and of Humanity alone to form the bounds of our communion. A free mind will refuse all pledges of belief in the face of men save to that liberty which holds it open to new teaching. It will refuse to make its theological conviction the basis of its religious sympathy. Its religion will indeed be social. Its communion will shape itself into a Church. But the Church shall be open as Brotherhood; it shall be free of doctrinal pledges between man and man; free of claim to bind and loose; free to every earnest word the Spirit sends the Age. It shall say to every one; - this union is not for the purpose of binding your thought or suppressing your honest doubt; of teaching you to conform, or imitate or follow guides; but to help you into self-knowledge, self-respect, and perfect liberty to find and obey the Truth: not to make you confess Lords and Masters, or put on Greek and Hebrew labels; but to aid you in your moral endeavors, your devout aspirations, your genuine affections, and your humane work. This is what we, friends, have meant by a Church: what we have tried to make this Church stand for; and what we mean to make it stand for, I trust, more and more perfectly, as long as it shall stand at all. You have bravely sustained it, under many difficulties, some of you for the whole twelve years that have passed since we opened its public religious services; years of struggle with such obstacles as must beset every free movement in its beginning; years also of increasing confidence. It is not for us to estimate our success. But at least we will all of us be right in purpose. We will stand on an Eternal Rock. We will greet the whole Present as it is, and obey its voice. The morning calls us with clearest golden light and bracing air, to walk in this love and liberty, and it shall not call in vain. T THE LORD'S SUPPER. SECOND PAPER.-ITS PRIMITIVE OBSERVANCE. HE disciples seem to have understood Jesus to institute a perpetual memorial of himself. Yet they were not infallible, and it is admitted that they sometimes grossly misinterpreted the Master's words. Undisciplined in the observation of facts, and carried away with the torrent of feeling, it was most natural for them to have gone beyond the precept. Calling to mind the last supper, and the words "Do this in remembrance of me," it would be surprising if they had not put their fond and worshipful regard into an established ritual. Yet no ritual is created complete at once. It grows up almost or quite unconsciously. There is something most charming in the child-likeness of the primitive disciples in their earliest days. For a little time after the Pentecostal outpouring, there was, for once, a universal Christian communion. The disciples had all things in common, we are told, those who had possessions selling them, and laying down the price at the apostles feet. So "distribution was made unto every man according as he had need." One of the most marked features of the new religious society, was the close attachment, and affectionate regard of the members for one another. The characteristic was not wholly lost for centuries. So long as the Nazarenes continued despised and persecuted, they were very dear to one another. To manifest their brotherly love constituted a part of their religious service. The fact must strike us, moderns and occidentals, as strange, if not incredible. Nevertheless, it was certainly so. In the Love-feast, of which I shall speak more fully in another place, sociability was enjoyed apart from the properly religious or devotional element; but, at first, the Lord's supper was the grand occasion of communing with one another, as well as with Christ and God. I shall take particular pains to bring into view the social element, as it is the one which, in our day, is almost entirely overlooked. Throughout the New Testament, we can but observe the prominence of personal affection. "Greet one another with the holy kiss," says Paul; and whole chapters of his epistles are taken up with salutations. Without entering into the affectionate spirit which animated the Apostolic church, it were impossible to understand their celebration of the Lord's supper. With an appreciation of it, a religious supper would seem to be almost a necessity, irrespective of any command or suggestion on the part of Jesus. The picture furnished us in the second chapter of Acts may be too highly colored, but we cannot help feeling that it conveys, on the whole, a just impression. "And they (the new converts) continued steadfastly in the apostles doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers. And all that believed were together, and had all things common; and sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need. And they continuing daily, with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, did eat their meat with gladness and singleness of heart." Observe that these people were "living religion." Their whole life was taken up into their Christianity. Fellowship was put beside doctrine, and breaking bread beside prayer; while the public service in the temple seemed scarcely so sacred as their eating together in private houses with joyful and simple hearts. From the narrative, it would not appear that they did not have the communion three times a day; though it is probable that it was only the supper, the principal meal of the day, which assumed a religious character. It is important to notice that the Lord's supper was celebrated every day. It is not unlikely that Jesus meant to suggest that he should be tenderly remembered once a year, at the Passover supper. But glowing affection sets itself no ordinary bounds. To those in whose minds Jesus was still so really living, every day seemed none too often to eat and drink, in his name; and everything led to the consecration, for this purpose, of the chief meal, the supper. It seems generally to be thought that, though the Lord's supper was partaken of by the primitive church in connection with an actual meal, yet itself was apart and subsequent to it, a sort of appendage to the proper meal. This is a theory with no facts for its support. It was invented to justify our modern communion ceremonies, which are but grim anatomies of those living and genial suppers the primitive church enjoyed. In the very passage which I have quoted, and in an immediate connection with the breaking of bread from house to house, it says that "they did eat their meat with gladness." It was no show of eating, and no mere breaking of bread, but a hearty meal which constituted their Lord's supper. "It was a social meal," says Prof. Stanley, "where the hungry looked forward to satisfying their wants. It was a supper, that is, not merely a morsel of bread, and a drop of wine, taken in the early morning, or in the seclusion of the Eastern noon, but the regular substantial meal of the day; a supper at the usual hour after the sun had set, and therefore in its time, as well as in its festive accompaniments, recalling the night of the original institution. It seemed the most fitting expression of the whole Christian life, where all things, "whether they ate or drank," could be done "to the glory of God." After a time, the Lord's supper was celebrated no longer on every day, but only on the first day of the week. Yet the character of the meal was not thereby changed. It was still enjoyed in the evening. A little incident in the life of Paul brings before us one of these Christian gatherings. Paul, having revisited Troas, was about to depart early on Monday morning. Sunday evening the disciples came together, as their custom was, to break bread. With us, the principal service is that of preaching. In the age of the apostles the grand occasion was the breaking of bread. In its prominence, the social evening meal was to the primitive church, what the mass is to the Roman Catholic. Many torches were burning in that large Supper room in Troas, and the meeting was unusually solemn and impressive, because the great Apostle, the spiritual Father of those believers, was about to take his leave, never, perhaps, to see their faces more. The interesting group listened to the earnest words of Paul, and could not separate till the break of day. The Lord's supper is here identified with that in which Paul takes the necessary nourishment for setting out upon his journey. Prof. Stanley remarks that the word "eaten," in this connection, implies making a meal. The peculiar circumstances in which the disciples came together at this time to break bread, prevented the occasion from being, as it usually was, a joyful one. Yet the social element was most prominent. Combined with the religious character was precisely that significance which we attach to the giving of a generous banquet to a departing guest. In order to see how free and easy, how eminently social and human, the primitive Lord's supper was, it is necessary for us to glance at some abuses which crept into the observance in the church at Corinth. Paul writes to the church how he has heard that divisions and contentions have arisen through the very supper which is calculated to promote unity and brotherly love. He begins by assuring them that to come together and eat to that end, is not to observe the Lord's supper. He suggests that many of them have been more intent upon gratifying their own appetites, than in discharging a Christian duty. The distinctions of wealth and rank had found place at the common table; the rich had withheld their good things from the poor, so that while one was unprovided for, another was eating and drinking to excess. It appears from this, that it was the custom for all the members of the brotherhood to bring with them, according to their means and convenience, the provision for the supper, and to spread the contents of their several baskets upon the common table. But careless of the poor, selfish and vain, the rich had so set out their delicacies as to be able to keep them among themselves. Or, like greedy children, some had hastened immediately on their arrival, to appropriate the best of the feast, to the annoyance and grief of those who came in later. Now, the bare possibility of eating to excess, and drinking to intoxication, is sufficient to indicate the total unlikeness of the Lord's supper then and now. Evidently a church tea-party much more nearly answers to the apostolical supper, than the stiff and empty ceremony which we call the communion. It is not only in respect to quantity and variety of food and drink that the two suppers are in contrast. Consider how radically they differ in all the social elements which should characterize the meeting and communion of friends. To think of engaging in cheerful conversation with the friend at your elbow in the modern service! Evidently there is no thought of sociability in the latter, while it was most prominent in the former. That which in our day would most resemble the breaking of bread in the primitive church, would be the meeting in their hall of an Enthusiastic Secret Society to partake of a supper in honor of a distinguished and beloved leader. Yet there would still be lacking something which would have to be sought for in the ease and simplicity of a picnic made up of congenial friends or related families. And this in turn might be wanting in the Religious element. How unfortunate it is that the Christian church has inherited the solemn rebuke of Paul, without the kind of observance to which his stern words apply. I cannot help thinking that the zealous apostle, in his conscientious endeavor to correct an abuse, went to the other extreme. Strictly to follow his injunctions, and vividly to call up the scene of the betrayal, would induce a solemnity irreconcilable with sociability. Hitherto, a genial intercourse had characterized the common meal of brotherly love and tender remembrance. Hereafter, the mind was to be fixed upon the last hours of the departed, and on subjects of purely religious contemplation. Unconsciously, perhaps, Paul inaugurated the movement which result in sundering the Love-feast from the Lord's Supper and in erecting the latter into a solemn sacrament. No wonder that the Apostle was thoroughly indignant at the desecration, and that he should have used strong terms to set forth the enormity of it. Aiming simply at terrifying the careless and selfish, of course the picture of the supper, as he draws it, is very partial both in detail and coloring. Whatever is written for a particular end is inevitably shaped to fit that end. It is because the whole truth is not in point when a single duty or lesson is to be enforced. I cannot think that Paul wished to make the supper a solemn and unsocial one. It only is certain that he would have the serious meaning and associations of the occasion check the frivolity and rudeness of those Corinthians. DANIEL BOWEN. PRIDE. COULD one ascend with an unheard-of flight, Till earth were left a dwindling star, whose light All height would vanquish; there in deeps of space, KNOW thou, O friend, that vainly on the ear, Vainly as golden pollen on the sea, Fall hints of the supernal mysteries, D. A. W. |