o our ear than sound of vintage bells to villagers
on the Rhine.

I recommend that this Association hereafter meet tri- [20]
ennially; many of its members reside a long distance from
Massachusetts, and they are members of The Mother
Church who would love to be with you on Sunday, and
once in three years is perhaps as often as they can afford
to be away from their own fields of labor. [25]

Communion Address, January, 1896

_Friends and Brethren:_--The Biblical record of the
great Nazarene, whose character we to-day commemorate,
is scanty; but what is given, puts to flight every doubt as
to the immortality of his words and works. Though [30]

[Page 121.]

written in a decaying language, his words can never pass [1]
away: they are inscribed upon the hearts of men: they
are engraved upon eternity's tablets.

Undoubtedly our Master partook of the Jews' feast
of the Passover, and drank from their festal wine-cup. [5]
This, however, is not the cup to which I call your at-
tention,--even the cup of martyrdom: wherein Spirit
and matter, good and evil, seem to grapple, and the
human struggles against the divine, up to a point of
discovery; namely, the impotence of evil, and the om- [10]
nipotence of good, as divinely attested. Anciently, the
blood of martyrs was believed to be the seed of the Church.
Stalled theocracy would make this fatal doctrine just
and sovereign, even a divine decree, a law of Love! That
the innocent shall suffer for the guilty, is inhuman. The [15]
prophet declared, "Thou shalt put away the guilt of
innocent blood from Israel." This is plain: that what-
ever belittles, befogs, or belies the nature and essence of
Deity, is not divine. Who, then, shall father or favor
this sentence passed upon innocence? thereby giving the [20]
signet of God to the arrest, trial, and crucifixion of His
beloved Son, the righteous Nazarene,--christened by
John the Baptist, "the Lamb of God."

Oh! shameless insult to divine royalty, that drew
from the great Master this answer to the questions of the [25]
rabbinical rabble: "If I tell you, ye will not believe; and
if I also ask you, ye will not answer me, nor let me go."

Infinitely greater than human pity, is divine Love,--
that cannot be unmerciful. Human tribunals, if just,
borrow their sense of justice from the divine Principle [30]
thereof, which punishes the guilty, not the innocent. The
Teacher of both law and gospel construed the substitution

[