faith in Him, we venture to say,." Take what Thou wilt; leave me Thyself; I have enough." And the man who says, "Because God is at my right hand, I shall not be moved," has the right to anticipate an unbroken continuance of personal being, and an unchanged continuance of the very life of his life That which breaks off all other lives abruptly is no breach in the continuity, either of the consciousness or of the avocations, of a devout man. For beyond the flood, he does what he does on this side, only more perfectly and more continually. "He that doeth the will of God abideth for ever." And it makes comparatively little difference to him whether his place be on this or on the other side of Jordan. We "shall not be moved," even when we change our station from earth to heaven. And the sublime fulfilment of the warranted confidence of the trustful soul is when the to-morrow of the skies is as the to-day of earth, only "much more abundant."

XXVIII.

Feasting on the Sacrifice.

"The meek shall eat and be satisfied."-Ps. xxii. 26.

HE flesh of the sacrifice of his peaceoffering for thanksgiving shall be offered in the day of his oblation." Such was the law for Israel. And the custom of sacrificial feasts,

which it embodies, was common to many lands. To such a custom my text alludes; for the Psalmist has just been speaking of " paying his vows" (that is, sacrifices which he had vowed in the time of his trouble), and to partake of these he invites the meek. In some way or other the singer of this Psalm anticipates that his experiences shall be the nourishment and gladness of a wide circle; and if we observe that in the context that circle is supposed to include the whole world, and that one of the results of partaking of this sacrificial feast is, "your heart shall live for ever," we may well say with the Ethiopian eunuch, "of whom speaketh the Psalmist thus?"

The early part of the Psalm answers the question. Jesus Christ laid His hand on this wonderful Psalm

of desolation, despair, and deliverance, when on the Cross He took its first words as expressing His emotion then: "My God! My God! Why hast Thou forsaken Me?" Whatever may be our views as to its authorship, and as to the connection between the Psalmist's utterances and his own personal experiences, none to whom that voice that rang through the darkness on Calvary is the voice of the Son of God, can hesitate as to who it is whose very griefs and sorrows are thus the spiritual food that gives life to the whole world.

From this, the true point of view, then, from which to look at the whole of this wonderful Psalm, I desire to deal with the words of my text now.

I. We have first, then, the world's sacrificial feast.

The Jewish ritual, and that of many other nations, as I have remarked, provided for a festal meal following on, and consisting of the material of, the sacrifice. A generation which studies comparative mythology, and spares no pains to get at the meaning underlying the barbarous worship of the rudest nations, ought to be interested in the question of the ideas that underlay and were expressed by that elaborate Jewish ritual. In the present case the signification is plain enough. That which, in one aspect, is a peace-offering reconciling to God, in another aspect is the nourishment and the joy of the hearts that accept it. And so the work of Jesus Christ has two distinct phases of application, according as we think of it as being offered to God or appropriated by men. In the one aspect it is our peace; in the other it is our food and our life. If we glance for a moment at the marvellous picture of

suffering and desolation in the previous portion of this Psalm, which sounds the very depths of both, we shall understand more touchingly what it is on which Christian hearts are to feed. The desolation that spoke in "Why hast Thou forsaken me?" the consciousness of rejection and reproach, of mockery and contempt, which wailed, "All that see me laugh me to scorn; they shoot out the lip; they shake the head, saying, He trusted on the Lord that He would deliver him; let Him deliver him, seeing he delighteth in Him"; the physical sufferings which are the very picture of crucifixion, so as that the whole reads more like history than prophecy, in "All my bones are out of joint; my strength is dried up like a potsherd; and my tongue cleaveth to my jaws"; the actual passing into the darkness of the grave, which is expressed in "Thou hast brought me into the dust of death"; and even the minute correspondence, so inexplicable upon any hypothesis except that it is direct prophecy, which is found in "They part my garments among them, and cast lots upon my vesture "-these be the viands, not without bitter herbs, that are laid on the table which Christ spreads for us. They are parts of the sacrifice that reconciles to God. Offered to Him they make our peace. They are parts and elements of the food of our spirits. Appropriated and partaken of by us they make our strength and our life.

Brethren, there is little food, there is little impulse, little strength for obedience, little gladness or peace of heart to be got from a Christ who is not a Sacrifice. If we would know how much He can be to us, as the nourishment of our best life, and as the source of our purest and permanent gladness, we must, first of all,

look upon Him as the Offering for the world's sin, and then as the very life and bread of our souls. The Christ that feeds the world is the Christ that died for the world.

Hence our Lord Himself, most eminently in one great and profound discourse, has set forth, not only that He is the Bread of God which came down from heaven, but that His flesh and His blood are so; and the separation between the two in the discourse, as in the memorial rite, indicates that the violent separation of death has taken place, and that thereby He becomes the life of humanity.

So my text, and the whole series of Old Testament representations in which the blessings of the Kingdom are set forth as a feast, and the parables of the New Testament in which a similar representation is contained, do all converge upon, and receive their deepest meaning from, that one central thought, that the peaceoffering for the world is the food of the world. We see, hence, the connection between these great spiritual ideas and the chief act of Christian worship. The Lord's Supper simply says by act what my text says in words. I know no difference between the rite and the parable, except that the one is addressed to the eye and the other to the ear. The rite is an acted parable; the parable is a spoken rite. And when Jesus Christ, in the great discourse to which I have referred, dilates at length upon the eating of His flesh and the drinking of His blood as being the condition of spiritual life, He is not referring to the Lord's Supper, but the discourse and the rite both refer to the same spiritual truth. One is a symbol; the other is a saying; and symbol and saying mean just the