ss. It is of the
very essence of what is meant by being a Christian. "If any man have not
the Spirit of Christ, he is none of His." The sixth chapter of St.
John's Gospel is not a mere prediction of the Eucharist. It is the
revelation of that principle of which the Eucharist is an illustration.
Our Communions are the supreme moments, the crises, in a process which is
for ever going on, the feeding of us, by the Spirit, with the flesh and
blood, the holy and victorious manhood, of the Redeemer.

What relation, then, can this spiritual process have to the material
substances, to the bread and wine which are used in the Eucharist? This
question at once opens out into the larger one, as to the relation
between matter and spirit. Now, that question could not be dealt with at
all satisfactorily without undertaking a vastly larger task than we are
prepared for at the present moment. We should have to ask, What is,
after all, meant by "matter," and what by "spirit"?

But something may be achieved on a much humbler scale. It will suffice
for our present purpose to concentrate our attention on a remarkable fact
which seems to underlie all our experience. And we will approach the
statement of this fact by first recalling the familiar definition of a
sacrament, which fastens upon the union of the outward and visible with
the inward and invisible as being the essence of what is meant by a
sacrament. Now, the fact we have in view is this: _every_ outward object
in the world is, in this respect, a sacrament. What we seem to see is
everywhere spirit working through what we call "material" objects. That
sacramental principle of the universe is the very principle which
underlies our Lord's parables of Nature. Speaking more accurately, we
see in "matter" (1) the means of the self-revelation of spirit; (2) the
instrument by which spirit acts.

The human organism may serve as a type of this. Here is a spiritual
being, the Ego, in its will, its thoughts, its affections, invisible, and
it makes its presence manifest, and it acts, through the material
manifestation and instrument of itself, the body. To believers in God,
nature itself, in its deepest reality, is the revelation of the Divine
Presence, and the instrument of the Divine action. A beautiful sunset is
a veritable and genuine sacrament. In the light of this profound truth,
of matter as the manifestation and instrument of spirit, we are enabled
to see how futile was