Page:The kernel and the husk (Abbott, 1886).djvu/148

132 history of the Church, and by my own experience. The miracles I can easily disentangle from the life of Christ; but His divine claims to be our Helper and Saviour after death and to all eternity, I cannot. Accepting them, I can neither deny Him worship nor myself the right of access to Him in prayer.

Christ's whole life and doctrine, His plan (so to speak) for the establishment of spiritual empire over the hearts of men, appear to me imbued with divinity; but if I were forced to choose some one particular discourse or incident in His life as a reason for my adoration of Him, I should not choose any of His mighty works of healing, nor any of His parables or discourses, nor even His death upon the cross: I should point to the institution of the Lord's Supper. As the years pass over my head, the picture of that mysterious evening becomes more and more powerful and vivid with me and more and more inexplicable unless Jesus was verily the Life of the world. It is ten times more vivid and more powerful now than it was when I believed in a miraculous Jesus. When I kneel down at the altar-rails there rises up through the distance of eighteen centuries that strange scene in the guest-chamber at Jerusalem, where Jesus portioned out His flesh and blood, bequeathing Himself to His disciples for ever. Then follows the thought of the countless myriads of souls who have derived spiritual strength from this rite and have lived again in Christ, and I say to myself, "Truly God was in the self-doomed man who thus gave us His flesh and blood for mankind. A mere man devise so strange a rite! So (at first) repellently strange! so profoundly simple! so perfectly and spiritually successful!" I solemnly protest to you that the inexpressible depth of the divine intuition which found utterance in the Lord's Supper, impresses me more and more—far more than all the miracles put together—as a proof that we