But, dear brethren, there are deeper thoughts than this, on which I must dwell briefly.  ’In remembrance of Me’—­Jesus Christ, then, takes up an altogether unique and solitary position here, and into the sacredest hours of devotion and the loftiest moments of communion with God, intrudes His personality, and says, ’When you are most religious, remember Me; and let the highest act of your devout life be a thought turned to Myself.’

Now, I want you to ask, is that thought diverted from God?  And if it is not, how comes it not to be?  I want you honestly to ask yourselves this question—­what did He think about Himself who, at that moment, when all illusions were vanishing, and life was almost at its last ebb, took the most solemn rite of His nation and laid it solemnly aside and said:  ’A greater than Moses is here; a greater deliverance is being wrought’:  ‘Remember Me.’  Is that insisting on His own 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.’