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"What handsome flowers they had!" "How they sung, and held the ribbons of their banners!" "And how the silver fringes of the banners glistened in the sun! That must have cost a deal of money!" "Goodness how handsome it was, Francois!" "I believe you, and the communicants with their badges of white satin on the arm, and wax candles with velvet and gold handles."
All in white the communicants go up two and two in a hushed, sweet awe to take the body of their Lord, and Tomaso, who is priest's boy, tries not to look unduly puffed up by his office. After that you have dinner and a bottle of wine that ripened on the sunny slope of Escondito.
They are earnest in prayer to him that he would preserve them from falling back into their former wicked and superstitious courses." The accounts from Nain were to the same effect: "Our communicants," say they, "have made a perceptible advance both in the knowledge of themselves as sinners, and of Jesus as their Saviour.
Its beauty is untouched by the twenty long years since first he wandered by its shores. A Paradise in a forest. His few communicants have said adieu. There is nothing to follow him but the incense-breathing murmurs of the forest branches, from fragrant pine and stately redwood, sighing, "Go, in God's name." Their wind-wafted voices speak to him of the happy past.
The wheaten posset he offered the shocked communicants belonged to these also, and the figure of a woman on the altar was of course the holy Wheatsheaf, whose unveiling was the culminating point in that famous ritual.
When Miss Rice dismissed us, no one moved; all were bowed on their desks, weeping. She then gave opportunity for prayer, and while I prayed, all were in tears. The girls have kept all the rules well to-day. This evening, the communicants met with Miss Rice, and the rest with Martha. Miss Rice read about Jonah in the ship, and said a few words; after that, Raheel the teacher prayed.
But his presence in no way affects the validity of the sacrament, being merely a wise precaution against the admission of unworthy communicants. The laity surrender into the hands of the clergyman, or the minister aided by elders or deacons, their power of admitting or rejecting worthy or unworthy persons.
For this no societies or new ecclesiastical machinery will be required. The force to do this work is already enlisted in the communicant membership of our one hundred and fifty organized congregations. We have approximately 60,000 communicants. These are our under-shepherds whose business it is to aid the pastor in searching for "the lost sheep of the house of Israel."
Luther had required that at the Lord's Supper the cup, in accordance with the original institution of Christ, should be given to the laity. Carlstadt and Zwilling, however, wished to make it a sin for a person to partake of the Communion without the cup being given to the communicants.
I am convinced that if we ministers were more direct and plain-spoken to such persons at such times; if we, like Bunyan, told them plainly what kind of a world it is they are coming out to buy and sell in, and what its merchandise and its prices are; if our people would let us so preach to their sons and daughters, I feel sure far fewer young communicants would make shipwreck, and far fewer grey heads would go down with sorrow to the grave.
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