his helpless parents; but as soon as he enters the country, the idols fall down, and confess his true divinity. He is presented in the temple as the son of man; but by Simeon and Anna he is celebrated, with divine praises, for the Messias, the Son of God. He is baptized in Jordan as a sinner; but the Holy Ghost, descending upon him, proclaimed him to be the wellbeloved of God. He is hungry in the desert as a man; but sustained his body without meat and drink, for forty days together, by the power of his divinity there he is tempted of Satan as a weak man, and the angels of light minister unto him as their supreme Lord. And now, a little before his death, when he was to take upon him all the affronts, miseries, and exinanitions of the most miserable, he receives testimonies from above, which are most wonderful; for he was transfigured upon Mount Tabor, entered triumphantly into Jerusalem, had the acclamations of the people; when he was dying, he darkened the sun; when he was dead, he opened the sepulchres; when he was fast nailed to the cross, he made the earth to tremble; now, when he suffers himself to be apprehended by a guard of soldiers, he strikes them all to the ground only by replying to their answer : that the words of the prophet might be verified, "Therefore my people shall know my name; therefore they shall know in that day, that I am he that doth speak; behold! it is I.”* The soldiers and servants of the Jews having recovered from their fall, and risen by the permission of Jesus, still persisted in their inquiry after him, who was present, ready, and desirous to be sacrificed. : lle, therefore, permitted himself to be taken, but not his disciples: for he it was that set them their bounds; and he secured his apostles to be witnesses of his suffering and his glories; and this work was the redemption of the world, in which no man could have an active share; he alone was to tread the wine-press; and time enough they should be called to a fellowship of sufferings. But Jesus went to them, and they bound him with cords; and so began our liberty and redemption from slavery, and sin, and cursings, and death. But he was bound faster by bands of his own his Father's will, and mercy, pity of the world, prophecies and mysteries, and love held him fast and these cords were as "strong as death;" and the cords, which the soldiers' malice put upon his holy hands, were but symbols and figures, his own compassion and affection were the morals. But yet he undertook this short restraint and condition of a prisoner, that all sorts of persecution and exterior calamities might be hallowed by his susception; and these pungent sorrows should, like bees, sting him, and leave their sting behind, that all the sweetnesses should remain for us. Some melancholic devotions have, from uncertain stories, added sad circumstances of the first violence done to our Lord; that they bound him with three cords, and that with so much violence, that they caused blood to start from his tender hands; that they spat then, also, upon him, with a violence and incivility like that, which their fathers had used towards Hur, the brother of Aaron, whom they choked with impure spittings into his throat, because he refused to consent to the making a golden calf. These particulars are not transmitted by certain records. Certain it is, they wanted no malice, and now no power; for the Lord had given himself into their hands. St Peter, seeing his master thus ill-used, asked, "Master, shall we strike * Isa. lii 6. with the sword ?" and before he had his answer, cut off the ear of Malchus. Two swords there were in Christ's family, and St Peter bore one; either because he was to kill the paschal lamb, or, according to the custom of the country, to secure them against beasts of prey, which in that region were frequent, and dangerous in the night. But now he used it in an unlawful war; he had no competent authority; it was against the ministers of his lawful prince, and against our prince we must not draw a sword for Christ himself, himself having forbidden us; as his "kingdom is not of this world," so neither were his defences secular: he could have called for many legions of angels for his guard, if he had so pleased; and we read that one angel slew 185,000 armed men in one night; and, therefore it was a vast power, which was at the command of our Lord: and he needs not such low auxiliaries as an army of rebels, or a navy of pirates, to defend his cause he first lays the foundation of our happiness in his sufferings, and hath ever since supported religion by patience and suffering, and in poverty, and all the circumstances and conjunctures of improbable causes. Fighting for religion is certain to destroy charity, but not certain to support faith. St Peter, therefore, may use his keys, but he is commanded to put up his sword; and he did so; and presently he and his fellows fairly ran away and yet that course was much the more Christian; for though it had in it much infirmity, yet it had no malice. In the mean time, the Lord was pleased to touch the ear of Malchus, and he cured it: adding to the first instance of power, in throwing them to the ground, an act of miraculous mercy, curing the wounds of an enemy made by a friend. But neither did this pierce their callous and obdurate spirits; but they led him in uncouth ways, and through the brook Cedron, in which it is said the ruder soldiers plunged him, and passed upon him all the affronts and rudenesses which an insolent and cruel multitude could think of, to signify their contempt and their rage. And such is the nature of evil men, who, when they are not softened by the instruments and arguments of grace, are much hardened by them; such being the purpose of God, that either grace shall cure sin, or accidentally increase it; that it shall either pardon it, or bring it to greater punishment; for so I have seen healthful medicines, abused by the incapacities of a healthless body, become fuel to a fever, and increase the distemperature, from indisposition to a sharp disease, and from thence to the margent of the grave. But it was otherwise in Saul, whom Jesus threw to the ground with a more angry sound than these persecutors: but Saul rose a saint, and they persisted devils; and the grace of God distinguished the events. ON THE CRUCIFIXION OF JESUS. WHEN the sentence of death pronounced against the Lord was to be put in execution, the soldiers pulled off the robe of mockery, the scarlet mantle, which in jest they put upon him, and put on his own garments. But, as Origen observes, the evangelist mentioned not that they took off the crown of thorns; what might serve their interest they pursue, but nothing of re mission or mercy to the afflicted Son of man: but so it became the King of sufferings, not to lay aside his imperial thorns, till they were changed into diadems of glory. But now Abel is led forth by his brother to be slain: a gay spectacle to satisfy impious eyes, who would not stay behind, but attended and waited upon the hangman to see the catastrophe of this bloody tragedy. But when Piety looks on, she beholds a glorious mystery. Sin laughed to see the King of heaven and earth, and the great lover of souls, instead of the sceptre of his kingdom, to bear a tree of cursing and shame. But Piety wept tears of pity, and knew they would melt into joy, when she should behold that cross, which loaded the shoulders of her Lord, afterward sit upon the sceptres, and be engraved and signed upon the foreheads of kings. It cannot be thought but the ministers of Jewish malice used all the circumstances of affliction, which, in any case, were accustomed towards malefactors and persons to be crucified; and therefore it was that in some old figures we see our blessed Lord described with a table appendent to the fringe of his garment, set full of nails and pointed iron; for so sometimes they afflicted persons condemned to that kind of death : and St Cyprian affirms, that Christ did stick to the wood that he carried, being galled with the iron at his heels, and nailed even before his crucifixion. But this, and the other accidents of his journey, and their malice, so crushed his wounded, tender, and virginal body, that they were forced to lay the load upon a Cyrenian, fearing that he should die with less shame and smart than they intended him. But so he was pleased to take man unto his aid, not only to represent his own need, and the dolorousness of his passion, but to consign the duty unto man, that we must enter into a fellowship of Christ's sufferings, taking up the cross of martyrdom when God requires us, enduring affronts, being patient under affliction, loving them that hate us, and being benefactors to our enemies, abstaining from sensual and intemperate delight, forbidding to ourselves lawful festivities and recreations of our weariness, when we have an end of the spirit to serve upon the ruins of the body's strength, mortifying our desires, breaking our own will, not seeking ourselves, being entirely resigned to God. These are the cross, and the nails, and the spear, and the whip, and all the instruments of a Christian's passion. And we may consider, that every man in this world shall, in some sense or other, bear a cross: few men escape it, and it is not well with them that do but they only bear it well that follow Christ, and tread in his steps, and bear it for his sake, and walk as he walked ; and he that follows his own desires, when he meets with a cross there, (as it is certain enough he will,) bears the cross of his concupiscence, and that hath no fellowship with the cross of Christ. By the precept of "bearing the cross," we are not tied to pull evil upon ourselves, that we may imitate our Lord in nothing but in being afflicted; or to personate the punitive exercises of mortification and severe abstinencies, which were eminent in some saints, and to which they had special assistances, as others had the gift of chastity, and for which they had special reason, and, as they apprehended, some great necessities but it is required that "we bear our own cross;" so said our dearest Lord.* For when the cross of Christ is laid upon us, and we are called to martyrdom, then it is our own, because God made it to be our portion: and * Matt. xvi. 21. : when, by the necessities of our spirit and the rebellion of our body, we need exterior mortifications and acts of self-denial, then also it is our own cross, because our needs have made it so; and so it is when God sends us sickness, or any other calamity: whatever is either an effect of our ghostly needs, or the condition of our temporal estate, it calls for our sufferance, and patience, and equanimity; for "therefore Christ hath suffered for us,' saith St Peter,* "leaving us an example, that we should follow his steps," who bore his cross as long as he could; and when he could no longer, he murmured not, but sank under it ; and then he was content to receive such aid, not which he chose himself, but such as was assigned him. Jesus was led out of the gates of Jerusalem, † that he might become the sacrifice for persons without the pale, even for all the world: and the daughters of Jerusalem followed him with pious tears till they came to Calvary, a place difficult in the ascent, eminent and apt for the publication of shame, a hill of death and dead bones, polluted and impure, and there beheld him stripped naked, who clothes the field with flowers, and all the world with robes, and the whole globe with the canopy of heaven, and so dressed, that now every circumstance was a triumph: by his disgrace he trampled upon our pride; by his poverty and nakedness, he triumphed over our covetousness and love of riches; and, by his pains, chastised the delicacies of our flesh, and broke in pieces the fetters of our concupiscence. For as soon as Adam was clothed, he quitted Paradise; and Jesus was made naked, that he might bring us in again. And we also must be despoiled of all our exterior adherencies, that we may pass through the regions of duty and divine love to a society of blessed spirits, and a clarified, immortal, and beatified estate. There they nailed Jesus with four nails, fixed his cross in the ground, which, with its fall into the place of its station, gave infinite torture, by so violent a concussion of the body of our Lord, which rested upon nothing but four great wounds; where he was designed to suffer a long and lingering torment. For crucifixion, as it was an exquisite pain, sharp and passionate, so it was not of quick effect towards taking away the life. St Andrew was two whole days upon the cross; and some martyrs have upon the cross been rather starved and devoured with birds, than killed with the proper torment of the tree. But Jesus took all his passion with a voluntary susception, God heightening it to great degrees of torment supernaturally and he laid down his life voluntarily, when his Father's wrath was totally appeased towards mankind. : And now behold the Priest and the Sacrifice of all the world laid upon the altar of the cross, bleeding, and tortured, and dying, to reconcile his Father to us and he was arrayed with ornaments more glorious than the robes of Aaron. The crown of thorns was his mitre, the cross his pastoral staff, the nails piercing his hands were instead of rings, the ancient ornament of priests, and his flesh razed and checkered with blue and blood instead of the parti-coloured robe. But as this object calls for our devotion, our love and eucharist to our dearest Lord; so it must needs irreconcile us to sin, which, in the eye of all the world, brought so great shame, and pain, and amazement upon the Son of God, when he only became engaged by a charitable substitution of himself in our place; and therefore we are assured by the demonstration of sense and experience, it will bring death, and all imaginable miseries, as the just expresses of God's indignation and hatred: for to this we may apply the words of our Lord in the prediction of miseries to Jerusalem, "If this be done in the green tree, what shall be done in the For it is certain, Christ infinitely pleased his Father, even by becoming the person made guilty in estimate of law; and yet so great charity of our Lord, and the so great love and pleasure of his Father, exempted him not from suffering pains intolerable: and much less shall those escape, who provoke and displease God, and "despise so great salvation," which the holy Jesus hath wrought with the expense of blood and so precious a life. But here we see a great representation and testimony of the Divine justice, who was so angry with sin, who had so severely threatened it, who does so essentially hate it, that he would not spare his only Son, when he became a conjunct person, relative to the guilt, by undertaking the charges of our nature. For although God hath set down in holy Scripture* the order of his justice, and the manner of its manifestation, that one soul shall not perish for the sins of another; yet this is meant for justice and for mercy too, that is, he will not curse the son for the father's fault, or, in any relation whatsoever, substitute one person for another to make him involuntarily guilty: but when this shall be desired by a person that cannot finally perish, and does a mercy to the exempt persons, and is a voluntary act of the suscipient, and shall in the event also redound to an infinite good, it is no deflection from the Divine justice to excuse many by the affliction of one, who also for that very suffering shall have infinite compensation. We see that, for the sin of Cham, all his posterity were accursed; the subjects of David died with the plague, because their prince numbered the people idolatry is punished in the children of the fourth generation: Saul's seven sons were hanged for breaking the league of Gibeon; and Ahab's sin was punished in his posterity, he escaping, and "the evil was brought upon his house in his son's days." In all these cases the evil descended upon persons in near relation to the sinner, and was a punishment to him and a misery to these, and were either chastisements also of their own sins, or, if they were not, they served other ends of Providence, and led the afflicted innocent to a condition of recompense accidentally procured by that infliction. But if for such relation's sake and economical and political conjunction, as between prince and people, the evil may be transmitted from one to another, much rather is it just, when, by contract, a competent and conjunct person undertakes to quit his relative. Thus when the hand steals, the back is whipped; and an evil eye is punished with a hungry belly. Treason causes the whole family to be miserable; and a sacrilegious grandfather hath sent a locust to devour the increase of the nephews. But, in our case, it is a voluntary contract, and therefore no injustice; all parties are voluntary. God is the supreme Lord, and his actions are the measure of justice: we, who had deserved the punishment, had great reason to desire a Redeemer: and yet Christ, who was to pay the ransom, was more desirous of it than we were, for we asked it not before it was promised and undertaken. But thus we see that sureties pay the obligation of the principal debtor, and the pledges of contracts have been, by the very wisest nations, slain, when the articles have been broken. And that *Deut. xxiv. 16. Ezek. xviii. 2, 3, 4, 5, &c. |