nd make plastic and
supple, our wills. We nourish our wills by submitting them to Jesus,
and we feed on Him when we not only say 'Lord! Lord!' but when we do
the things that He says. We feed on Christ, when we let His great,
sacred, all-wise, all-giving, all satisfying love flow into our
restless hearts and make them still, enter into our vagrant
affections and fix them on Himself. Thus when mind and conscience and
will and heart all turn to Jesus, and in Him find their sustenance,
we shall be filled with the feast of fat things which He has prepared
for all people. With that bread we shall be satisfied, and with it
only, for the husks of the swine are no food for the Father's son,
and we 'spend our money for that which is not bread, and our labour
for that which satisfieth not,' if we look anywhere else than to the
Paschal Lamb slain for us for the food of our souls.

III. The Christian life is a continual purging out of the old leaven.

I need not remind you how vivid and profoundly significant that
emblem of leaven, as applied to all manner of evil, is. But let me
remind you how, just as in the Jewish Ritual, the cleansing from all
that was leavened was the essential pre-requisite to the
participation in the feast, feeding on Jesus Christ, as I have tried
to describe it, is absolutely impossible unless our leaven is
cleansed away. Children spoil their appetites for wholesome food by
eating sweetmeats. Men destroy their capacity for feeding on Christ
by hungry desires, and gluttonous satisfying of those desires with
the delusive sweets of this passing world. But, my brother, your
experience, if you are a Christian man at all, will tell you that in
the direct measure in which you have been drawn away into paltering
with evil, your appetite for Christ and your capacity for gazing upon
Him, contemplating Him, feeding on Him, has died out. There comes a
kind of constriction in a man's throat when he is hungering after
lesser good, especially when there is a tinge of evil in the supposed
good that he is hungering after, which incapacitates Him from eating
the bread of God, which is Jesus Christ.

But let us remember that absolute cleansing from all sin is not
essential, in order to have real participation in Jesus Christ. The
Jew had to take every scrap of leaven out of his house before he
began the Passover. If that were the condition for us, alas! for us
all; but the effort after purity, though it has not entirely att