with different degrees of irradiation; the light vouchsafed to the church before the coming of Christ, resembling that of the “morning spread upon the mountains;” the evangelical light, like the sun in his meridian brightness. Yet, as the church is one, so is the sun that illuminates her; and that sun is the Lord our righteousness. Some, guided in their interpretation of scripture, more by sound than by sense, and by the analogy of faith, have supposed, that the feast in the text, to which sinners are invited, is the sacrament of the Lord’s supper; and they have added one fatal mistake to another, by assuming from hence a false authority of giving unlimited and pressing invitations to sinners to approach that sacred ordinance; as if, because, when the bread and wine are prepared for the celebration of it, “and all things” in _that_ sense “are ready,” therefore every man, who receives the invitation, ought to “come.” Without enlarging here on the extreme folly and danger of pressing men to come to the sacrament, before they have by faith come to Christ; I cannot help observing, that the scripture before us affords no room to justify their conduct, or to countenance the absurd comment, on which the temerity of it is founded. Not to say, that the parable looks back to a period long _before_ the sacrament was instituted, and that the extensive invitation before us is absolutely incompatible with the state of communicants in general; it is sufficient to refute the interpretation imposed on the text only to observe, that a parable cannot delineate an ordinance consisting of outward symbols; since this would be to make one set of external images and metaphors explanatory of another; and even to make the latter, the _thing signified_, when it is itself _but a sign_. The nature of a parable, and that of a sacrament, may agree in delineating one subject common to both; but they cannot mutually represent each other. Thus, the sacrament of the Lord’s supper is a feast, but it is only so as being in its elements a representation of the body and blood of Christ. These are the “inward part and thing signified.” But to those who receive the sign, without acting faith on the thing signified, the sacrament becomes no feast at all: they have no life or enjoyment in it; and through their unbelief it turns eventually into poison instead of food. So that what is the inward spiritual substance of that institution, constitutes also the divine realities couched under the metaphors in the parable. The supper in both is, Jesus crucified for sinners, with all the riches of his atonement and dying love; on which the soul of a believer feeds, as its richest repast.