are to ascend thither where at the summit the face of God can be seen.

But that is not all. Our Lord, if I may recur to a former figure, went
on to open another finger of His hand, and to show still more of the
gift. For He not only said, 'the Son of Man gives the bread,' and 'I
am the Bread that came down from heaven,' but He went on to say, in a
subsequent stage of the conversation, 'the Bread that I will give is
My flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.' Now, notice
that '_will_ give.' Then, though the Word was made flesh, and the
manna came down from heaven, the especial gift of His flesh for the
life of the world was, at the time of His speaking, a future thing.
And what He meant is still more clearly brought out, when we read
other words which are the very climax of this conversation, when He
declares that the condition of our having life in ourselves is our
'eating the flesh and drinking the blood of the Son of Man.' The
figure is made repulsive on purpose, in order that it may provoke us
to penetrate to its meaning. It was even more repulsive to the Jew,
with his religious horror of touching or tasting anything in which the
blood was. And yet our Lord not only speaks of Himself as the Bread,
but of His flesh and blood as being the Food of the world. The
separation of the two clearly indicates a violent death, and I, for my
part, have no manner of doubt that, in these great words in which our
Lord lays bare the deepest foundations of His claim to be the Food of
humanity, there is couched, in the veiled language which was necessary
at the then stage of His mission, a distinct reference to His death,
as being the Sacrifice on which a hunger-stricken world may feed and
be satisfied.

So here we have, in three steps, the great central truth of the Gospel
set forth in symbolical aspect: the Son that gives, the Son that is,