in view. At that moment I was tempted to stop, and to carry no further
my researches on a doctrine which I thought I had found clearly
set forth, but the absurdity of which had never appeared to me
so palpable. I then felt an utter disgust towards the Gospel;
nevertheless, internally spurred on by an invisible power, which was
then unknown to me, but which I now recognize to have been the Holy
Spirit, the author of all divine revelation; and attracted, as it
were, in spite of myself, by the Spirit of God, who graciously
purposed to teach me to appreciate, and in time to receive, the truth
of his word, I resumed my New Testament, which I had for a moment
thrown aside, and recommencing the perusal of the sixth chapter of St.
John, I read it to the end, which I had not done before.

When I reached the sixty-third verse, I was struck as by a flash of
light, which instantaneously discovered to me the mistake that I had
at first made in the meaning of the six verses transcribed above, and
imparted a new value to the Gospel. When I read "It is the Spirit that
quickeneth, the flesh profiteth nothing--the words that I speak unto
you, they are Spirit, and they are Life," John, 6:63, I had, as it
were, the key of the chapter, and no longer discerned in it the
doctrine of the real presence. I perceived that it in no way referred
to swallowing and digesting, with our corporeal organs, the body and
blood of Christ: I saw that the expressions of eating and drinking
were used figuratively, and that they really signified nothing
but knowing Christ, coming to him, and believing in him, as it is
explained in the thirty-fifth verse of the same chapter, where Jesus
Christ says, "I am the bread of life; he that cometh to me shall never
hunger, and he that believeth on me shall never thirst."

It was, then, as clear to me as the day, that Jesus Christ used the