Consider the bearing of all this on our highest act of worship, the Holy Communion. There are few parish priests who cannot testify from their own experience to the wonderful--if not miraculous--effects of the reception of the Sacrament upon apparently dying persons, who had been given up by medical science. There is nothing in this that need surprise the Christian believer, nothing that is really repugnant to the findings of modern science. The Apostle Paul, writing to the Corinthians about the profanation of the Lord’s Supper, attributes to this cause certain physical consequences incurred by the offenders. ‘For this cause many among you are weak and sickly, and not a few sleep.’[81] There is a natural and proper antipathy in many minds to the idea that the Sacramental Elements operate as a charm. Such an idea would be irrational and superstitious, and we are not intended to conceive of a vindication of the sanctity of the Lord’s Supper by material and simply magical penalties. The offence of the Corinthians was the irreverence of ‘not discerning (or discriminating) the Body,’ and Apostolic teaching plainly implies that a spiritual offence of itself acts upon the bodily organism, by a mysterious law of the Divine government.[82] (Here again we must not say that God sent the disease.) Surely, then, it may be argued, per contra, that a reverent reception of the Eucharist makes for health and life, for it brings the failing bodily and spiritual powers of the sick into contact with the Divine and immortal life which animates the mystical Body of Christ. This line of argument may be illustrated by the words of the late F. W. H. Myers: ‘To keep our chemical energy at work, we live in a warm environment and from time to time take food. By analogy, in order to keep the spiritual energy at work, we should live in a spiritual environment, and possibly from time to time absorb some special influx of spiritual life.’[83] It remains only to add that the words of administration in our Communion Office embody the truth for which we are pleading. ‘The Body of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was given for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life.’ [81] 1 Cor. xi. 30. [82] In the _Cambridge Bible_, note _ad locum_, Dr. Lias says we can well understand how a crime against His Body and Blood would deprive any Christian, who committed it, of His presence, and predispose it to sickness and even death. [83] _Human Personality_, i. 218; quoted by Dearmer, _Body and Soul_, p. 123.