The Conservative Reformation and Its Theology - Saint Mary ...

upon this we have the idea of supernatural eating, with the natural bodily
organ: "Of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat;
for in the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." Man did eat of it,
and found it a sacrament of death. In, with, and under that food, as a divine
means judicially appointed, was communicated death. That
“mortal taste
Brought death into the world and all our woe."
The great loss of Paradise Lost was that of the Sacrament of Life, of
that food, in, with, and under which was given immortality, so objectively,
positively, and really that even fallen man would have been made deathless
by it: "Now lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and
eat, and live forever," Get. iii. 22. The great gain of Paradise Regained is
that of the Sacrament of Life. Christ says: "I am the life;" "The bread that I
will give is My flesh, which I will give for the life of the world." The cross
of Christ is the tree of life, and He the precious fruit borne by heavenly
grace upon it. The cross is the centre of Paradise Regained, as the tree of
life was the centre of the first Paradise. Christ's body is the organ of the life
purchased by His obedience and death. The Holy Supper is the sacrament
of that body, and, through the body, the sacrament of the life which that
body brings. But that same body is also a sacrament of death to the
unworthy recipient. The whole sacrament on its two sides of death and life
is in it united: salvation to the believer,judgment to the unworthy. After the
creation of man, God's first provision was for the generation and birth of
the race, the foreshadowing of regeneration and of the new birth, for which,
in Holy Baptism, the first provision is made in the new creation of the New
Testament. The next provision made for man was that of sustenance for the
life given, or yet to be given. In the Garden of Eden was a moral miniature
of the universe; and with the act of eating were associated the two great
realms of the natural and the supernatural; and with this was connected the
idea of the one as a means of entering the other, of the natural as the means
of entering into the supernatural.