The first words of the sentence were, “For I received from the Lord”—he emphasized “I,” as though it meant “I myself,” or “Whatever others may have received, I received so and so”—“that which I also delivered over to you, that the Lord Jesus, on the night on which he was to be delivered over.…” Here I paused and looked back, to see what “for” meant (in “for I received”) and why Paul was introducing this saying of the Lord. I found that the apostle had been warning the Corinthians thus, “Ye meet together, not for the better, but for the worse.” In the first place, he said, there were dissensions among them, and in the next place, “When ye come together it is not possible to eat the Lord’s Supper, for each one taketh his own supper, and one is hungry while another is drunken.” Then I understood that the Lord’s Supper meant that same Christian feast of which Arrian had spoken. This interested me because in Rome, as a boy, I had heard it said that the Christians partook of “a Thyestean meal,” that is, they killed children and served up the flesh to the parents. This I do not think I had myself believed, except perhaps in the nursery; but it was commonly taken as truth among the lower classes in Rome.

Now I perceived that the meal was to have been a joint one—like that of the Spartan public meals or syssitia, where all fed alike. But in that luxurious city of Corinth many of the Christians had introduced Corinthian luxury and turned the public meal into a group of private meals, so that some[161] had too little and others too much. Paul tried to bring them back to better things by telling them what Christ said to his disciples on the night of his last meal, “the night on which he was to be delivered over.” He implied that their meal ought to have been like Christ’s last meal; and now the question for me was, what that, the Lord’s Supper, was like.

But first I had to ask myself the meaning of Christ’s being “delivered over.” About this I had no doubt that it referred to the prophecy in Isaiah concerning the Suffering Servant, who “was delivered over on account of our sins.” These words Paul had quoted in the epistle to the Romans, and he elsewhere spoke of God, or the Father, as “giving,” or “delivering over,” the Son for the salvation of mankind. Now both Isaiah and Paul had made it quite clear that the Servant, or Son, thus “delivered over” by the Father, goes voluntarily to death, and this I assumed to be the case here. But I did not know by what agency God was said to have “delivered him over.” I thought it might be by a warning or d?monic voice, as in the case of Socrates, bidding him surrender himself to the laws of his country. Or Christ’s own people, the citizens of Jerusalem, might have delivered him up to Pilate, to procure their own exemption from punishment on account of some rebellion or sedition. Or he might be said to have been delivered over by a decree of Fate, to which he voluntarily submitted.

So much was I in the dark that for a moment I thought of Christ as fighting at the head of an army of his countrymen and giving himself up for their sakes, like Protesilaus or the Decii; and I tried to picture Christ doing this, or something like this. But I failed. Still I was being guided rightly so far as this, that I began faintly to recognise that this “delivering over” might be not a mere propitiation of Nemesis, occurring now and then in battles, but part of the laws of the Cosmopolis, occurring often when a deliverance is to be wrought for any community of men. Of such a propitiation Protesilaus was the symbol, concerning whom Homer says,
“First of the Ach?ans leaped he on Troy’s shore
Long before all the rest.”

He leaped first, in order to fall first. But his country rose by[162] his fall. His wife sorrowed, “desolate in Thessaly,” and his house was left “half built.” But in the minds of men he abides among the firstfruits of the noble dead, who have counted it life to lay down life for others. This legend I now began to apply to spiritual things. I was being prepared to believe that the sons of God in all places and times must needs be in various ways and circumstances “delivering themselves over” as sacrifices to the will of God, in proportion to their goodness, wisdom, and strength—the good spending their life-blood for the evil, the wise for the foolish, the strong for the weak.

After this, came a sentence that perplexed me greatly, “This is my body, which is in your behalf. Do this to my remembering or reminding.” Not being able to make any sense at all of this, I read on, in hope of light: “In the same way also the cup, after supper, saying, This cup is the new covenant in my blood.” The word “covenant” helped me a little, because I had found Paul speaking elsewhere to the Corinthians in his own person about a “new covenant” and an “old covenant.” Also to the Galatians he mentioned “two covenants,” one of which, he said, “corresponds to Mount Sinai.” So I turned to the scripture that described how God made a “covenant” with Israel that they should obey the Law given to them from Mount Sinai. It had these words: “And Moses, having taken the blood”—that is, the blood from a “sacrifice of salvation” consisting of bullocks—“sprinkled it on the people and said, ‘Behold the blood of the covenant that the Lord has covenanted with you concerning all these words’.” The blood of the old covenant (I perceived) was blood of “sprinkling,” purifying the body. David prayed for something more than that, when he said, “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.” So it occurred to me that the “new covenant” was to purify, not the body but the heart and the spirit, entering into man and becoming part of him so as to cleanse him from within.

This seemed to agree with Paul’s opinion, and with what I had read in Isaiah, that the sacrifices of bulls and goats cannot make the heart clean. Now, therefore, going back[163] again to the first words “This is my body, which is in your behalf,” I inferred that Christ was speaking about Himself as being the “sacrifice of salvation” above mentioned, and that He used these words, purposing to devote Himself to death for the people, in order to redeem them from sin by purifying their hearts.

I am writing now in old age. Forty-five years have passed since the night when I first read, “This is my body, which is in your behalf.” During that interval I have done my best to ascertain the exact words spoken by the Saviour in His own tongue. And now it is much more clear to me than it was then that the Lord Jesus was herein giving Himself, His very self, both as a legacy to the disciples and also as a ransom for their souls. But even then I perceived that some such meaning must be attached to the words, and that they could not have been invented by any disciple; and they made me marvel more than anything else that I had met with in the Jewish scriptures or Paul’s epistles. Such a confidence did they shew in the power of His own love, as being stronger than death! I do not say that I believed that the words had been fulfilled. But I felt sure that Christ had uttered them in the belief of their being fulfilled; and, just for a few moments, the notion that He should have been deceived seemed to me so contrary to the fitness of things, and to the existence of any kind of Providence, that I almost believed that they must have had some kind of fulfilment. I did not stay to ask, “How fulfilled?” I merely said, “This is divine, this is like the ‘still small voice.’ This is past man’s invention. This must be from God.”

Then I checked myself, doubt rising up within me. “Paul,” I said, “was not present on the night of the Last Supper. He says concerning these words, ‘I received of the Lord that which I also delivered unto you.’ Is it not strange that the oracles or revelations supposed by Paul to have been delivered to him by Jesus after the resurrection should have included matters of historical fact, and historical utterances, which could have been ascertained from the disciples that heard them? I must wait till I receive the Christian gospels from Flaccus.”

Then this also occurred to me. “Socrates, too, like Christ,[164] was unjustly condemned. Socrates might have escaped from death, but he refused. The d?monic voice that told him what to do and not to do, bade him remain and die, and he obeyed. In effect, then, this voice from heaven ‘delivered over’ Socrates to death. Or he may be said to have ‘delivered himself over.’ Now what were the last words of Socrates? Did he leave any such legacy to his disciples? Might I not find some help here? For assuredly Socrates, like Christ, endeavoured to make men better and wiser.” I remembered hearing Epictetus say—and I recognised the truth of the saying—“Even now, when Socrates is dead, the memory of the words and deeds of his life is no less profitable to men, perhaps it is more so, than when he lived.” So I turned over Arrian’s notes and found several remarks of our Master about Socrates and his contempt for death; and with what a humorous appearance of sympathy he accepted the jailer’s tears, though he himself felt they were altogether misplaced. At last I came to a passage where Epictetus compared Socrates, on his trial, and in his last moments, to a man playing at ball: “And what was the ball in that case? Life, chains, exile, a draught of poison, to be parted from a wife, to leave one’s children orphans. These were his playthings, but none the less he kept on playing and throwing the ball with grace and dexterity.”

This was enough, and more than enough. It was hopeless, I perceived, to search in Epictetus for what I sought—some last legacy of Socrates to his disciples, implying that he longed to help them after death. Epictetus would have rebuked me, saying, “How could he help them when he was dissolved into the four elements? What could Socrates bequeath to them beyond the memory of his words and deeds?”

Failing Epictetus, I took out from my bookcase such works of Plato and Xenophon as might contain the last thoughts of Socrates. Both of these writers believed in the immortality of the soul. Yet I could not find either of them asserting, or suggesting, that Socrates felt any trouble or anxiety for his friends and for their faith, nor any token of a hope that his soul might help theirs after his death—or rather, to use his phrase, after he had “transferred his habitation.” When I tried to find[165] such a hope, I could not feel sure that I was interpreting the words honestly. It seemed to me that I was importing something of the Jewish pathos, or feeling, into an utterance of the Greek logos. I still retained the conviction that Socrates, in his last moments, had his disciples at heart, and that, in enjoining that last sacrifice to ?sculapius, he wished to stimulate them to something more spiritual and more permanent than that single literal act. But I longed for something more. I thought of Christ’s “constraining love,” and how a man might be “constrained” in a natural way by the love of the dead—the love of a wife, father, mother, or child. Such a love I said, might be no less powerful, for help and comfort, than the hate of Clytemnestra following Orestes for evil. ?neas (I remembered) used the word “image,” speaking to the spirit of Anchises, “Thy image, O my father, constrained me to come hither.” But Anchises replies that he himself had been all the while following his son in his perilous wanderings, so that it was not a mere “image.” It was a presence. “Is it possible,” I asked, “that Christ, not in poetry but in fact, thought of bequeathing to His disciples such a presence, to follow and help them after His death?”

Yes. It seemed quite possible, nay, almost certain—that Christ thought this. But who, except a Christian, would believe that the thought was more than a dream? “Scaurus,” I said, “who often jests at me as a dreamer, would now jest more than ever. Here am I, pondering poetry, when I ought to be studying history! Yet how can I study history in Paul, when Paul himself tells me that he received these words from one that had died—presumably therefore i............