the dogs eat of the _crumbs_ which fall from the master’s table.” Now it was a common-place in the doctrine of Jesus that every disciple who ministered the Word or Bread of Life invariably received it back in ample measure: “Freely ye have received, freely give.” Give what? Certainly not material bread, but the truth or bread of life. And again, “Give, and it shall be given unto you: good measure pressed down and running over shall THEY[24] give into your bosom.” Again, I ask, give what? What but the spiritual Bread, which, by the laws of spiritual nature, cannot be freely given without a yet more rich return into the giver’s heart? It was this Bread that Christ ministered to His disciples and bade them set before the people; it was this Bread which the disciples found multiplied in their hands so that it sufficed for all, and they themselves were fed from the crumbs that fell from the food. In course of time the story of this spiritual banquet finding its way into Christian hymns and traditions would be literalized and amplified with variations. As Moses “spread a table” for Israel “in the wilderness,” so also, it would be said, did Jesus of Nazareth when he fed thousands of His followers on divine Bread. The Fish, _which is not mentioned in our Lord’s dialogue with the Disciples_, might naturally he added to the Bread, in the narrative, as a Eucharistic emblem. If the Fish had been mentioned by our Lord in the dialogue under question, my explanation would at once fall to the ground; but it is not mentioned; and the only difficulty is in explaining how Jesus could have spoken metaphorically of the “seven” as well as the “twelve” baskets. We can understand the “twelve”—each one of the twelve Apostles who ministered, receiving a return of spiritual “crumbs”—but whence the “seven?” Here I can but conjecture. You know that seven is what is called “a sacred number.” I find in the Fourth Gospel, xxi. 2-14, a story (evidently emblematic) of a miraculous meal of bread and fishes in which “seven” apostles took part. This may have been based upon some tradition in which seven apostles were recorded as having taken part in a spiritual Eucharistic feeding of the multitude. If that was so, it would follow that in the latter case there would be “seven baskets” of fragments, as in the former case there were “twelve,” corresponding to the number of the ministering apostles: and Jesus, in the dialogue under consideration, would remind His disciples how on two occasions where the bread of life was multiplied for the hungry, the twelve Apostles received the twelve baskets of crumbs, and the seven received the seven.