tion, Christ, in the efficacy of his atonement, and the riches of his grace, is present to the mind, and dwells in the heart. The bread which is eaten is the visible emblem of the body which was wounded and broken for our transgressions. The wine which is drank is the visible emblem of the blood which was shed for the remission of our sins. Faith appropriates the virtue of the invisible realities, while the eye, the hand, and the lips, are employed by the significant emblems; and the soul is refreshed, invigorated, and made joyful in the Lord. It is also a feast of communion, in which the members of Christ's family recognize their relation to each other, and their common relation to him. Both the joy and the unity of the feast are referred to by the Apostle, when, addressing the members of the Corinthian church, he says, "The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ? the bread which we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ? For we being many are one bread, and one body: for we are all partakers of that one bread."* All partaking of Christ, they all unite in him. The bond which unites to the Head, unites also * 1 Cor. x. 16, 17. to the members. All other distinctions, natural, intellectual, civil, political, national,-yield before the equalizing, yet ennobling,-the separating, yet attractive and combining designation, disciple of Christ. There is no longer Jew nor Greek, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free; but Christ to each one is all and in all; and they all are one in him. At the supper of the Lord, when it is properly observed, this union is visibly represented. It is his feast, and it is spread for all those who constitute, by virtue of their union to him whom the Father has appointed the head of the family, "the household of God." In its celebration, they blend into one mass, all earthly distinctions suspended and forgotten at the table round which they sit, and from which they equally partake. The members of the Corinthian church perverted the supper in both parts of its design. They made it a social and convivial, rather than a spiritual feast; and therefore it was necessary that they should be reminded of the original words of the institution. They partook of it in parties, one before another, and one consuming that which should have been equally divided between others. Thus they ate and drank unworthily, not discerning in the elements of the supper the emblems of the Lord's body; nor recog ---- nizing and representing, in the mode of their communion, the fact, that in the merit derived from the offering of that body, they all equally, and at the same time, participated. On account of these corruptions which the Apostle reproved, God also was displeased; and in proof of his displeasure, he made the food of which they thus irreligiously partook, like the quails on which the Israelites fed in the wilderness, produce disease, instead of yielding nutriment. "For this cause," the Apostle tells them, " many are weak and sickly among you, and many sleep. "* The statements which we have made, relative both to the design of the Lord's supper, and to the popular mode of its celebration in the first Christian churches, receive strong confirmation from the nature of the corruptions which the Apostle reproves, as existing in the mode of its observance in the Corinthian church. The corruptions were of that kind, which could easily have been engrafted on the popular celebration of a spiritual feast, into the arrangements of which, the elements of corporeal refreshment, as the symbols of mental enjoyment, were introduced; but which it would have been impossible so speedily to have connected. with the official administration of that, which on its institution, still recent, could have been represented as involving a deeply reverential mystery, and the impressive sanctions of a religious vow. It will be remembered, that in planting the church at Corinth, the Apostle's personal labours had been employed for nearly two years. In reference to the institution of the supper, he tells them, that he had delivered to them that which he had "received of the Lord;"* and by immediately adding the words, which the Redeemer employed in appointing the ritual commemoration of his death, but on which occasion Paul himself had not been present, he clearly intimated, that all the particulars which had been connected with that appointment, had been communicated to him by special revelation. During the protracted period of his personal ministry at Corinth, the supper would in all probability, as appears to have been the case at Troas, be observed weekly; and certainly, whenever observed under the Apostle's own eye, it would be in its original purity. Some time after Paul had left Corinth, Apollos followed, to water what he had planted. Acquainted, as Apollos must have been, with the mode in which the supper was celebrated ་ in other churches, which the Apostles had formed, it is not probable that any abuses in its observance would have been allowed in the church at Corinth, while its members enjoyed his ministrations. And yet, in about three years after he himself had left their city, and in less than two years after Apollos had departed, Paul writes his first Epistle to the Corinthians, in which, reproving them, he says, "in eating, every one taketh before other his own supper, and one is hungry, and another is drunken."* Now, though, as the Apostle tells them, this was not in reality to eat the Lord's supper, yet it was what they had substituted for it, without being themselves alive to the fact, that they had essentially altered its character, subverted its design, and vitiated its observance. Could they have been insensible to the alteration which they had made in the institution, if on each successive Lord's day, of at least three years, in which it must have been observed in its purity, they had been accustomed to contemplate and receive it, as the deeply mysterious sacrifice of the altar; or even as the efficacious rite, which none but an Apostle, or one succeeding him in priest's orders, could administer to a kneeling recipient? There must have been enough of the original * 1 Cor. xi. 21. |