I rise from my seat, and say, "I cannot dine with you, because there is no Lamb on the table, and no sacrifice here." I do not object to a few bitter herbs with the Lamb, because this is part of the injunction, "Thou shalt eat the passover with bitter herbs. But let them be of

God's selecting and providing, not the sour, corrupt, poisonous, filthy produce of poor fallen nature. It is our precious Christ in the fulness of grace, in the perfection of His work, in the atonement which He has accomplished, in the satisfaction which He has given, and in the communication of His grace from His fulness unto my soul, that I want for my perpetual food.

Then mark what the apostle says, "Having Christ, I possess all things." The believer is able to do what the Israelites were commanded to do: he is able to eat a whole lamb; he is able to partake of a whole Christ. There is no division here; he is able to partake of a whole sacrifice; and in it he finds infinite blessings treasured up, and stored under covenant engagement and transactions. Every instance of pardon is in this Lamb. All the communications of sanctification and justification laid hold of, and enjoyed, and put on by faith-are all in this Lamb; all the privileges of adoption are in His hands. He is the Chief, the First-born, the elder Brother of the whole family. So the privileges of the gospel, the promises of the Word, the enjoyment of spiritual life, the associations of the followers of the Lamb, every spiritual comfort that we can realize, and all the spiritual progress that we make-all are in and by this Lamb, this precious glorious Christ-" for all the promises of God in Him are yea, and in Him amen, unto the glory of God by us." So we may

well say again," having Christ, I possess all things." Now is not this high living? Is it not living something like Christians? as "heirs of God, joint-heirs with Jesus Christ?" Do not talk to me of feeding upon frames and feelings, and groping amongst “ifs," and "buts," and "peradventures," and probabilities, and contingencies, and conditions, and uncertainties-they are enough to make all the people of God like Pharaoh's lean kine, if they do not absolutely starve them to death. Let me see the people of God fat and flourishing in the courts of the Lord's house; and in order to this they must feed upon this slain Lamb-"slain from before the foundation of the world." Let us examine for a moment how many meals we get from day to day. You know some people who are very abstemious tell us that one good meal a-day is quite enough for the body, and it may be so; but sure I am that it is not enough for my soul. And I shall not be dictated to by any philosophy under heaven, so as to be restricted with regard to the number of spiritual meals when I come to feed upon our precious Christ, and eat of His body and drink His blood. No, I must come to this one point, that as He Himself invites me and declares that He has provided a feast of fat things, that His oxen and fatlings are killed, and all things are ready, I will eat all day long if He give me power, feed upon Him perpetually, and rejoice in Him from morning till night and from night till morning. I would have my first meal with Him before even quitting my pillow. I would be engaged with Him and feed upon Him before raising my body from my bed. I would not go to any employment until I had been fed with marrow and fatness from my precious Christ. I would not proceed many steps without seeking some inn by the way, some secret, sacred place, some circumstances rendered holy in the providence of God by His

sanctifying power, in which I should enjoy Christ. At the corner of every street, in every scene of business, and in every association I enter into, I must have something of my precious Christ; or I go faint, and sicken, and am ready to famish. It is upon Him that the believer must live, and therefore, with the Psalmist, I would say, "My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God; when shall I come and appear before God?" What was this for? but that he might obtain that blessedness which our Redeemer sets forth when He said, "Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness; for they shall be filled." If you give me something to feed upon in the morning sermon, I want more in the afternoon prayer meeting, in the closet, and at His table in the evening. If I meet with a promise in His Word that melts my soul with spiritual joy, I go on to look for fresh promises, and expect to receive new communications, crying out, "Lord, evermore give me this bread. Evermore keep me feeding upon thee;" for the table is so well spread, that there is not only the precious sacrifice containing all blessings upon it, but it is arranged from morning till night with fresh supplies. I want, then, the knowledge of my justification; and if I get that I must range a little further, and find the sweet assurance of my adoption into the family of God, and then I must have the sanctifying power of the Holy Ghost. This I call feeding upon Christ. Oh, the vast importance of thus living high. The paltry toys of time cannot afford their votaries such luxuries as these. The men of the world live only upon husks, and try to satisfy their cravings with things that cannot satisfy. They are aptly alluded to in the description of the prodigal son in a far country, who would "fain have filled his belly with the husks that the swine did eat;” and there are not a few who are Christians making the same attempt, and trying to fill themselves with husks that the swine did eat; but they are altogether unprofitable; they have no sustenance, no nourishment in them for the heaven-born soul. He cries,

"Give me Christ, or else I die."

He hungers after Him continually, and he must be fed with that "manna which cometh down from heaven."

IV. Let me now lead on your attention to the Master's words, "This is my body," and "this is my blood of the New Testament, which is shed for many." Now here I must for a few minutes be a little explicit. "This is my body." Those white-frocked infidels, who call themselves priests, say that this must be understood literally; and they have ventured to go so far as to amplify it, and tell us that the morsel of bread over which they have mumbled something mysterious, as if they were performing an incantation, is really and truly transubstantiated and changed into the body, soul, and divinity of the Lord Jesus Christ. I do not, however, think that any one of them believes it. They cannot be such arrant fools as to believe it. And how such carnivorous animals should be allowed to delude the millions of the people as they do, I cannot conceive. Where such a dogma is listened to and received for one moment, rationality must be gone. I will not allow that any individual can be rational who harbours such a notion. Now if you speak of the words as being positively and literally understood, remember that when the apostle wrote his first letter to the Corinthians, the Holy Ghost commanded him to give a

with

beautiful description of the redeemed Church, and to sum it up this declaration, "Ye are the body of Christ.' Suppose one of these deceivers should, for some wicked purpose, turn to that text, and say, "Now I insist upon it that every believer, and especially every believer who was then at Corinth, is really and truly transubstantiated into the body, blood, soul, and divinity of the Lord Jesus Christ," surely he would have as much right so to pervert that Scripture as the other. Surely he would have as much authority from God to say so of that as of the other. The apostle, directed by the Holy Ghost, also uses the same emblem in his Epistle to the Ephesians; and again, in his Epistle to the Colossians, describing the Church as the body of Christ. Christ said of the morsel of bread, "This is my body;" and the Holy Ghost says, by the apostle, in writing to the Corinthians," Ye are the body of Christ." Now, if I take the one literally, surely I may be allowed to do the same with the other! And then I must come to the conclusion that every Christian is no longer a man, a woman, and a human body, but literally and positively transubstantiated into the body, blood, soul, and divinity of the Lord Jesus Christ! So that the fact is, that we have no Christians, but so many Jesus Christs upon earth, according to that mode of reasoning. And is it possible that, in the nineteenth century, men taking to themselves credit for enlightenment and intelligence, can, for an instant, listen to such a devilish system as that?

I have spoken in as strong language as I could command, because I would deprecate, with all honesty, those gross insults to His glorious person. I do not at all imagine the teachers of the system themselves believe it, because they are known to sneer at it at times, and one of the popes once said to a cardinal who had expressed a doubt whether Christianity had any good in it or not, "Never mind; if it is a deception, it is a very lucrative one." Having reprobated all such stupid wickedness, I pass on to notice the fact, that when Christ says "this is my body," it is the same as when He says "I am the door," the medium of entrance. And His meaning is, that whilst the believer partakes of the emblems with his natural powers and faculties, his spiritual man, his renewed mind, his heaven-born existence, is, by faith and love, spiritually feeding upon the precious body and blood of Christ. And this, I trust, will be your and my privilege to-night, passing by all the perversions of mortals. I do not expect my body to be much nourished by my taking a tea-spoonful of wine and a little morsel of bread. I do not expect nourishment for either soul or body in them, literally, but I do expect my faith to be assisted, and in lively exercise to receive, participate, and enjoy the whole Christ as my own; to receive the application of His precious blood, to cleanse me from all sin, and to seal my pardon. I do expect all the sacred blessings that are treasured up in His glorious person, to be symbolized to my view in the emblems of His body, and in His precious person I do expect to find my all, that I may glorify Him as the Lord my God.

Now mark, I beseech you, that this sacred gospel feast is intended to nourish not the fleshly, but the spiritual, existence. I know very well that the design is awfully perverted, and I fear that there are thousands in dear old England this very day, who will approach the table of the Lord under a vain notion that they shall not have performed their duty, or completed the evidence of their

Christianity, or put the finishing stroke, as it were, to matters which relate to their salvation, that they shall greatly offend God, and be endangering their own souls, or, as some call it, "sin away their grace," if they absent themselves from the table of the Lord. I would entreat of you that none of you come to the table with us to-night possessed with such notions. Instead of this idle, vain notion of the ordinance, as if there were something in the ordinance itself that amounted to a periodical atonement for sin, and made us better than we have been-God grant that we may be-instead of this, the child of God comes to it, that his faith may be nourished, that his life may be nourished, that his hope may be nourished, that he may grow up into Christ Jesus, participate in the feast of fat things, and get a sweet foretaste of that heavenly and glorious supper at which we expect to sit down at the right hand of the Majesty on high.

While I have reprobated the idea of graceless people coming to the Lord's table without vital godliness in their souls and a robe of righteousness to cover them, I cannot help censuring, in warm and affectionate terms, the wilful absence from the Lord's table of many who are dressed in His righteousness. What, beloved, is the dying request of the Saviour to be a matter of mere caprice, a matter of mere convenience, of mere occasion, a matter for hesitation of thought, "Shall I go, or shall I not?" God Almighty keep my hearers from thus trifling with sacred things! The feast is provided. The King will be here. Of that I am certain. A number of welcome guests, ordained of old, will be present. And shall any one do as Thomas did, be absent unnecessarily one day, on account of some trifling cause or reason? God forbid! If you have spiritual life in your souls, let it be exhibited; if you have spiritual life in your souls, let us see more decision; show that you are capable of enjoying God, when He gives you the invitation, “Eat, O friends; and drink, yea, drink abundantly, O beloved." You perceive, then, beloved, how anxious I am for a separation between the sheep and the goats; how anxious I am for a division between the Church and the world. I would not, if I knew it, administer the emblems to a worldling. And I would not, if I could help it, have a Christian absent from participation in them. I would not deceive a soul by administering that which belongs not to him. Nor would I excuse a soul from the known duty and the high privilege of attending to the dying request of his best of friends.

May I be allowed to close this morning's discourse (the subject of which I mean to resume in the evening, if spared), by urging upon you what the apostle did in his days, "let a man examine himself," and so let him eat of that bread and drink of that cup? And may I picture to myself that my hearers will retire from this place, and enter upon secret, close self-examination, crying out before the throne, "Search me, O God, and know my heart; try me, and know my thoughts: and see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting?" May I hope that you will be honest with yourselves? May I hope that you will make your appeal to God after this manner, and then pray the Master of the feast to be present and known amongst us in the breaking of bread, and thus get a revenue of praise and glory to His precious name in the peace and nourishment of His believing family? Amen.

A Discourse,

Delivered in Grove Chapel, Camberwell, Sunday Evening, May 6, 1849, BY THE REV. JOSEPH IRONS.

"I am that bread of life."-John vi. 48.

ACCORDING to the wicked and ridiculous notions of the transubstantiation advocates, we must in this text admit the reverse of what they demand, namely, that Jesus was transubstantiated in an opposite direction, so that whilst He was living, and walking, and talking, He must have been bread. If they will insist that the bread, which He declared to be His body, was transubstantiated into the body, soul, and divinity of the Lord Jesus Christ, then they may as well insist, from His statement here, that the body and soul with which He walked about, were at that moment transubstantiated into bread. And I am certain that the one is quite as reasonable as the other. But both these wretched films of Romish invention, both these wretched dogmas of superstition, prove that "the natural man discerneth not the things of the Spirit of God, neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned," but he that is spiritual discerneth all things, while he himself is discerned of no man, and, consequently, he can discern how that body which was walking about Judea, and working miracles as it walked, could be bread, and how that bread of which He spoke could be His body. These are contrarities, however, to the carnal mind. Like everything in the Word of God, they are parables unknown to the world, and were never intended to be discerned by the enemies of God and of His Christ; but are family privileges to the Lord's people. I do not intend to pursue the same idea with which we closed our subject this morning, nor to reprobate these gross abominations, though Published in Weekly Numbers, 1d., and Monthly Parts, price 5d.

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