Our Lord considered the present a favorable occasion for speaking of the Sacrament of His body and blood, which was to be distributed, not to a few thousands, but to millions of souls; not in one place, but everywhere; not at one time, but for all days, to the end of the world. “I am,” He says to His hearers, “the bread of life. Your fathers did eat manna in the desert and died.... I am the living bread which came down from heaven. If any man eat of this bread he shall live forever, and the bread which I will give is My flesh for the life of the world. The Jews, therefore, disputed among themselves, saying: How can this man give us His flesh to eat? Then Jesus said to them: Amen, amen, I say to you: Unless ye eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, ye shall not have life in you. He that eateth My flesh and drinketh My blood hath everlasting life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For My flesh is meat indeed, and My blood drink indeed.”(367) If these words had fallen on your ears for the first time, and if you had been among the number of our Savior’s hearers on that occasion, would you not have been irresistibly led, by the noble simplicity of His words, to understand Him as speaking truly of His body and blood? For His language is not susceptible of any other interpretation. When our Savior says to the Jews: “Your fathers did eat manna and died, ... but he that eateth this (Eucharistic) bread shall live forever,” He evidently wishes to affirm the superiority of the food which He would give, over the manna by which the children of Israel were nourished. Now, if the Eucharist were merely commemorative bread and wine, instead of being superior, it would be really inferior to the manna; for the manna was supernatural, heavenly, miraculous food, while bread and wine are a natural, earthly food. But the best and the most reliable interpreters of our Savior’s words are certainly the multitude and the disciples who are listening to Him. They all understood the import of His language precisely as it is explained by the Catholic Church. They believed that our Lord spoke literally of His body and blood. The Evangelist tells us that the Jews “disputed among themselves, saying: How can this man give us His flesh to eat?” Even His disciples, though avoiding the disrespectful language of the multitude, gave expression to their doubt in this milder form: “This saying is hard, and who can hear it?”(368) So much were they shocked at our Savior’s promise that “after this many of His disciples went back and walked no more with Him.”(369) They evidently implied, by their words and conduct, that they understood Jesus to have spoken literally of His flesh; for, had they interpreted His words in a figurative sense, it would not have been a hard saying, nor have led them to abandon their Master.