u
sin. Nothing will save you, if you sin. If you lust after evil
things, as those old Jews did; if you are idolaters, as they were;
if you are profligates, as they were; if you tempt Christ, as they
did; if you murmur against God, as they murmured, you will be
destroyed like them.

Note here two things. First, that St. Paul says that we really
receive Christ in the Holy Communion. He does _not_ say, as some
do, that the Communion is merely a remembrance of Christ's death.
He says that the faithful verily and indeed receive Christ's body
and blood in the Sacrament. He says so, distinctly, plainly,
literally; and if that be not true, his whole argument goes for
nothing, and will not stand. The Jews, he says, drank of the
spiritual Rock which followed them, and that Rock was Christ; and so
he says to you. But that did not save them from the punishment of
their sins, when they went and sinned afresh: neither will it save
you.

But now--What are these strange words which St. Paul uses? These
old Jews drank of the spiritual Rock which followed them, and that
Rock was Christ? Where in the Old Testament do we read of the Rock
following them? We read of Moses striking the rock in Horeb, at the
beginning of their wanderings in the wilderness; but not of its
following them afterwards.

St. Paul is here using a beautiful old tradition of the Rabbis, that
the rock which Moses struck in Horeb followed the Jews through all
their forty years' wanderings, and that on every Sabbath day when
they stopped, it stopped also, and the elders called to it, 'Flow
out, O fountain,' and the water flowed. A beautiful old story,
which St. Paul turns into an allegory, to teach, as by a picture,
the deepest and the highest truth. Whether that rock followed them
or not, he says, there was One who did follow them, from whom flowed
living water; and that Rock is Christ. Christ followed them.
Christ the creator, the preserver, the inspirer, the light, the
life, the guide of men, and of all the universe. It was to Christ
they owed their deliverance from Egypt; to Christ they owed their
knowledge of God, and of the law of God, to Christ they owed
whatever reason, justice, righteousness, good government, there was
among them. And to Christ we owe the same.

The rock was a type of him from whom flows living water. As he
himself said on earth, 'Whosoever drinketh of the water which I
shall give him, shall never thirst; but the water whi