Books by Mary Baker Eddy

COMMUNION ADDRESS, JANUARY, 1896
page 66

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

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written in a decaying language, his words can never pass
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.
This, however, is not the cup to which I call your attention,
- 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 omnipotence
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
prophet declared, "Thou shalt put away the guilt of
innocent blood from Israel." This is plain: that whatever
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
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
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
thereof, which punishes the guilty, not the innocent. The
Teacher of both law and gospel construed the substitution

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of a good man to suffer for evil-doers - a crime! When
foretelling his own crucifixion, he said, "Woe unto the
world because of offenses! for it must needs be that
offenses come; but woe to that man by whom the offense
cometh!"
   Would Jesus thus have spoken of what was indispensable
for the salvation of a world of sinners, or of the
individual instrument in this holy (?) alliance for accomplishing
such a monstrous work? or have said of him
whom God foreordained and predestined to fulfil a divine
decree, "It were better for him that a millstone were
hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the
depth of the sea"?
   The divine order is the acme of mercy: it is neither
questionable nor assailable: it is not evil producing good,
nor good ultimating in evil. Such an inference were
impious. Holy Writ denounces him that declares, "Let
us do evil, that good may come! whose damnation is
just."
   Good is not educed from its opposite: and Love divine
spurned, lessens not the hater's hatred nor the criminal's
crime; nor reconciles justice to injustice; nor substitutes
the suffering of the Godlike for the suffering due to sin.
Neither spiritual bankruptcy nor a religious chancery can
win high heaven, or the "Well done, good and faithful
servant,...enter thou into the joy of thy Lord."
   Divine Love knows no hate; for hate, or the hater, is
nothing: God never made it, and He made all that was

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