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

There were natural trees, with purely natural properties, whose fruit was
eaten naturally, and whose benefits were simply natural; bodily eating,
terminating in a bodily sustenance. But there was also the natural
terminating in the supernatural. There were two trees, striking their roots
into the same soil, lifting their branches in the same air--natural trees--but
bearing, by Heaven's ordinance, in, with, and under their fruitage,
supernatural properties. One was the sacramental tree of good. We call it a
sacramental tree, because it did not merely symbolize life, or signify it; but,
by God's appointment, so gave life--in, with, and under its fruit--that to
receive its fruit was to receive life. The fruit which men there would have
eaten was the communion of life. On Gen. iii. 22, the sound old Puritan
commentator, Poole, thus paraphrases: "Lest he take also of the tree of life,
as he did take of the tree of knowledge, and thereby profane that
sacrament of eternal life."
With this tree of life was found the tree which was the sacrament of
judgment and of death, and by man's relations to that tree would be tested
whether he were good or evil, and by it he would continue to enjoy good
or plunge himself into evil. By an eating, whose organs were natural, but
whose relations were supernatural, man fell and died. This whole mystery
of evil, these pains and sorrows which overwhelm the race, the past, the
present, and the future of sin, revolve around a single natural eating,
forbidden by God, bringing the offender into the realm of the supernatural
for judgment. We learn here what fearful grandeur may be associated in
the moral government of God, with a thing in itself so simple as the act of
eating. The first record of Revelation is a warning against the plausible
superficiality of rationalism. It was the rationalistic insinuation of Satan, as
to the meaning of God's Word, which led to the Fall. Abandon faith in the
letter of God's Word, said the Devil. Our first parents obeyed the seductive
insinuation and died.
In the Lord's Supper three great ideas meet us as they met in
Paradise. There is in it, 1, Bread, which, as bread, is the natural food of
man, and belongs to all men. But there is