e
out'; there shall be no sequences of sorrow, and struggle, and
distance and ignorance; but like it in that we shall feast on Christ,
for through eternity the glorified Jesus will be the Bread of our
spirits, and the fact of His past sacrifice the foundation of our
hopes.

So, dear brethren, though our external celebration of this rite be
dashed, as it always is, with much ignorance and with feeble faith;
and though we gather round this table as the first generation of
Israelites did round the passover, of which it is the successor, with
staff in hand and loins girded, and have to eat it often with bitter
herbs mingled, and though there be at our sides empty places, yet even
in our clouded and partial apprehension, and in the imperfections of
this outward type, we may see a gracious shadow of what is waiting
for us when we shall go no more out, and all empty places shall be
filled, and the bitter herbs shall be changed for the asphodel of
Heaven and the sweet flowerage round the throne of God, and we shall
feast upon the Christ, and in the loftiest experience of the utmost
glories of the Heavens, shall remember the bitter Cross and agony as
that which has bought it all. 'This do in remembrance of Me.' May it
be a symbol of our inmost life, and the prophecy of the Heaven to
which we each shall come!

THE UNIVERSAL GIFT

'The manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man
to profit withal.'--1 COR. xii. 7.

The great fact which to-day[1] commemorates is too often regarded as
if it were a transient gift, limited to those on whom it was first
bestowed. We sometimes hear it said that the great need of the
Christian world is a second Pentecost, a fresh outpouring of the
Spirit of God and the like. Such a way of thinking and speaking
misconceives the nature and significance of the first Pentecost,
which had a transient element in it, but in essence was permanent.
The rushing mighty wind and the cloven tongues of fire, and the
strange speech in many languages, were all equally transient. The
rushing wind swept on, and the house was no more filled with it. The
tongues flickered into invisibility and disappeared from the heads.
The hubbub of many languages was quickly silent. But that which these
things but symbolised is permanent; and we are not to think of
Pentecost as if it were a sudden gush from a great reservoir, and the
sluice was let down again after it, but as if it were the entrance
into a dry b