The reader should always turn to the Bible and read the passages referred to.

QUES. 12.-Will you please answer in Help and Food as to the following:In Mark 9:42-48, what does the Lord mean by cutting off hand or foot? How can the hand or foot offend one?

ANS.-Our Lord constantly used things natural or physical to illustrate spiritual truths. Note how largely in the Gospels the Lord taught by parables-as in Matt. 13th chapter. It is a simple and forceful way of presenting truths which might be difficult for our apprehension. Things that we see are made to illustrate what we cannot see. Thus the hand represents things that we do; and the foot points to our walk, or conduct. Persons may think they have to do this, that, and the other, to get along in this world; or they must go with, associate with, what they know is not right, not according to God. It brings a bad conscience, and if continued in it acts like local paralysis-it deadens the conscience. "Cut it off," says the Lord. Better lose a member than the whole body- better endure a temporary loss in this life, better cut off present indulgence, than lose one's soul eternally in hell! How simple the picture, and forceful the application.

QUES. 13.-In John 20:22 it is said that the Lord breathed on the twelve disciples and said, "Receive ye the Holy Ghost." Did He speak of the day of Pentecost, or did they receive the Holy Spirit at that time?

ANS.-It is not of a special act or moment that this passage speaks, but of what characterizes the present dispensation. Consider the last part of John's Gospel from chap. 13 to end of the 20th, you will see that in this last night, with His disciples alone, the Lord prepares them for what was before them. He was going to leave them; His work here on earth was finished; He was going back to the Father; they were to believe in Him now even as in the Father, invisible to them. He washes their feet as a picture of what He is doing for us now. He strengthens them in view of the opposition they would meet from the world, even as He had suffered opposition. In His high-priestly prayer (ch. 17) He says, "I have finished the work which Thou gavest Me to do" (though the cross was yet before Him), and He presents them to the Father in the value of that work which is considered as done. It is all anticipative, you see.

Now in the 20th chapter, as the Risen One, He takes His place before them as the Head of a new race to whom He gives a new life-eternal life-"He breathed on them." As He had breathed natural life into Adam, now as "the last Adam, a quickening Spirit" (1 Cor. 15:45), He takes His place as the communicator of eternal life to the new race of whom He is the Head, and the gift of the Holy Spirit accompanies the new position in which He brings those whom God has given Him. The passage therefore speaks not of receiving eternal life then, nor the Holy Spirit then, but is emblematic of the Lord's place in new creation.