f Christians. "These things I write to you, who believe on
the Name of the Son of God, that ye may know that ye have eternal life."
Being as it is a moral and spiritual reality, it is outside time and
space. It is unaffected by "changes and chances." It is for ever beyond
the reach of the temporal processes of decay, corruption, death. Here it
manifests itself in service, that service of our fellows which is the
service of God. Hereafter, it will be manifested in higher and more
exalted forms of service. "Have thou authority over ten, over five,
cities."

Now all this, the consummation and glorious fruit of our humanity,
holiness, union with God, life eternal, we see already realised in Jesus
Christ, the Son of man. We see it realised, as we have learnt, not in a
separate, solitary, individual, isolated life, but in that common nature
which "for us men and for our salvation" He assumed of the Virgin Mary.

All that is in Him was in Him first, in order that it might be in us. And
this is the important point: it can only be in us by virtue of our union
with Him. That union He describes under the vivid and forcible metaphor
of eating His flesh, and drinking His blood. "He that eateth My flesh,
and drinketh My blood, hath life eternal." His flesh and blood--a common
Jewish phrase for human nature--is precisely that common nature which He
assumed, in which He died to sin, which He raised from the dead and
exalted to the Right Hand of God, and which He imparts to us, by His
Spirit given to dwell in us for evermore.

The doctrine of the Atonement is incomplete, it is irrational, until it
is completed by the doctrine of the Spirit, the Giver of Life. As He is
the source of life in all living organisms, so He is in Christians the
source of the Christ-life. He comes to dwell in us, not simply as the
Spirit, but as the Spirit of Christ--the Spirit Who first created, and
then "descended" to abide in the Perfect Manhood. That gift of the
Spirit of Christ as the indwelling source of the life of Christ, and the
means of the Presence of Christ in us, is the characteristic gift of the
New Dispensation. It is His work to make us ever more and more partakers
of Christ, to be perpetually feeding us with His flesh and blood.

And, as we are about to speak of the Holy Communion, it is well to insist
first on this, that the work of the Spirit in there feeding us with the
flesh and blood of the Son of man is a continuous proce