Seite:Marsh Hallig 1856.djvu/252

and blood of the Lord. But let a man examine him-
self, and so let him eat of that bread and drink of that
cup. For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eat-
eth and drinketh damnation to himself, not discerning
the Lord's body/"
  "Permit me," interposed Mander, "to ask a question
on this point. Could the first disciples who sat at the
table with their Master, have enjoyed in the bread and
wine, such a sacrament as you are supposing, since the
Lord himself was then present with them ?"
  "I need not answer this question," said Hold, "until
you have replied to my objections to regarding it merely
as a memorial, until you have shown that the theory by
which it is endeavored to give the communion a higher
character without confessing the bodily presence, is
really any thing more than the superadding of acces-
sories, which, with all their apparent abundance, leave
it, after all, simply a commemorative ceremony, the
joining in which has no other effect on the believer than
such as may be derived from any lively refreshment of
our memory of the Lord and Redeemer. But I would
remind you, that not much depends upon the answer to
your question. If we recognize in the Lord's Supper,
a church ordinance for all future Christian congrega-
tions — and this but few have denied — so it may well
have a significance for the later professor, different from
that which it had for the first disciples to whom the
visible presence of the Redeemer was itself a sacrament,
an import which it first received after our Lord had
ascended again to his heavenly Father. This other
significance consists only in this, that we have in the
bread and wine what they had visibly before them.