of Life, and inherent in all knowledge. St John gives no account of the institution of the rite at the time of the Passover, although he alone of the four Evangelists reports Christ's verbal teaching of the doctrine thus embodied on occasions other than its inauguration as a symbol of communion. In the sixth chapter of his gospel we find Christ reported as using the same symbolic phraseology with regard to His flesh and blood that He employed in His speech introducing the rite at the Last Supper. We read of the disciples and the Jews disputing Christ's words, interpreting them literally, and calling forth His explanation that "It is the Spirit that quickeneth; the words that I speak[107] unto you, they are spirit and they are life." Notwithstanding the implied injunction that His doctrine of the unity of life was to be interpreted in a spiritual sense, we find that "from that time many of his disciples went back, and walked no more with him." Since then, how many literal interpreters of Christ's symbolic utterances have turned aside from following after Him, and have been led away into idolatrous worship of the letter of His teaching to the neglect of its spiritual significance! It would appear that the symbolic epitome of the doctrine of communion had been conceived by Christ some time before He introduced it as a rite on the occasion of the Last Supper; that the idea had already been verbally expounded by Him; and that its consolidation into the form eventually chosen was achieved as a dramatic finale to the whole of His previous teaching. If the fourth gospel be the work of John, the disciple whom Christ loved, it is significant that he alone reported[108] the injunction that Christ's words were to be interpreted in a spiritual sense. The doctrine of the unity of life, incorporated in the rite of communion, permeates the whole of the gospel, and lends strength to the supposition that its writer had in some special way known personal intimacy with Christ. Union between God as the supreme Spirit of Life, and the Word as the expression of God, is the basis of its doctrinal construction; and the institution of the rite of communion, duly reported in the other gospels, is here shown to be the logical conclusion, in the form of a symbolic epitome, of the premisses adopted by the writer. Supposition, however, is not evidence. In order to determine the significance of the rite of communion, and thus to arrive at some idea of its importance in Christian doctrine, it is necessary to subject it to that test which Christ Himself declared to be the proper criterion of merit—the Spirit of Truth. In these later days, nearly two thousand years[109] since He utilised the loving obedience of His disciples to institute symbolic evidence of the spiritual unity of life—a rite designed to give light to untold generations to come—how have men obeyed His injunction to test His words and deeds by the Spirit of Truth?