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’; ‘the blood shed for many for the remission of sins?’ Wherefore the association with the Passover sacrifice?  Wherefore the declaration that ‘this is the blood of the Covenant,’ unless all tended to the one thought—­His death is the foundation of all loving relationships possible to us with God; and the condition of the remission of sins—­the Sacrifice for the whole world?’

This is the point that He desires us to remember; this is that which He would have live for ever in our grateful hearts.

I say nothing about the absolute exclusion of any other purpose of this memorial rite.  If it was the mysterious thing that the superstition of later ages has made of it, how, in the name of common-sense, does it come that not one syllable, looking in that direction, dropped from His lips when He established it?  Surely He, in that upper chamber, knew best what He meant, and what He was doing when He established the rite; and I, for my part, am contented to be told that I believe in a poor, bald Zwinglianism, when I say with my Master, that the purpose of the Lord’s Supper is simply the commemoration, and therein the proclamation, of His death.  There is no magic, no mystery, no ‘sacrament’ about it.  It blesses us when it makes us remember Him.  It does the same thing for us which any other means of bringing Him to mind does.  It does that through a different vehicle.  A sermon does it by words, the Communion does it by symbols.  That is the difference to be found between them.  And away goes the whole fabric of superstitious Christianity, and all its mischiefs and evils, when once you accept the simple ‘Remember.’  Christ told us what He meant by the rite when He said ’Do this in remembrance of Me.’

II.  And now one word or two more about the other particulars which I have suggested.  The past, however sweet and precious, is not enough for any soul to live upon.  And so this memorial rite, just because it is memorial, is a symbol for the present.

That is taught us in the great chapter—­the sixth of John’s Gospel—­which was spoken long before the institution of the Lord’s Supper, but expresses in words the same ideas which it expresses by material forms.  The Christ who died is the Christ who lives, and must be lived upon by the Christian.  If our relation to Jesus Christ were only that ’Once in the end of the ages He appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself’;