at event.
It dates long before any of the Gospels, and goes up, probably, to
somewhere about five and twenty years after the Crucifixion. It
presupposes a previous narrative which had been orally delivered to
the Corinthians, and, as the Apostle alleges, was derived by him from
Christ Himself. It is intended to correct corruptions in the
administration of the rite which must have taken some time to develop
themselves. And so we are carried back to a period very close indeed
to the first institution of the rite, by the words before us.

No reasonable doubt can exist, then, that within a very few years of
our Lord's death, the whole body of Christian people believed that
Jesus Christ Himself appointed the Lord's Supper. I do not stay to
dwell upon the value of a rite contemporaneous with the fact which it
commemorates, and continuously lasting throughout the ages, as a
witness of the historical veracity of the alleged fact; but I want to
fix upon this thought, that Jesus Christ, who cared very little for
rites, who came to establish a religion singularly independent of any
outward form, did establish two rites, one of them to be done once in
a Christian lifetime, one of them to be repeated with indefinite
frequency, and, as it appears, at first repeated daily by the early
believers. The reason why these two, and only these two, external
ordinances were appointed by Jesus Christ was, that, taken together,
they cover the whole ground of revealed fact, and they also cover the
whole ground of Christian experience. There is no room for any other
rites, because these two, the rite of initiation, which is baptism,
and the rite of commemoration, which is the Lord's Supper, say
everything about Christianity as a revelation, and about Christianity
as a living experience.

Not only so, but in the simple primitive form of the Lord's Supper
there is contained a reference to the past, the present and the
future. It covers all time as well as all revelation and all
Christian experience. For the past, as the text shows us, it is a
memorial of one Person, and one fact in that Person's life. For the
present, it is the symbol of the Christian life, as that great sixth
chapter in John's gospel sets forth; and for the future, it is a
prophecy, as our Lord Himself said on that night in the upper
chamber, 'Till I drink it new with you in My Father's kingdom,' and
as the Apostle in this context says, 'Till He come.' It is to these
three aspec