the Bread of the world, and the death whereby His flesh and blood are
separated and become the nourishment of all sin-stricken souls. I do
not say one word to enforce these claims, but I beseech you deal
fairly with these Gospel narratives, and do not go on picking out of
them bits of Christ's actions or words, which commend themselves to
you, and ignoring all the rest. There is no more reason to believe
that Jesus Christ ever said, 'As ye would that men should do to you,
do ye even so to them likewise,' or any other part of that Sermon on
the Mount which some people take as their Christianity, than there is
to believe that He said, 'The bread which I give is My flesh, which I
will give for the life of the world.' Believe it or not, it is not
dealing with the Scripture records as you deal with other historical
records if, for subjective reasons, you brush aside all that
department of our Lord's teaching. And if you do accept it, what
becomes of His 'sweet reasonableness'? What becomes of His meekness
and lowliness of heart? I was going to say what becomes of His sanity,
that He should stand up, a youngish man from Nazareth, in the
synagogue of Capernaum, and should say, 'I, heaven-descended, and
slain by men, am the Bread of Life to the whole world'?

I was going to make another observation, which I must just pass with
the slightest notice, and that is that, taking this point of view and
giving full weight to these three stages of our Lord's progressive
revelation of Himself, we have the answer to the question, What is the
connection between these discourses and the ordinance of the Lord's
Supper? Our modern sacramentarian friends will have it that Jesus
Christ is speaking of the Communion in this chapter. I take it, and I
venture to think it the reasonable explanation, that He is not
speaking about the Communion, but that this discourse and that rite
are dealing with the same truths--the one in articulate words, the