Meditations on the holy sacrament of the Lords last Supper Written many years sinceMeditations on the holy sacrament of the Lords last Supper Written many yeares since

Fifthly, we eat and drink the Sacrament of Christ crucified, to signify that real and near incorporation of the faithful into Christ their head; for the end of eating is the assimilation of our nourishment and the turning of it into our own nature and substance, whatsoever cannot be assimilated is ejected: and thus is it between us and Christ; whence it cometh that we so often read of the^c Inhabitation of Christ in his Church, of his more peculiar presence^d ⟨p. 61⟩with and in his people, of our spiritual^c ingrasture into him by faith, of those more near and approaching relations of Brotherhood^d, and coinheritance^e between Christ and us, that mutual interest, fellowship, and society which we have each to other, with infinite other expressions of that divine and expresselesse mixture whereby the faithful are not only by a consociation of affections^f and confederacy of wills, but by a real though mystical union ingrafted, knit, and as it were jointed unto Christ by the sinew of faith, and so made heirs of all that glory and good which in his person was purchased for his members, and is from him diffused on them as on the parts and portions of himself. So that it pleaseth Gods spirit (as some^g do observe) so far sometimes to express this union betwixt Christ and his Church, as to call the Church it self by the name of Christ, and every where almost to interest^h himself in the injuries and sufferings of his Church, yeaⁱ to esteem him self incomplete and maimed without it. And here this mystical unity between Christ & his Church being by eating and drinking so expressly signified, and in the Sacrament so graciously obsignated unto us, it will not be impertinent to enlarge somewhat on so divine a point: wheresoever any thing hath so inward a relation and dependency on something else, as that it