Him with any variety of offender he had met
with. Why do men still continually attempt afresh to account for Him,
and to give at last a perfectly satisfactory explanation, on ordinary
principles, of all that He was and did? Why, but because it is seen that
as yet He has not been so accounted for? Men do not thus strive to prove
that Shakespeare was a mere man, or that Socrates or Epictetus was a
mere man. Alas! that is only too obvious. But to Christ men turn and
turn again with the feeling that here is something which human nature
does not account for; something different, and something more than what
results from human parentage and human environment, something which He
Himself accounts for by the plain and unflinching statement that He is
"from heaven."

For my part, I do not see that this can mean anything less than that
Christ is Divine, that in Him we have God, and in Him touch the actual
Source of all life. In Him we have the one thing within our reach which
is not earth-grown, the one uncorrupted Source of life to which we can
turn from the inadequacy, impurity, and emptiness of a sin-sick world.
No pebble lies hid in this bread on which we can break our teeth; no
sweetness in the mouth turning afterwards to bitterness, but a new,
uncontaminated food, prepared independently of all defiling influences,
and accessible to all. Christ is the Bread from heaven, because in
Christ God gives Himself to us, that by His life we may live.

There is another sense in which Christ probably used the word "living."
In contrast to the dead bread He had given them He was alive. The same
law seems to hold good of our physical and of our spiritual life. We
cannot sustain physical life except by using as food that which has
been alive. The nutritive properties of the earth and the air must have
been assimilated for us by living plants and animals before we can use
them. The plant sucks sustenance out of the earth--we can live upon the
plant but not on the earth. The ox finds ample nourishment in grass; we
can live on the ox but not on the grass. And so with spiritual
nutriment. Abstract truth we can make little of at first hand; it needs
to be embodied in a living form before we can live upon it. Even God is
remote and abstract, and non-Christian theism makes thin-blooded and
spectral worshippers; it is when the Word becomes flesh; when the hidden
reason of all things takes human form and steps out on the earth before
us, that trut