1818 Jan y 28

Not Paul

III Doctrine

Ch Mysticism

4

§ Lord’s Supper

Thus far the antecedent―setting aside the false intimation tacked to it, trivial the simple and innoxious statement of a simple and to all but the Apostles themselves who alone were concerned in it an / a comparatively at least / immaterial incident.

But now comes the consequent: consequent the product not of logic, but of Paul’s ever extravagant yet ever interested rhetoric. Every man who eating bread and drinking wine eats and drinks it in commemoration of the bread and wine eaten and drunk by and with Jesus at his last supper will if he eats it unworthily incur thereby a danger more or less considerable of death in this world and boundless misery in the / a / world to come. ‘For Bentham footnote at this point: ‘I. Cor. XI 29. 30’. he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to himself, not discerning the Lord’s body. 30. For this cause many are weak and sickly among you, and many sleep.’ Bentham footnote at this point: ‘ By another interpretation Paul’s credit may be saved. Eating unworthily is doing so to excess: damnation, nothing more than condemnation.’

Note here how naturally, and how customarily, a supernatural cause is spun out of a natural effect. Among those who were present at these commemorative suppers were some and in no small number, in this very part the Epistle itself informs us, were in the habit of / apt to / drinking to excess / intoxication /. All men are doomed to death all men are liable to sickness: not more effectually would the name of Jesus than the name of Charles Fox or that / the name / of William Pitt divest the / any / intoxicating liquor of any part of its pernicious influence. Here then were indisputable occurrences and for / on / these occasions in the character of effects, the piety of Paul, followed by so much other piety of the same stamp found a convivial cause. It was not by the physical excess the temporal the physical the physiological the pathological excess―no it was by the unworthiness―the spiritual unworthiness that the effect had been produced.