down from heaven;" and, after the example of the Nazarenes, some of whom were, perhaps, mingled in the crowd, "they said: Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How, then, saith he: I came down from heaven?"

This murmur was but too perceptible; and Jesus, whose discourse was interrupted thereby, thought himself obliged to silence it. "He, therefore, answered, and said to them [in an austere tone]: Murmur not among yourselves;" though, after all, neither your murmurs nor your indocility need excite surprise; they are the natural result of the low and grovelling motives which brought you here. It is not by following the allurements of flesh and blood that I am to be found. "No man can come to me, except the Father, who hath sent me, draw him (5): and I will raise him up in the last day." If you do not wish to be one of these, do not think the number shall be smaller on that account, since of all nations, without distinction of Jew or Gentile, is it written in the prophets (6): "They shall all be taught of God. Every one that hath heard of the Father, and hath learned of him, cometh to me. Not that any man hath seen the Father, but he who is of God; he alone hath seen the Father." Nevertheless, without having seen the Father unveiled, we have heard, and learned from him, when we observe with attention and

(5) By an interior attraction, by making him wish what he did not previously wish, saith Saint Augustine. By comparing this expression of the Saviour with that which he said to Saint Peter: Flesh and blood hath not revealed it to thee, but my Father who is in heaven, we have the double operation of grace-the revelation and the attraction, the light of the understanding and the impulse of the will. The Fathers have always found this attraction in the text which gives occasion to this note, and they availed themselves of it to advantage against Pelagius, who denied its necessity and declared against its existence. The enemies of free will have abused it, to support their dogma of irresistible grace. We find the Catholic truth in the middle station between these two errors. We, therefore, adopt the medium, by believing, on one side, that, in the matter of salvation, man can do absolutely nothing without the interior attraction of grace; and, on the other, that he always has the unhappy power of resisting this attraction, and of rendering it useless to him, by his resistance, according to this decision of the Council of Trent, sess. 6, can. 4 : If any one saith that the free will of man, moved and excited by God, cannot, if he wishes so to do, refuse its consent, . . . let him be anathema. (6) This prophecy is in Isaiah, chapter 54, nearly in the same terms that we see it here. It is to be found in equivalent terms in several other prophets. It began to have its accomplishment presently after the descent of the Holy Ghost.

receive with docility this testimony which he hath rendered to his Son by his own lips, and which he hath since repeated and confirmed by a host of prodigies: (a) "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased."

CHAPTER XXVI.

CONTINUATION OF THE DISCOURSE ON THE

EUCHARIST.-THE DISCIPLES ARE SCAN

DALIZED.CONSTANCY OF THE APOSTLES.

AFTER this digression, in which Jesus Christ has incidentally spoken of the immutability of divine election and of the necessity of interior grace-mysteries which he merely sketches (if we may use the expression), and the development of which he seems to reserve for the apostle of the Gentiles-he returns to the principal object of his discourse. After having informed them that he is the true bread of life, and that he who shall be nourished with this bread shall live eternally, he proceeds to inform them that this bread is his own flesh, which should be eaten and received within us in the same way as ordinary food. It is thus that, seeming to enter into their material views, he shocks their senses, and completely puzzles their reason. He resumes, therefore, and continues in these terms: (b) "Amen, amen, I say to you, he that believeth in me hath life everlasting. I am the bread of life. Your fathers did eat manna in the desert, and are dead. This is the bread that cometh down from heaven, that, if any man eat of it, he may not die (1).

(a) St. Matthew, iii. 17.

(b) St. John, vi. 47–72.

(1) All those who eat the living bread die corporeally, and all those who have eaten. the manna are not spiritually dead; we must, therefore, explain in what sense Jesus Christ has said of the first that they do not die, and of the second that they are dead. The Saviour speaks less of persons than of the properties of these two aliments. Manna did not give immortal life to the body, much less to the soul. The bread which is here called the living bread gives, or, if we prefer so to express ourselves, it supports : 1st, the life of the soul-a life immortal in its nature, which can only perish through

"I am the living bread, which came down from heaven. If any man eat of this bread, he shall live forever; and the bread that I will give is my flesh [which I am to give], for the life of the world. "The Jews, therefore, strove among themselves, saying: How can this man give us his flesh to eat (2)?" It may be that they spoke this through derision, or that, having seen the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves, they inquired by what new prodigy he could substantiate so strange a promise; for it is questionable whether they thought that Jesus Christ spoke to them of eating his flesh cut in pieces. Incredulous as they were, they must have found it difficult to imagine that such a thought could have entered the mind of a man so wise and so holy as Jesus must naturally have appeared to them. Yet what else could they imagine, supposing he spoke of the real eating of the proper substance of his flesh, and what other meaning could be given to his words? This it was that caused their embarrassment, and the point upon which it seems reasonable that Jesus Christ should have enlightened them, if, as has been contended in later ages, he had only spoken of eating merely by faith

the fault of him who hath received it, so that if he come to perdition, that death should not be imputed to the bread, but to him alone. In the same way as if God had left to Adam, in the fruit of the tree of life, the power of committing suicide, in the supposition that he availed himself of this power of self-murder, his death could not be attributed to the tree of life, but to the violence which he would have voluntarily exercised upon himself. 2d. It is the common opinion of the holy Fathers that this living bread imprints upon the very bodies of those who nourish themselves with it a vivifying quality, which is in them, as it were, the germ of the happy and immortal life which shall be communicated to them by the resurrection. We should believe this with these Fathers; but supposing, what they themselves supposed, that the just who preceded the coming of Jesus Christ, the children who died before the age when the Church permits them to communicate, and, generally, all those who have died in justice, without having been able to participate in the eucharistic bread; that all these, I say, shall have received the virtue of it, which virtue shall have supplied the reality to them. There is nothing in this which should appear surprising, since baptism, the most necessary of all the sacraments, is supplied by charity and by martyrdom.

(2) How-a Jewish word, as Saint Cyril calls it: let us take care not to advance it; it is the source of all infidelity. We should also call it a Calvinistic word, for the Calvinists have likewise said: How can this man give us his flesh to eat? This word has no other signification than this: I cannot comprehend such a thing; therefore God cannot make it be so, at least God has not declared that it is so; which is reducible to this silly proposition: Nothing can be except what I can comprehend.

alone. The latter point of view has nothing which shocks either the senses, or reason, or humanity; and, by speaking as he did, Jesus Christ was a rock of scandal to the incredulous. But he could not give the metaphorical explanation, because he had spoken, in point of fact, of real eating; he could not, I say, destroy the meaning which himself had wished to establish; wherefore, in pursuance of the right which he had to be believed upon his own word, without explaining how he wished them to confide in his almighty power, instead of struggling to disabuse them, he reiterates these strong expressions which had conveyed to their minds the idea of the real eating of his flesh; and, to confirm them in it, he swears for the fourth time, and saith to them: "Amen, amen, I say unto you, except you eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, you shall not have life in you. He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath everlasting life, and I will raise him up in the last day; for my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood abideth in me, and I in him (3). As the living Father hath sent me, and I live by the Father, so he that eateth me, the same also shall live by me (4).

(3) Jesus Christ does not say: He dwells in my flesh, and my flesh in him; but, he abideth in me, and I in him. For, in point of fact, the flesh and the blood withdraw when the accidents become altered; but the vivifying spirit abideth—that is to say, the divine person, which in Jesus Christ is properly the I: it abideth, I say, producing life in the soul of him who has received the flesh and the blood, which are, as it were, the channel by which the divinity communicates itself. Thus, Jesus Christ and the man who receiveth him live by the same life, produced by the same vivifying principle, according to what Saint Paul saith: He who is joined to the Lord is one spirit (1 Cor. vi. 17). This is what the Saviour understands by these words: He abideth in me, and I in him. An expression which is scarcely sufficient to give an idea of so intimate a union; but human language furnishes no other.

(4) The explanation of the preceding text serves also to throw light upon this one. In the same way as the Father, by sending the Son-that is to say, by uniting the divinity to the humanity in the person of the Son, has given to humanity the life of which the divinity is the efficient principle; thus he who unites himself to the Son by the eating of his body, likewise receives life from him. We therefore see life reside in the divinity as its source, whence it infuses itself into the humanity of Jesus Christ, which is united to it. The humanity in its turn unites itself to men by the eating, and communicates to them the life with which it is filled and animated. This life is assumed in the most extensive and most excellent sense. It is at the same time the life of grace, the life of glory, and even the natural life, which consists in the eternal union of the soul with the

This is the bread that came down from heaven. Not as your fa thers did eat manna and are dead; he that eateth this bread (5) shall live forever. These things he said, teaching in the synagogue, in Capharnaum."

After reading these words of the Saviour, no one will be surprised that we should understand with reference to the Eucharist, not only these, but also the preceding words. It is, in point of fact, this adorable sacrament which alone is spoken of throughout the entire of this discourse. Though shrouded at first, it discovers itself by degrees, and is at last disclosed here with such evidence as renders it no longer possible to repudiate the fact. We first see it announced under the name of nourishment which endureth unto life everlasting; then Jesus Christ calls it the living bread which came down from heaven; afterwards he adds, that he is this same living bread who, by the incarnation, came down from heaven, and who giveth life. Had he stopped here, we might have thought, with some appearance of reason, that there is question here merely of his mysteries and maxims, which he has just proposed to men as a salutary bread with which they should nourish themselves by faith and meditation; but when at last he says expressly, that this bread is his flesh, which was to be given for the life of the world—an expression which he is found to repeat at the institution of the Eucharist; when, instead of disabusing his hearers, whom this expression had so much shocked, he drops the word bread, and no longer speaks to them but of eating his flesh, which is "meat indeed," and of drinking his blood,

body. Jesus Christ, from the instant of his conception, has had, in point of fact, the two first, and by right, the third; for he only died because he hath wished it, and he hath arisen never more to die again. Like him, we have, in point of fact, the first life, and by right, the other two lives; but we shall only enjoy the second after death, and the third after the resurrection. They are deferred in our regard, but they are due to us, if we preserve the vivifying spirit which Jesus Christ communicates to us by the communion of his body and of his blood. This seems to be merely the development of these words of Saint Paul to the Romans, chapter viii. 11 : And if the spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, he that raised up Jesus Christ from the dead shall quicken also your mortal bodies, because of his spirit that dwelleth in you. (5) From this text, and from several others of a similar nature, where mention is only made of the eating of bread alone, the Council of Trent, sess. 21, ch. i., concludes that communion under the two kinds is not necessary to participate in the sacrament.