personality, and making the remembrance of it the very apex
and shining summit of all religious aspiration--is that the work of
one about whom all that we have to say is, He was the noblest of men?
If so, then I want to know how Jesus Christ, in that upper chamber,
founding the sole continuous rite of the religion which He
established, and making its heart and centre the remembrance of His
own personality, can be cleared from the charge of diverting to
Himself what belongs to God only, and how you and I, if we obey His
commands, escape the crime of idolatry and man-worship? 'Do this in
remembrance,'--not of God--'in remembrance of Me,' 'and let memory,
with all its tendrils, clasp and cleave to My person.' What an
extraordinary demand! It is obscuring God, unless the 'Me' _is_ God
manifest in the flesh.

Then, still further, let me remind you that in the appointment of
this solitary rite as His memorial to all generations, Jesus Christ
Himself designates one part of His whole manifestation as the part
into which all its pathos, significance, and power are concentrated.
We who believe that the death of Christ is the life of the world, are
told that one formidable objection to our belief is that Jesus Christ
Himself said so little during His life about His death. I believe His
reticence upon that question is much exaggerated, but apart
altogether from that, I believe also that there was a necessity in
the order of the evolution of divine truth, for the reticence, such
as it is, because, whatsoever might be possible to Moses and Elias,
on the Mount of Transfiguration, 'His decease which He should
accomplish at Jerusalem,' could not be much spoken about in the plain
till it had been accomplished. But, apart from both of these
considerations, reflect, that whether He said much about His death or
not, He said something very much to the purpose about it when He said
'Do this in remembrance of Me.'

It is not His personality only that we are to remember. The whole of
the language of the institution of the ritual, as well as the form of
the rite, and its connection with the ancient passover, and its
connection with the new covenant into connection with which Christ
Himself brings it, all point to the significance in His eyes of His
death as the Sacrifice for the world's sin. Wherefore 'the body' and
'the blood' separately remembered, except to indicate death by
violence? Wherefore the language 'the body _broken_ for you';
'th