nother said: "How can this man give us his flesh to eat?"
Hearing them Jesus reaffirming his statement said: "Verily, verily, I
say unto you, except ye eat of the flesh of the Son of Man, and drink
his blood, ye have not life in yourselves.... For my flesh is meat
indeed, and my blood is drink indeed." His disciples, likewise, prone
here as so often to make a literal and material interpretation of his
statements, said one to another: "This is a hard saying; who can hear
him?" Or according to our idiom--who can understand him? Jesus asked
them squarely if what he had just said caused them to stumble, and in
order to be sure that they might not miss his real meaning and therefore
teaching, said: "It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth
nothing: the words that I speak unto you, _they_ are spirit, and _they_
are life."

Try as we will, we cannot get away from the fact that it was the words
of truth that Jesus brought that were ever uppermost in his mind. He
said, Follow me, not some one else, nor something else that would claim
to represent me. And follow me merely because I lead you to the Father.

So supremely had this young Jewish prophet, the son of a carpenter, made
God's business his business, that he had come into the full realisation
of the oneness of his life with the Father's life. He was able to
realise and to say, "I and my Father are one." He was able to bring to
the world a knowledge of the great fact of facts--the essential oneness
of the human with the Divine--that God tabernacles with men, that He
makes His abode in the minds and the hearts of those who through desire
and through will open their hearts to His indwelling presence.

The first of the race, he becomes the revealer of this great eternal
truth--the mediator, therefore, between God and man--in very truth the
Saviour of men. "If a man love me," said he, "he will keep my words: and
my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode
with him.... If ye keep my commandments, ye shall abide in my love; even
as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love."

It is our eternal refusal to follow Jesus by listening to the words of
life that he brought, and our proneness to substitute something else in
their place, that brings the barrenness that is so often evident in the
everyday life of the Christian. We have been taught _to believe in_
Jesus; we have not been taught _to believe_ Jesus. This has resulted i