The same general considerations reappear in the verses following the specific precept, but with a difference.  The neighbour’s profit is still put forth as the limiting consideration, but it is elevated to a higher sacredness of obligation by being set in connection with the ‘glory of God’ and the example of Christ.  ’Do all to the glory of God.’  To put the thought here into modern English—­Could you ask a blessing over a glass of spirits when you think that, though it should do you no harm, your taking it may, as it were, tip some weak brother over the precipice?  Can you drink to God’s glory when you know that drink is slaying thousands body and soul, and that hopeless drunkards are made by wholesale out of moderate drinkers?  ’Give no occasion of stumbling’; do not by your example tempt others into risky courses.  And remember that ‘neighbour’ (verse 24) resolves itself into ‘Jews’ and ‘Greeks’ and the ’Church of God’—­that is, substantially to your own race and other races—­to men with whom you have affinities, and to men with whom you have none.

A Christian man is bound to shape his life so that no man shall be able to say of him that he was the occasion of that one’s fall.  He is so bound because every man is his neighbour.  He is so bound because he is bound to live to the glory of God, which can never be advanced by laying stumbling-blocks in the way for feeble feet.  He is so bound because, unless Christ had limited Himself within the bound of manhood, and had sought not His own profit or pleasure, we should have had neither life nor hope.  For all these reasons, the duty of thinking of others, and of abstaining, for their sakes, from what one might do, is laid on all Christians.  How do they discharge that duty who will not forswear alcohol for their neighbour’s sake?

‘IN REMEMBRANCE OF ME’

   ’This do in remembrance of Me.’—­1 COR. xi. 24.

The account of the institution of the Lord’s Supper, contained in this context, is very much the oldest extant narrative of that event.  It dates long before any of the Gospels, and goes up, probably, to somewhere about five and twenty years after the Crucifixion.  It presupposes a previous narrative which had been orally delivered to the Corinthians, and, as the Apostle alleges, was derived by him from Christ Himself.  It is intended to correct corruptions in the administration of the rite which must have taken some time to develop themselves.  And so we are carried back to a period very close indeed to the first institution of the rite, by the words before us.

No reasonable doubt can exist, then, that within a very few years of our Lord’s death, the whole body of Christian people believed that Jesus Christ Himself appointed the Lord’s Supper.  I do not stay to dwell upon the value of a rite contemporaneous with the fact which it commemorates, and continuously lasting throughout the ages, as a witness of the historical veracity of the alleged fact; but I want to fix upon