The ordinance of the Lord's Supper is considered a positive institution of Christianity by almost the whole of the Christian world, the great majority of Unitarians included. The Society of Friends, and the Free-thinking Christians, are perhaps the only sects who positively decline, from principle, the practice of the rite; while some Unitarians deem it inconsistent with their principles to believe that Christ designed the ordinance for permanent and universal adoption. It is practised by many as a means, a very important means, of increasing love and exciting to obedience, while they yet cannot plead a Divine sanction in its favor, or much less suppose that any peculiar quality resides in what is eaten and drank, or any peculiar virtue in the act of eating and drinking by which any peculiar privilege can be attained. In these last suppositions all our body are agreed, since no intimation can be found in the Scriptures that the sacramental bread and wine were at any time used otherwise than as merely emblematical of the sacrifice of Christ. It was the practice of the early Christians to assemble for the supper, each carrying his portion of the feast, which was eaten like any other feast, and frequently with excess on the part of the rich, while his poorer neighbor hungered. 'When ye come together,' says the Apostle (1 Cor. xi. 20-23,), it is not to eat the Lord's Supper; for in eating, every one taketh before another his own supper, and one is hungry and another is drunken. What? Have ye not houses to eat and drink in? Or despise ye the Church of God, and shame them that have not?' (v. 33.) 'Wherefore, my brethren, when ye come together to eat, wait one for another. And if any man hunger, let him eat at home; that ye come not together unto condemnation.'--It is not conceivable that these Christians had any notion that what they ate and drank was in itself sacred, or that the Apostle was aware of any other purpose of the rite but that of 'showing forth the Lord's death till he came.'