling seeks to justify itself, but cannot do so in words. It therefore expresses itself in societies, [198] fellowships--actions which are symbolic. And here we must insist that symbols are not things which pretend to be what they are not. It has been well said, "A symbol is something which manifests to human sense a non-sensuous reality; and the truest symbols are those things in human life which are the most natural manifestations of the unseen reality."⁹ Here in this Feast of bread and wine the Christian Church has expressed, as it never could have done in mere words, its passionate love of God, which sprang from the love of God to man--we love Him because He first loved us--which love of God was supremely declared in the Passion which is symbolised. It has also expressed its passionate love for man, and this is symbolised in the fellowship meal. In this sense the Lord's Supper is the great dramatic act of the Christian community. "For as oft as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye show forth the Lord's death till He come."¹⁰ We miss much of the beauty of the language of the Supper when we fail to remember that at first it was associated with a real fellowship meal. In the East such meals were common, and meant more than they do to us. To "eat salt" with an Arab is a bond of eternal friendship; and so the Church, in a most solemn manner, expressed its own bonds of fellowship and its fellowship with its risen Lord. Cunningham says: "No one who knows what human nature is will wonder that a common meal should be made the most sacred institution of the Christian religion,"¹¹ and it is true to say with Mr. Emmet that "We [199] shall never realise the full possibilities of the rite until we somehow make it the 'fellowship meal.'"¹² This does not mean that we shall return to the condition of the Corinthian Church, for that was a perversion of the rite, but that we shall realise more deeply the social side of our religion so beautifully expressed by St. Paul in that same letter, "For we being many are one bread."¹³

      Action is the completion of all the operations of the mind: the will is the instrument of action. Here we are face to face with what Kant called the "practical reason," and man is seen as a creature capable of morality. How does this feast aid us on the moral side? In what way does it strengthen the will? Has it any value in this direction? Some who have stood for the value of the feast in other directions have denied to it any value here; but mainly because the normal ethical doctrine which has accompanied the dogma of transubstantiation has been so repulsive to them. Where the doctrine of transubstantiation is held, it is generally believed that the Eucharist is the most potent means of atoning for sin. But this is the very opposite of the primitive doctrine. In fact, impurity was the one thing which made the feast invalid. Let a man examine himself, and so let him eat and drink,¹⁴ was the injunction of St. Paul, and the writer to the Hebrews expressed the same thought when he said, "Therefore, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience, and our bodies washed with pure water, let us draw near."¹⁵ So strongly was this felt in the [200] early Church that the writer of the Didache says: "If anyone is holy, let him come; if any is not, let him repent."¹⁶ The very symbols proclaim to us, louder than words, the awful price of our sin, and the Lord's Supper stands as a perpetual barrier to sin in the Christian. In this sense it may be said to be the moral dynamic of our religion.

      Lastly, the Lord's Supper serves a different yet lofty purpose, not to the individual as such, but to the corporate body. That which has so often proved a source of disunion was really intended to be a unifying institution. The very fact that it has so frequently split the Body of Christ proves it to be intimately related to the problem of unity. Ignatius, in a later age, found his centre of unity in the Bishop; but we are coming to realise that the unity of the Church a generation earlier was centred in a Person, and expressed not by a language of words, but by a language of action. This language of action nowhere found adequate expression as it did in the ordinances of Baptism and the Lord's Supper. Is it not significant that in his letter, written to a Church which was in danger of disunion, St. Paul should put forward both the argument from Baptism and that from the Lord's Supper? "For we being many are one bread and one body; for we are all partakers of that one bread."¹⁷ It was a fellowship meal in the true sense of the term. How could there be bickering and strife in that holy [201] fellowship? Had they not all come into that fellowship company by the one way, and here in the Church's worship had found their strongest bond of union? And so may it be once again when, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience, and our bodies washed with pure water, we draw near in full confidence. Such a unity will depend on no extraneous circumstances, neither on man nor his message, but upon the dominating influence of the Person of our Lord, which influence will come to us in the solemn yet social act of communing with His Body and Blood.¹⁸

[EOCU 190-202]