It is the sacrificial feast of Christians, and bears the same relation to the sacrifice of Christ that the heathen sacrificial feasts did to their sacrifices and that the Jewish sacrificial feasts did to their sacrifices. It is a sacrificial feast, offering the victim, in symbols of bread and wine, to our participation, and signifying that all those who partake of the victim in these symbols, are sharers in the altar, are of those for whom the sacrifice was offered and to whose benefit it inures. A Babel of voices may rise about us. One will say, It is the badge of a Christian man's profession. Another, It is the bloodless sacrifice continuously offered up by the vested priest to God in behalf of the sins of men.
History says, briefly and pointedly, it is the Christian passover.
And, so saying, it will carry us back to that upper room where we shall see Jesus and His disciples gathered about the passover meal, the typical sacrificial feast. And there was the company of those for whom this particular lamb was offered and who now, by partaking of its flesh, were to claim their part in the sacrifice. And there stood the Antitype, who had for centuries been represented year after year by lambs like this. No longer will it be possible to eat this typical sacrifice typical sacrifices were now to cease, in their fulfilment in the Antitype. How simple, how significant, the whole is, when once it is approached on the historical point of view.