t spread the table this morning for your Lord. You
did not make ready for your Saviour and then invite Him in. He invited
you. He said, This is My Body broken for you, and This is My Blood shed
for you; drink ye all of it. And had any one challenged you at the fence
door and asked you how one who could not pay his own debts or provide
himself a proper meal even for a single day, could dare to sit down with
such a company at such a feast as that, you would have told him that he
had not seen half your hunger and your nakedness; but that it was just
your very hunger and nakedness and homelessness that had brought you
here; or, rather, it was all that that had moved the Master of the feast
to send for you and to compel you to come here. There was nothing in
your mind and in your mouth more all this day than just that this is the
Lord's Supper, and that He had sent for you and had invited you, and had
constrained and compelled you to come and partake of it. It was the
Lord's Table to-day, and it will be still and still more His table on
that great Communion-Day when all our earthly communions shall be
accomplished and consummated in heaven.

2. All that Mansoul did in connection with that great feast was to
prepare the place where Diabolus at one time had held his orgies and
carried on his excesses. Her Prince, Emmanuel, did all the rest; but He
left it to Mansoul to make the banqueting-room ready. When our Lord
would keep His last passover with His disciples, He said to Peter and
John, Go into the city, and there shall meet you a man bearing a pitcher
of water, and he will show you a large upper room furnished and prepared.
There is some reason to believe that that happy man had been expecting
that message and had done his best to be ready for it. And now he was
putting the last touch to his preparations by filling the water-pots of
his house with fresh water; little thinking, happy man, that as long as
the world lasts that water will be holy water in all men's eyes, and
shall teach humility to all men's hearts. And, my brethren, you know
that all you did all last week against to-day was just to prepare the
room. For the room all last week and all this day was your own heart,
and not and never this house of stone and lime made with men's hands. You
swept the inner and upper room of your own heart. You swept it and
garnished its walls and its floors as much as in you lay. He, whose the
supper really was, told y