union, or subordinate to it?
That is, do they and the communion alike point to some great truth
superior to them both: or do our Lord's words, in St. John, point to the
communion itself as their highest meaning?

The communion itself expresses a truth above itself by a symbolical
action; the words of our Lord, in St. John, are exactly the same with
that symbolic action; it is natural, therefore, to understand them not
as referring to it, but to the same[14] higher truth to which it refers
also: and the more so as the communion is not once mentioned by St. John
either in his Gospel or in his Epistles; but the idea which the
communion expresses appears to have been familiar to his mind; at least,
if we suppose that his mention of the blood and water flowing from our
Lord's side in his Gospel, and his allusion again to the same fact in
his Epistle, have reference in any degree to it, which seems to me
most probable.

[Footnote 14: The common tendency to make the Christian sacraments an
ultimate end rather than a mean, is exhibited in the heading of the
tenth chapter of the 1st Epistle to the Corinthians, in our authorized
version, where we find the first verses described as stating, that "the
Jews' sacraments were types of ours." Whereas, so far is it from the
apostle's argument to represent our sacraments as the reality of which
the Jews' sacraments were the type, that he is describing theirs and
ours as co-ordinate with each other, and both alike subordinate to the
same truth; and he argues, that if the Jews, with their sacraments, did
notwithstanding lose the reality which those sacraments typified, so we
should take heed lest we, with our sacraments, should lose it also. The
erroneous heading is not given in the Geneva Bible, where we have, on
the contrary, the true observation; "the sacraments of the old fathers
were all one with ours, for they respected Christ only." It is true that
if no more were meant than that "the Jews' sacraments were like ours,"
there would be no reason to object to the expression; but apparently
more is meant, as the word type seems to imply that what it is compared
with is the reality, of which it is itself only the image; and one thing
cannot properly be called the type of another, when both are but types
of the same third thing. But the divines of James the First's reign and
of his son's, were to the reformers exactly what the so-called fathers
were to the apostles: the very same tendenci