Are we longing to live feeding on the Lord Jesus Christ, and nourished by that which in the sixth chapter of St. John he sometime describes as the bread of life, and sometimes as his body and blood? Again we are taught that for that sacred food and sustenance we must be brought into direct and immediate contact with himself. We are not to look for any mystical change in the elements supposed to be accomplished by some miraculous power in a priest, or suppose that it is Christ in the elements that is the real food of the soul when hungering and thirsting after life. But we are taught that it is the soul _itself_ that feeds on Christ _himself_, and so enjoys his promise, “He that cometh to me shall never hunger, and he that believeth in me shall never thirst.”
And lastly, does the soul tremble under the consciousness of sin? Sin of the nature? Sin of the heart? Sin of the thought? Sin of the act? Sin of the whole man and every part of him? Does the horrid, dreadful thought of sin rise up as an impassable barrier between the conscience-stricken sinner and the holiness of God? Once more the great principle of a complete and final propitiation proclaims without reserve the joyful tidings that in Christ Jesus there is _nothing between_, that the veil of the temple is rent from the top to the bottom, and that now there stands open a new and living way leading direct to the mercy seat of God. To remove that awful barrier of unforgiven sin, we need no saints, no masses, no purgatorial fire. We need no priests to make a propitiatory offering by what he claims as his sacerdotal power. As believers in the Lord Jesus Christ we have received the reconciliation from the Son of God himself. It is his own blood that was shed, and his own hand that has given the pardon. And, though Satan may accuse, and conscience convict, though it may seem impossible to our own judgment that such as we are should ever be permitted to find fellowship with God, we may thank him with profound thanksgiving that he has removed the curse by bearing it himself upon the cross, and may venture to draw near in the words of that most incomparable hymn—
Just as I am, thy love unknown Has broken every barrier down, Now to be thine, and thine alone, O Lamb of God, I come.
