XII. Christ Our Friend Crucified: The Seven Words

THE SEVEN WORDS

Christ our Friend Crucified

We have been considering so far the Friendship of Jesus Christ, and the various modes in which He offers it to us, whether interiorly or exteriorly, in the depths of our own consciousness, or in His representatives on earth, each in his various degree. To-day we turn back to the Gospels for the actual record of that supreme pledge of friendship which He gave once for all, the manifestation of that greatest of all Loves by which He laid down His Life for His friends. As we look on Him crucified, we see a bewildering wealth of functions which He performs for us on the Cross; Uke a Sovereign He bears upon His own wounded Breast all those orders and insignia, which He alone can bestow. Priesthood is there, Royalty, the Prophetic Office, Sacrifice, Martyrdom — all alike are jewels w^hich He confers on those who follow Him, each in His own degree. But, for the most part, we shall pass these by: we shall consider

Him from that same standpoint as that from which we

III have considered Him throughout — as our own familiar Friend who trusted us, and who was rewarded by us with the Crown of Thorns; who yet is content to bear all this and a thousand Passions more, if at the end He can but persuade us that He loves us. He spoke Seven Words as He hung there on Calvary, and each tells us of His Friendship.

^^ Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do^ ^ Our Friend has climbed the Hill; He has been stripped of His clothes and laid upon the Cross that He has carried from the steps of the Praetorium. The executioners prepare and choose the nails.... Those whose love He is seeking stand round looking down upon His upturned face. He, lying there, sees them, and sees behind them all those whom they represent — all those countless souls each one of whom He desires to win. And, as the hammer is Hfted and falls. He utters His first Word. ^^ Father, j or give them, for they know not what they doy

I. And is such a word as this possible? Is it possible even for Divine Charity to declare that ''they know not what they do"? He had lived three years in public as their servant and friend; He had helped all who came to Him, fed the hungry, healed the sick, relieved the tormented. Not once was it known that any who came to Him was cast out. Even those whom the world regarded as worthless, the ruined wrecks of humanity, the publican and the harlot, — even those who had lost the world's undiscriminating friendship, found a friend in Him. All this was undeniable; it was even a matter of public notoriety. It was impossible to pretend that the world rejected Him because He rejected the world — impossible to urge that the world was in ignorance of His prodigal charity and largeheartedness. He has been a friend to all. One only excuse was urged — He w^as no friend at least to Caesar.

But what they did not know — and it was upon this that Divine Charity fastened as the one loophole through which they might escape — was that it w^as their God who had done all these things; that it was the Creator who had been so tender to the creature; that it was the Lord of Life even now whom they held beneath their hands. They thought that they were taking His Life from Him; they did not understand that He was laying it down of Himself. They thought that they were ending for ever a career of mercy which displeased them; they did not know that they weie co-operating in a supreme climax of mercy. They knew not what they did.

They knew, then, that they were outraging a human friend, but not that they were slaying a Divine Friend. They knew that they were betraying a fellow-creature, that they were sinning against every code of human decency and gratitude and justice; they knew, like Pilate, that they were killing a just man, that they were 9 taking upon their own heads the blood of an innocent person. But they did not know that they were crucifying the Lord of Glory, that they were attempting to silence the Eternal Word.

This, then, can at least be said in their favour — They know the horror, but not the full horror, of what they do. Therefore, Father, forgive them."

II. ''As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be." The world, as well as Jesus Christ, is the same yesterday, to-day and for ever. There is a Society in the world in which Jesus Christ dwells perpetually; and this Society, like Jesus Christ, is at once Divine and human. This Society, then, the CathoHc Church, is ceaselessly engaged in both Divine and human works; and, like Jesus Christ Himself (and like every activity for good), meets with amazing ingratitude. Once more in our own day — as in England three centuries ago, in Rome sixteen centuries ago — this Society is in the act of being crucified by those whose rehef and salvation it is her one desire to bring about. It is, in fact, a condition of things which must be perpetual so long as the world remains what it is; though this period or that may exhibit the fact more starthngly.

It is impossible to say that men do not know, at least in part, what it is that they do. They know that the whole of European civiHzation rests upon CathoKc foundations — that the Church fed the hungry, taught the ignorant, befriended the outcast, and made life tolerable to the sufferers, centuries before the State dreamed of doing so, before, indeed, there was anything that could be called a State, to do so. They know that she has been the mother of ideals, of the noblest art and the purest beauty. They use to-day, in every country of Europe, for secular or semi-sacred purposes, buildings which she raised for her own worship of her God. They know that the morals of men find their only ultimate sanction in her teaching — that where dogma goes down, crime goes up. And here, again, the only charge against her is that she is no friend to Caesar — no friend, that is, to any system that seeks to organize society apart from God.

But, thank God! Divine Charity can still plead for men that they do not know the full horror of what they do, that they still think that to cripple and torture the Church of God is to do God service. For they do not know that she is His Darling, and the Bride of His Son; that she is the Eternal City coming down from God out of heaven; that, further, in these very sufferings of hers, she is accomplishing and applying Divine Atonement for the sins of those who crucify her.

They know that they are outraging human justice, that they are dealing with a world-wide community in a manner in which they dare not deal with any nation; that they are severing the branch which supports themselves. But they do not know that in this instance human justice is a Divine Right; that in this instance a

Society is a Body which incorporates, not the lives of men, but the Incarnate Life of God; that they are slaying, not a Prophet or a Servant, but an Only-Begotten Son.

This prayer, then, is one which we can take upon our own lips.... We have abused the French Republic and the Portuguese revolutionists, and the Italian Freemasons, and the Spanish anarchists, and the Irish Orangemen long enough. In the very point of our agony we must learn to pray. Forgive them, for they know not what they do.

III. Lastly, it is for ourselves also that Jesus prays: since we too, in our own measure, have sinned in frantic ignorance.

For here are we Cathohcs to whom have been committed the treasures of truth and grace; and here about us is the world to whom we have not transmitted them. We confess to a Httle sloth and lethargy, a little avarice, a little lack of generosity. We "know w^hat we do," in part: we know we are not faithful to our highest inspirations, that we have not done all that we might, that we have shown a little self-will, a Httle maHce, a little pardonable temper. And we confess these things, and give an easy absolution. And yet we know not what we do. We do not know how urgent is the need of God, how tremendous are the issues He has committed to our care, how enormous is the value of every soul — of every act and word and thought that help to shape the destinies of such a soul. We do not know the tense expectation with which Heaven waits upon our whims: we do not know how here, in these minute opportunities of every day, He the germs of new worlds that may be born to God, or crushed in embryo by our carelessness. We finger the jewels He was given us, and forget that each is worth a King's ransom; we play, like children in the midst of a garden, tramphng down the flowers which God can replace but can never restore....

For it is a Divine cause that we Catholics are crucifying every day; and a Divine Honour that we are insulting. If we could but see Him, here lies Jesus in our midst, with the marks of His agony upon Him, waiting for ''one to comfort" Him, but He ''found none." ^ He Hes here, and we gossip and stare, and go our ways where the tragedy is done, when He hangs between heaven and earth, descended from the one and rejected by the other — our God whom we thought our slave, who desires to be our Friend.

Father, then, by this prayer of Thy crucified Son, forgive us also; for we know not what we do.

But, above all, is this ignorance of ours the more startling in that very aspect of the spiritual Hfe with which we are concerned. We know how it is a constant experience of those who are Christians to meet with Jesus suddenly coming to them as a Friend. There is

• Ps. kviii: 21.

scarcely an instructed Christian, at least, anywhere, who, usually in his youth, though occasionally in more mature life, does not suddenly awaken to the fact that Christ desires more than mere obedience, mere faith, or mere adoration — that He desires such a Friendship with Himself that its inception is no less than a moral conversion. It is a wonderful and a beautiful sight to observe a soul in this manner becoming conscious — as a maiden becomes conscious that she is loved — of the heart-shaking fact that her God is her Lover. He comes, as to His own — and His own receives Him.

And yet, again and again, as in human love, so in Divine love, the romance wears off; and the soul which a few years ago centred all upon Jesus Christ, a soul which reformed her Hfe and arranged its details with the single object of growing more and more conformed to her Friend, which embraced devotion as her principal business, which concentrated her capacities and instincts for beauty, her interests, her emotions, her understanding, solely upon Him; which took a new start in life and a new centre from which to act; which sloughed off her sins almost without an effort in the sunlight of His Presence — such a soul as this, when a Httle while has passed, when the searching processes of the Purgative Way begin to sift her through, or when imagination becomes weary, or maturity dulls the keen emotions of adolescence, or when the dreary facts of the world begin to reiterate their claim to be the sole proper object

CHRIST IN HIS HISTORICAL LIFE II g of consideration — little by little such a soul as this, instead of tightening her hold upon her Friend, instead of cHnging, even in a faith that amounts almost to a virtue of desperation, to that which has, as a matter of fact, been the most real and vital experience of her life, instead of seeking to transfer the image of Jesus from the romantic mood which has, it may be, passed, to the mature state which is now hers, instead of striving to cling to Him with her weakness, in place of the natural strength which has gone — instead, relinquishes the tremendous reality among the fairy-stories of her youth, and counts Him and His Friendship as among those illusions which, though natural to early years, must pass away as experience increases. She is still content, perhaps, to treat Him as her God, as the ideal of the human race, as the Saviour of men; but no longer as the Lover who desires her among ten thousand, as the Prince who has awakened her with a kiss, to whom, henceforward she must wholly belong. And yet so seldom it is that she knows what it is that she does! She regrets it, maybe, a little; she sees that it would have been more perfect to have persevered; she even envies, a little, those who have persevered. She knows that she has been wanting; but she knows not how much. She knows not that she has forfeited the possibility of sanctity, that she has missed for ever a thousand opportunities that can never come back: she knows not that, if it were not for God's mercy, she would have forfeited for a certainty even the probability of her salvation.

n

An hour perhaps has passed away.... The screams and the blasphemies of the two tortured thieves have died to moans, and the moans to the silence of exhaustion; and in the silence the Grace of God and the habits of the past have been at work together. The one on this side is still absorbed in his own pain, regarding it, contrasting it, turning it this way and that, seeking to adjust it: and the other is aware that there is something in the universe besides his own pain, that his pain is not the beginning and the end of all things. From time to time he has caught glimpses, as his head writhed this way or that, through blinding blood and tears, through the mist of dust trampled up by the surging crowds, of Another who hangs in the midst. His friend has seen Him too, but has seen His patience only as a reproach to His own torment.... ''If thou be Christ, save Thyself, and us." ^ Yet this one sees more than a failure and a tragedy: he has heard, maybe, that first Word groaned out as the nails went through; and upon this detail and that and the other, his own darkened mind — the mind of a savage child — has been painfully at work.

And Grace has been at work too, in its mysterious operation, upon that defiled and undeveloped mind, like sunlight in a filthy slum.... We know almost nothing, after all our theology, of that Divine process; we know a little of its conditions, a fraction of its effects; we have labelled a few by-laws of its working; but no more. This, however, we know — that the man to whom it came was not wholly self-centred; that there was still in him enough receptivity for Grace to enter.

I. So, little by little, the truth — (we dare not say the whole explicit truth) — began to filter in. That darkened mind began to catch glimpses, that came and went and returned, of the supreme Fact which the cultivated Pharisees overlooked... that the Criminal was not wholly a Criminal, that the Thorns were not wholly a mockery, that the title above the Cross was something besides a sneer.... Pain is a strange magician w^hen Grace stands behind, an initiator into secrets, a High Priest who handles and dispenses mysteries unkno^Mi to those who have not suffered....

At least we know that the thief spoke at last — a greater miracle than Balaam's ass! — that a murderer recognized the Lord of Life, that a liar spoke the truth, that an outlaw submitted to the King. "Lord, remember me when Thou shalt come into Thy kingdom."

He asks, therefore, for the least thing for which he could ask — that a King who will some day enter into a kingdom will not wholly forget that there is such a creature as Dismas, who once suft'ered by His side. He no longer submits a doubt — "// thou be the Christ'^ — but he calls Him "Lord" outright. He no longer asks for relief — ^'save Thyself and us"; but for some future remembrance. One day, whenever that may be, remember....

And, upon the word, the miracle happens which always happens when a soul begins with shame to take the lower place. As soon as we have learnt to be servants we receive the place and name of Friend. " Friend, go up higher." ^... "I will not now call you servants... but I have called you friends." ^ For He is the One, cui servlre regnare est; whose service is perfect freedom.... "This day thou shalt be with Me in Paradise." ^ n. Here, then, is one of the most profound laws of the spiritual Kfe, and one of the most difficult to learn, because, like all the fundamental laws of grace, as well as of nature, it presents itself as a paradox. ''If you wish to be high, you must aim to be low."... "He that humble th himself shall be exalted." ^

(i) Now, as long as Self reigns within the soul, our whole instinct is, obviously, in some manner towards self-assertion, even though that object may be disguised in terms of the Love of God. Certainly a soul can win heaven by continuing to desire it effectively; but it is equally certain that a soul cannot reach the highest

• Luke xiv: lo. ' Luke xxiii: 43.

2 John XV: 15. *Luke xiv: 11.

place in heaven, still less the position of an intimate friend of Christ on earth, from such a motive as this. That is, so long as Self reigns, until Self has been denied and crucified, the soul cannot be, in the highest sense, Christ's disciple. We usually set out on our spiritual Hfe, aiming to be proficient, to make progress, to accomplish something for God, to render ourselves, in a way, indispensable to the Divine Cause. We carry, that is to say, into spiritual things the same ambitions and emulations as serve to make a man eminent in worldly affairs. We attempt, in a sense, to force our friendship on Christ, and to insist on that relationship to Him on which we have set our heart. We seek to bend the Divine Will to ours, to accomplish our union with God by attempting to change Him rather than ourselves.

And we fail, of course, lamentably and ignominiously, every time. For in spiritual matters there must be a reversal of the usual methods, if there is to be success. Certainly "blessed are they that hunger"; blessed are they that are "ambitious"; but the ambition must be pursued not by self-assertion but by self-extinction; for "blessed are the meek"; "blessed are the poor in spirit"; "blessed are they that mourn." ^

So, again and again, through a lack of the Christian spirit, even though we aim at the Christian life, we become disheartened and discouraged. We make no

» Matt. V: 3 ff.

progress, and, even if we do not altogether give up the quest, we at least begin to falter in it.

(ii) But, on a sudden, the soul makes a blinding discovery; for the first time, perhaps, she sees Humility with her face unveiled, and in her eyes perceives the true image of herself. Then, in swift succession, follow discovery after discovery in addition. She understands, for example, that this self on which she has set her heart is simply not worth having; she perceives that there is not one of her good actions in the past that has been wholly good, for each that has not been done out of a merely natural generosity, has been done largely out of this very love of self; she learns that her ''progress," for the most part, has been in the wrong direction altogether, that she has been accumulating merits that have scarcely a touch of meritoriousness, that she has been serving self throughout in those very actions which she had told herself were pleasing to God; in short, that her development has lain only in an increase of selfcentredness, and that the self-control that she has learned by her efforts has been a ''vicious victory" (as St. Augustine calls it) after all; since she has been striving all along to conquer God, instead of yielding to Him.

Then, indeed, the cry breaks from her spontaneously, "Lord, remember me when Thou shalt come into Thy Kingdom.... Lord, remember me... forget not altogether that such as I exist, in that far-off day which

I had thought in my pride was already past, that day when Thou shalt take Thy power and reign even in this heart that so long has been a rebel to Thee. Remember me, when the supreme achievement of love has been wrought, and Human Nature has been made conformable to the Divine.... Dear Jesus, in that day be to me not a Judge, but a Saviour!"

And then, by one more bewildering paradox, all is done; and the soul in that instant has what she desires. She has prayed that she may learn to serve, and with the very utterance of that prayer finds that she has been taught to reign. For she has learned the lesson of Him who was made in the form of a servant that He might rule kings — of Him who was meek and humble of heart — and she has found rest to her soul. For His arms are that instant about her, His kiss is on her lips, and His Words in her ear — ''To-day thou shalt be with me in Paradise!" ''O Soul that I have made and loved, who hast learnt at last to be my servant, come up higher, from my Feet to my Heart, 0 my friend! Now that thou hast at last put thyself at my mercy, behold! in that instant I put myself at thine. Take my hand and walk with me, now that thou art willing to follow me; for see — we walk together already in Paradise."...

Oh! this Friendship of Jesus for the Penitent! Just now there were three of Christ's intimates round His Cross — the immaculate Mary and the stainless disciple whom Jesus loved, upon the one side, with the purified weeping Magdalene upon the other. Now the quaternion of His lovers is complete, for the brokenhearted Thief has joined them — he who desired to serve, and therefore merited to reign.... And he, too, already hangs in Paradise.

m

Two of the personages standing beside the Cross are, for all Christians, for all time, the supreme types of Divine and human love. There is Mary, loved into immaculate being by the Eternal Father, the Mother Herself of Immaculate Love, and John the chosen disciple, allowed to rest his head, even before he had attained heaven, upon the breast of that same Immaculate Love. Surely these two, Mary and John, are already as wholly one as Love can make them. Those who love God so perfectly cannot love one another less perfectly.... Yet Jesus, in His seven words upon the Cross, devotes one to make them closer still.

I. Our Lord desires not merely to form Friendships between Himself and every human soul, but to unite friends in divine charity to one another. He makes in fact the bond of charity between men the final test of charity towards Himself. ''He that loveth not his brother, whom he seeth, how can he love God, whom he seeth not?" ^ "As long as you did it not to one of these least, neither did you do it to me." ^ The second

• I John iv: 20. ^ Matt, xxv: 45.

commandment is like *'unto the first": "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." ^^ If one half of the energies of His life on earth has been to draw men to Himself, the other half has been to draw men to one another. "By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, if you have love one for another." ^ He pronounces blessings, then, not merely on those who "hunger and thirst after Justice," after the Divine Fount of Justice, but upon the peacemakers and the meek; for those who forgive not one another their trespasses (those who do not make the Divine bond between them stronger than the himian divisions that would separate them) cannot have their own trespasses forgiven — cannot, that is, rely upon a Divine bond which they themselves have repudiated.

II. Now the union of men with one another is, in one sense, the object of every human society. There has been verified gradually even in the most worldly spheres that fact which has always been preached by Christianity, that union is strength, that co-operation is better than competition, that to "lose self" in a Society of some kind is the only means of saving self; that individuality can be retained only by the sacrifice of individualism. But in practically all human societies that have ever existed, the bond of union is thought to be one of prosperity. "If we can rejoice together, win together, triumph together, we shall be able to love one another."

• Mark xii: 31. *Lev. xix: 18. 'John xiii: 35.

Now Jesus Christ does something that has never been done before. He uses suffering as the supreme bond of love. "Love one another," He cries from the Cross, *' because you are strong enough to suffer together." "Mother," cries the dying Friend of us all, "behold thy son. Son, behold thy Mother!"

This word, then, is no less significant of an immense spiritual principle than are the rest. Mary and John have loved one another perfectly — as perfectly, that is to say, as a common joy has made possible. Together they have watched His triumph: Mary has seen Him, the Child of Joy, upon her breast: John upon His breast has seen Him rejoice in spirit. But, from to-day onwards, their common love rises to yet greater heights: they love one another now, not merely in the Sacred Heart, but in the pierced and broken Sacred Heart. Hitherto they have been perfect friends; henceforth they are Blood-relations — relations in a blood more intimate to them than their own — a Blood shed for the remission of sins. It is not. Friend, behold thy friend"; but, "Mother, behold thy son. Son, behold thy Mother!"

III. (i) First, then, this is the bond which unites Mary to ourselves — not that she sang the Magnificat, but that the sword pierced her own heart also. Sorrow, wrongly received, is a mightier force than all ordinary human affections: sorrow, borne with resentment and bitterness, isolates the soul not only from God but from her own fellows. The wounded stag creeps away to die in loneliness. But, on the other hand, if sorrow is welcomed and taken in, if it is made, by the very effort which welcomes it, a bond of union with others that suffer, a link is forged which all the powers of hell cannot break. If Mary had been given us as our Mother in Bethlehem, if she had wrapped herself in her unique joy, if she had been to us but a figure of incarnate bhss; then when the horror of darkness fell upon us, we too should have crept away from even Her, to suffer in loneliness. A rehgion that presented to us Mary with her living child in her arms, and had no Mary with her dead Son across her knees, could not have been the rehgion to which we should turn in utter confidence when all else had failed. More — she could not have been our Mother in any but an adopted sense, if her bearing of us had been without pain. But, as it is, she who brought forth her unf alien First-born painlessly, brought forth the rest of her fallen Human Family in agony and darkness. Indeed she is the Mother of the redeemed, because she was the Mother of Redemption: she stood by the Cross of Jesus, as she had knelt by His cradle; and she is our Mother, then, by that very blood by which both she and we are alike redeemed. The ''Mother of Sorrows" must always be nearer to the human race than even the "Cause of our Joy."

(ii) It is only too easy, so soon as we begin to make any progress in spiritual religion, to forget those simple 10 elementary duties in which that religion began. Or, to put it another way, it is only too easy, when we have begun to experience an intimate and personal relationship with Jesus Christ, to forget, or at least to minimize, the relations that bind us to one another. Our Lord, therefore, in this Word directs our attention once more to the elementary- fact that "he that loveth not his brother whom he seeth, cannot love God whom he seeth not," however fervid or ecstatic his emotions may seem. We have then, continually, to test the reality of our devotion to Him by our practical devotion to one another.

If ever, then, there is a time when it is proper for us to turn to one another, and to verif}- our charit}^ it is when we stand beneath the Cross; since it is the supreme glor}^ of the Cross that it claims to make sufiering the deepest bond of human relations. Mahomet and Buddha lived to make men one: Buddha even, we are told, returned to earthly life to accomplish this. But it is Jesus Christ alone who died to imite them. Every earthly kingdom is troubled by sedition and faction so soon as it begins to totter: the Kingdom of God alone draws its bonds more closely as it approaches more nearly the extinction of Calvar>'.

This is the moment, then, when oui souls are most exalted in watching our Sa'iour die, to turn from that sight to the most ordinary and simple relationships of ever^'day life, and to ask ourselves whether we have that final proof of our disciplebhip of Jesus — that we love one another. It is an appalling fact that again and again those who claim to be enjoying the most intimate friendship with God are distinguished by selfishness and a lack of charity towards their neighbours — that it is those, again and again, above all others who live what are called "misunderstood" lives, who actually advance their "Rule of Life" or the calls of their devotion as arguments against their hax-ing time or energy to be kind to their servants or acquaintances. '* She is at her prayers, therefore she must not be disturbed. He is getting ready for the sacraments; therefore it is natural that he should be a little pee'ish and preoccupied."...

Go home, then, and make up that foolish quarrel once and for all: go home and apologize simply and sincerely for your share in that trouble in which perhaps the other was even more to blame than yourself. It is intolerable that the friends of the Crucified — that those even who aspire to be friends of the Crucified — should think it conceivable to be at peace with God, who are not at peace with wife or husband or parents.

"Behold your Mother... your son I" That soul with whom you are at variance has a bond with you far greater than that of a common creation. The fact that the Eternal Word died for you both upon the Cross is an infinitely stronger link of union than the fact that the Eternal Word -ssilled vou both into bein?. For while the Fall broke the harmony of creation, the Redemption restored it; and this restoration is a far greater marvel than even Creation itself.

No man can be a Friend of Jesus Christ who is not a friend to his neighbour.

IV

The darkness of Calvary, spiritual as well as physical, draws on to its deepest. Christ has prayed for those who have outraged and repudiated His Friendship: He who was always the Friend of Sinners has added one more to the company: He who was always the Friend of Saints has united two of them yet more closely than ever by the wedding of Pain. Now He draws inwards from the world for which He has done so much: He directs this consciousness into His own Sacred Humanity; and in a Word at which heaven and earth tremble together, reveals to us that that Sacred Humanity, as a part of that process by which He chose to 'Haste death for all" ^ and to learn '' obedience by the things which He suffered," ^ has to experience the sorrow of dereliction. He who came to offer that Sacred Humanity as the bond of Friendship between God and man, wills that His own Friendship with God should be obscured. He becomes indeed the Friend of fallen man, for He chooses to identify Himself with the horror of that Fall. The Beatific Vision which was lost to man iHeb. ii:9. *Heb. v:8.

through that fall, and which Jesus Christ can never lose, is now obscured to the eyes of Him who comes to restore it through Redemption.

I. Now, the true happiness of man consists in his gradual approach to the Beatific Vision. Christ offers us His Friendship on earth — that Friendship in which all human happiness consists — as a pledge and as a means of obtaining that final union with Him in heaven which we call by that name. Therefore the joy of Christ Himself on earth — that joy which again and again burst out into words during His earthly life, or into deeds of power and mercy, or into the silent radiance of the Transfiguration — that joy arose from the Beatific Vision on which He continually lived. He *' endured as seeing Him that is invisible." ^

It is now, on Calvary, that the supreme outrage takes place; that that which has been His support throughout His thirty years of Hfe, the strength of that ''meat" of which His disciples knew nothing, ^ has become, while not withdra^^^l, yet darkened to His eyes, together with every other consolation, human or Divine, that might, conceivably, have taken its place. The darkened sun above Him was a faint and shadowy type of His ovm darkened Soul. The sun is turned into blackness and the moon into blood and the stars fall from heaven, and the earth shakes, as, of His own free will and dehberate choice. He enters not merely into the shadow of death, but into the

^ Heb. xi: 27. 'John iv: 32.

Death of deaths itself. It is this Death of which He "tasted."... In this hour He puts from Him the one and only thing that makes life tolerable. His Body, torn and strained on the Cross, is but a very faint incarnation of the agony of His derelict Soul.... "My God, my God! Why hast Thou forsaken me?" ^

II. This Word is the one that, above all others, is most difficult of appHcation to ourselves. For the state in which it was uttered is simply inconceivable to us who find our consolation in so much that is not God, and to whom sin means so little. If physical comforts are wanting to us, we find refuge in mental comfort; if mental comforts are wanting, we lean upon our friends. Or, more usually, when the higher pleasures are withdrawn, we find relief, with scarcely an effort, in lower. When religion fails us, we console ourselves with the arts; when love or ambition disappoint us, we plunge into physical pleasures; when the body refuses to respond, we take refuge in our indomitable pride; and when that in its turn crumbles to nothing, we look to suicide and hell as a more tolerable environment. There seems no depth to which we will not go, in our passionate determination to make ourselves tolerable to ourselves.

This Word, then, is meaningless to most of us; for to Jesus Christ, when the Beatific Vision was overlaid with sorrow, there was nothing in Heaven or upon earth....

• Matt, xxvii: 46.

**I looked for one that would grieve together with me, but there was none: for one that would comfort me, and I found none."^.. The tragedy goes on, up there in the darkness: we hear the groan; we catch ghmpses of the tortured, colourless Face behind which the Soul itself hangs crucified;... we grope, we conjecture, we attempt to form lower images of the august reahty; but that is all.

Two great lessons, however, translated into terms that we can, perhaps, partly understand, come down to us:

(i) Occasionally even we ourselves rise to the point in the spiritual life where our Friendship with Christ is our chief joy, among all the other and lesser consolations that God gives. The fact that we know Him and can speak with Him is reckoned by us as sufficiently sweet as to make its apparent withdrawal the most acute of all our sorrows. (I need hardly say that this requires no particular proficiency in spiritual things. It is, in fact, impossible to be sincere and persevering in our rehgion, without sooner or later experiencing it.) Well, such a point is reached by us, let us say; and then, on a sudden, without our being conscious of anything more than our usual faithlessness and lethargy, this spiritual pleasure in rehgion is swiftly and completely withdrawn. And then what is our usual response?

As was remarked just now, a usual plan is instantly

• Ps. Ixviii: 21.

to find consolation elsewhere. We *' distract" ourselves, as we say; we turn our attention to other things. But a yet commoner plan is to lose heart altogether, to give up the practices which cause us pain, and meanwhile to complain bitterly of the way in which our Friend is treating us. Certainly a cry of help is not only justifiable, but actually meritorious; for our Lord Himself so cried upon the Cross. The fault lies not in so crying, but in resenting while we cry. It seems to us, in our complacency, as if we had deserved better of our Lord; as if there was a kind of right on our part to insist always upon the sense of our Friend's presence. Yet how, without such withdrawals, is progress possible? How is our hold upon our Friend to be tightened unless now and again it seems as if He were slipping from our grasp? How is real faith to throw out its roots and clench its fibres into the Rock, unless the desolating wind of trouble at times threatens to uproot us altogether? For the keener the tribulation and the more bitter the dregs, the more honourable is the draught. To hold our lips to that Cup which our Saviour drained, even though its bitterness is diluted by His mercy — the honour of this should surely be enough to make us hold our peace, for very shame.

(ii) A second lesson is, that the state in which God is the All of a soul, is a state to which we are bound at any rate to aspire. It is not enough that the Friendship of Christ should be merely the first of our various interests. Christ is not merely "the First"; He is Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. He is not the relatively most important; He is the Absolute and the All. Religion is not one of the departments which make up our life — (that is Religiosity) — but Religion is that which enters into every department, the fabric on which every device, whether of art or literature, or domestic interests, or recreation, or business, or human love, must be embroidered. Unless it is this, it is not Religion as it is intended to be.

To make it so, however, is the supreme difficulty of spiritual Hfe — to make it, that is, not only an integral element in the whole of life, but the dominant element in every department — in such a sense that its claims are imperative always, everywhere; again, not in the sense that the soul is uninterested in everything except the actual forms of worship or theology or asceticism or morals — this again may be called religiosity, or at least a sort of professionalism — but in such a way that the Will or the Power or the Beauty of God is subconsciously perceived in everything, and that "nothing is secular, except sin."

Now this, let us remind ourselves, is actually intended to be the life of every human soul; and, in proportion as we approximate to it, we are more or less fulfilling our destiny. For it is only to a soul that has reached this state that God can be All. He becomes "All" because nothing is any longer alien to Him. "Whether you eat or drink or whatsoever else you do, do all to the glory of God." ^ The whole of life becomes illuminated with His Presence; everything is seen to subsist in Him: Nothing has any value except so far as it is in relations with Him....

This, then, is the state for which a Christian soul is bound to strive and aspire. This and this only is the entirety of the Friendship of Christ; to a soul in this condition, and to her alone, can Jesus truly be said to be All. And this, further, is the only state in which real "DereHction" is possible. To lose Jesus if He occupies nine-tenths of our life surely brings extraordinary pain; but there yet will remain one-tenth in which the loss is not felt — one fractional interest to which the soul may turn for consolation. But when He occupies the whole of Kfe, when there is not one moment of the day, one movement of the senses, one perception or act of the mind in which He is not the background — subconsciously perceived and apprehended at the least — then, indeed, when He withdraws Himself, the sun is darkened and the moon cannot give her light; then indeed the savour goes out of life, and the colour fades from the sky, and form vanishes from beauty, and harmony from sound. It is such a soul as this, and this only, who can dare without presumption to take on her lips the words of Christ Himself, and to cry, "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me? For in losing Thee, I lose all.'*

The agony of Christ's Soul is passing, and the agony of the Body reasserts itself. He has hung since morning in the blaze of sunlight, sheltered only for a while by the darkness which hid the torment of His Soul; and as the minutes have gone by, little by little, like a tide of fire, has risen that thirst of Crucifixion which, some tell us, is the extremest pain of the sharpest form of death.

I. (i) Up to the present the deepest point of Christ's Humiliation has been His cry to His Father — that call for help by the Sacred Humanity which by His own Will w^as left derehct — His confession to the world that His Soul was in darkness. Now, however, He descends a still deeper step of humiliation, and calls for help, to man.

Christ asks man to help Him!

All through His fife He had offered help: He had fed hungry souls and hungry bodies. He had opened blindeyes and deaf ears; and lifted up the hands that hung do^Ti, and strengthened the feeble knees. He had stood in the Temple and called to all that thirsted to come and drink. Now, in return. He asks for drink, and accepts it. So David, too, in the stress of battle had cried, *'0h that some man would give me a drink of the water out of the cistern that is in Bethlehem!" ^

^ II Kings xxiii: 15.

For both David and David's Son were strong enough to condescend to weakness.

(ii) In the age-long Calvary of the world's history, Jesus cries on man to help Him; and the Giver of all humiliates Himself to ask.

Truly He makes every other appeal first. To the selfish undeveloped soul He speaks in the Voice of Sinai — ''Thou shalt not." To a soul that has made a little progress He offers encouragement and promises. ''Blessed is such and such a man, for he shall receive a reward." But here and there are souls that are deaf to Hell and Heaven alike, to whom the future means little or nothing — souls that are too reckless to fear Hell, too loveless to desire Heaven. And to those He utters His final heart-piercing appeal. "If you will not accept help from me, give at least help to me. If you will not drink from my hands, give me at least drink from yours. / thirst^

It is an amazing thought that men should have reduced Him to this; and it is a suggestive thought that men who will not respond for their own sakes, will, sometimes, respond for His.

"See," cries Jesus Christ, "you have given up the search; you have turned away from the door and will not knock. You will not take the trouble to ask. So it is I who have to do these things. Behold, it is I who go seeking the lost; it is I who stand at the door and knock. It is I who ask — who am become a beggar...,

Have mercy upon me, 0 my friends, for the Lord hath afflicted me! I no longer offer water; but I ask it; for without it I die."

II. It is good for us then, sometimes, to look at the spiritual life from another standpoint altogether. There come moments and even periods in our lives when religion becomes an intolerable burden; when the search is so long and fruitless that we sicken of it; when no door opens, however vehemently we knock; when we ask, and there is no Voice that answers. At times like this we lose heart altogether. It seems to us even that our own desires are not w^orth satisfying; that religion, like every instinct of our nature, reaches an end beyond which there is no going; that desire has, in fact, failed, and that we are not even ambitious of attaining heaven. The truth is that we are limited beings; and that the ''divine discontent," the desire for the infinite, the endless passion for God, is as much a grace from God as the power to reach to Him and win Him. It is not only that God is our reward, and our Lord; but He must actually be our Way by which we come to Him: we cannot even long for Him without His help.

It is when we are wearied out then by desiring, when desire itself has failed, that Jesus speaks to us in this Fifth Word from the Cross.

We have spoken of the Divine Friendship throughout as if it were a mutual relationship, as if we on one side, and Christ on the other, were united in a common bond. But, as a matter of fact, it is all on one side. We cannot even desire Christ without, except by the help of Christ within. The Christ within must cry "I thirst," ^ before the Christ without can give us the Living Water.

This appeal, then, of Jesus must be our last and final motive, when all other impulses have failed. He is so beaten and rejected that He is come even to this. He must ask for mercy upon Himself, before He can have mercy on us. If we do not find our Heaven in Him, at least let Him find His Heaven in us. If we can no longer say, ^'My soul is athirst for the Living God," at least let us listen when the Living God cries, "My Soul is athirst for you." If we will not let Him minister to us, for very shame let us be content to minister to Him.

HI. This then is, agam, the cry that goes up ceaselessly from Christ in His Church. We live in days that are full of terror and menace. Once the Church ruled in Europe; she was acclaimed as ''coming in the Name of the Lord." She went about doing good, offering the Water of Life, and giving it — the Bread of Life, and distributing it. Now before our eyes she is going on her Way of Sorrows; she is climbing the Hill; she is hanging on the Cross.... The world has won, once more; — has won exactly so far as it won on Calvary. Men no longer allow her to minister to them; more, they will not even allow her to minister to herself. They have nailed her to emblems of secular government; taken away her glory; and taunted her, that she cannot be the Saviour of others, since she cannot even save herself.

What hope then is left? How can hands bless that are nailed fast? How can fettered feet go to seek those that are lost? How can hps, bruised and parched with desolation, preach the tidings of divine Hberty?

Yet she can still cry out in pain/d?r her own sake. She can go on uttering cry after cry — in France, for the right to quench the thirst that will be her death if it is not satisfied; in Italy and Portugal, for the bare right to exist in the midst of a society which she brought forth and nursed to maturity....

And, for our own comfort, let us remember that it is Jesus Himself who so cries; and that when, once for all, He first uttered His petition, by the side of Jacob's well, and on the Cross of Calvary — even the Samaritan woman, the alien from God's commonwealth, even the soldiers of an Empire that was at war with God's kingdom, had mercy upon Him, and gave Him to drink.

VI

The evening light begins to glimmer again upon Calvary, the three crosses, and the little group that waits for the end; and as it falls upon the Face of Christ, the look of agony is gone. He has cried alike to God and man to have pity, upon tortured Soul and parched Body, and each has answered. Now in that Face, bleached by the darkness of the soul, and the Eyes, sunken with sorrow, a new look begins, that rises, as those who stand by watch Him, until the whole Face is radiant once again. The breaths come fuller and fuller, the Body nailed by its extremities begins to Hft itself higher and higher till strength is regained sufl&cient for Him not to speak only, but to utter a cry so loud and triumphant as to startle and amaze the officer who has watched many men die, but never as This Man dies. The cry peals out, Hke the shout of a king in the moment of victory; and, in an instant, failure and labour and bitterness are behind Him for ever. Consummatum est....''It is finished!"!

I. Christ came into the world to accomplish the greatest work of all — greater than that sheer act of the Divine Will by which all things came into being out of nothing, greater than that steady output of Divine Energy by which all things are held in being, the stars in their courses, atoms in cohesion, and the worlds of flesh and spirit in their mutual relations. For it is a greater act to restore than to create, to bring the disobedient will back to obedience than to will it into existence, to reconcile enemies than to create worshippers, to redeem than to make. That God should make man is an act of power; but to redeem him is an act of Love....

The whole of history up to Calvary is, looked at from one side, one ceaseless effort of preparation for Redemption. Not one lamb has shed his blood in vain, not one prophet has spoken, not one king has reigned, except as a Hnk in that chain of which the Lamb of God, the Servant of the Lord, and the ELing of Kings, is the end and the cHmax that justifies the whole. Abraham saw His day, and was glad; David sang of the day of His birth and of His wounded hands and feet: Isaias spoke of His grave with the wicked and his resting-place in the rich man's garden. God has brought all up to this point that crowns and fulfils them all. And now, Consummatiitn est.

Again, as we look back to Calvary through two thousand years, we see that all that God has done since, takes its rise from there; that every impulse of grace, every sacrifice and prayer offered, every movement of the Spirit of God, every response from the spirits of men, every sin forgiven, every new life begun, every death of a righteous man, every birth of a new soul into innocence — all these gain their full strength and indeed their very existence from the torrent of love that burst up into being at the foot of Christ's Cross.

Therefore at this moment, as the last drop of the Precious Blood is passing from His broken Heart, with a power beyond that of a dying man, Jesus cries in triumph, "It is finished."

Friendship between God and man is now made possible again, in the Body of Christ. That old irreconcilable enmity between the sin of the creature and the II

Justice of the Creator, between the defilement of the spirit and the Holiness of the Father of Spirits, is done away. We can be "accepted in the Beloved."

First, then: salvation is open to the sinner. No sin henceforth is unforgivable. Charity, it has been said, is the pardoning of the unpardonable and the loving of the unlovable: and in this Precious Blood, as the prophet sang, "there shall be a fountain open for the washing of the sinner and of the unclean";i and as the apostle wrote, it is this Blood which "cleanseth us from all sin." 2 The Friendship of God, therefore, is flung wide open to every soul that desires it.

But, more than this. Not only is mere friendship made possible by the death of Christ, but degrees of friendship to which even the angels cannot aspire. It is not only that a soul, through the Precious Blood, can pass from death to life, but that she can pass up through stages and heights and strata of that life, up to the perfection of sanctity itself. David could thirst for ' God; David could look on and up to that "awakening in the likeness of God" which is the soul's supreme satisfaction; but not until Christ had died could a soul reach that final object of the Divine desire and of her own which now lies open to every soul that is content to make the sacrifices necessary to gaining it. Not only, in the power of the Precious Blood, and the grace of the sacraments liberated by Its shedding, can every

• Zach. sdii; i. * I John i: 7.

action, word and thought be brought into obedience to Christ, but the soul can, by that same grace, reach a point of union with Him so vital and so complete that she can truly cry **with Christ I am nailed to the Cross, And I live, now not I; but Christ liveth in me." ^

II. Christ's work, then, is ''finished" on the Cross — finished, that is, not as closed and concluded, but, as it were, liberated from the agonizing process which has brought it into being — finished, as bread is finished from the mills and the fire, that it may be eaten; as wine is finished after the stress and trampling of the winepress — finished, as a man's body is finished in the womb of his mother and brought forth with travail.

It is finished, that is, for a new and glorious Beginning, that the stream which has flowed from His Wounds may begin to flood the souls of men, and the Flesh that has been broken, feed them indeed. For now the Passion of Christ begins to be wrought out in His Mystical Body, and she to ''fill up those things that are wanting of the Sufferings of Christ." ^ Now the enormous Process that has crushed and mangled Him in His assumed Nature begins effectively to carry on that same work of Redemption in the Human Nature of His Church, which, mystically, is the Body in which He dwells always — One Sun sets in order that another sun, which is yet the same, may begin to run his course. "The evening and the morning are one day."

1 Gal. ii: 20. ' CoL i: 24.

And yet, we His friends — we, who in virtue of His Friendship are enabled to live, to die and to rise in union with Him — live for the most part as if He had never died. Compare the life of a cultivated fastidious pagan with the life of a cultivated fastidious Christian. Draw the two from corresponding classes and set them side by side. Is there so enormous a difference? There are a few differences in the religious emblems of the two. The one has an Apollo; the other a Crucifix. The one has the Egyptian goddess with her son in her arms; the other has the Immaculate Mother of Jesus with her Holy Child. Their talk is different, their dresses, their houses — all those external matters that are wholly indifferent to the soul's life. But are their virtues so different, their outlook on eternity, their sorrow beside open graves, their hopes beside new cradles?... Even before Christ died, children loved their parents and parents their children. Do Christians rise so much higher now — nearer to that yet more amazing degree of love by which a man "hates his father and mother" in order to be the disciple of His Lord? Even before Christ died, chastity was a virtue. Are we so far advanced now in that purity of heart without which no man can see God? Even a Roman Emperor once preached self-control, and practised it. Are our own houses any better models of the peace of brethren who dwell together in unity?

Did Christ finish His work, merely in order that society might decay no further?... God help us! As we look at what is called Christian Society to-day, it seems as if Christ had not even yet begun.

Yet here is this vast river of grace pouring from Calvary, the river that ought to be making glad the City of God. Here is this enormous reservoir of grace, bubbling up in every sacrament, soaking the ground beneath our feet, freshening the air we breathe. And we still in our hateful false humility talk as if Perfection were a dream, and Sanctity the privilege of those who see God in glory.

In Christ's Name, let us begin. For Christ has finished.

VII

Our Lord has just cried aloud that Sixth Word in which He proclaimed that there was finished at last that ''Father's business" of which He had first spoken in the Temple. Now He droops His Head again Httle by Httle upon His Breast, and in the words that he had learned at Mary's knee — words in which every Jewish child committed the care of his soul into God's care through the coming night — He commits His spirit into His Father's hands. For the evening is drawing on and the Sabbath is near in which once more, God, having seen all that He has done, pronounces it ''Very good" and rests from His labours.

I. The thought of this Peace of Death into which our Divine Friend is passing is one of the most moving considerations of the Passion. He has been about His work for thirty- three years; and not for one instant, since He first drew mortal breath in the frosty stable of Bethlehem, has He ever yet truly rested. Even while He slept His Heart waked.

For that labour of His has included among other things the laying of foundations for the reform of the whole world. The whole of civiHzation, if it is to survive, the iron progress of the Roman Empire, the developing instincts of barbarian nations — all must remodel itself on the basis that He has laid down, or cease to exist. More than this: He has been laying down the constitution of a greater Kingdom than ever the world has seen — that Supreme supranational Society from which Kings must draw their sanctions and repubHcs their right to command; for the successor of His Vicar is to be *' Father of Princes and Kings and Lord of the World." And meanwhile His countless acts of mercy must be done; not one yearning soul must be sent empty away; not one sick body left uneased; not one transitory need, unsatisfied. And He is Man who has done all this. True, it is God alone who could have done it. No reformer, no philosopher, no monarch has ever even dreamed of founding such a Kingdom as this. But it has been accomplished through Human Nature; it has been the lips of a mortal Man who has said all these things; mortal hands that have laid those foundations; a mortal brain that has had to deal with and translate into human language and act the dreams of a God that must come true. Truly God cannot become weary; but God made man can become weary a thousand times over.

How utterly then has He earned His Rest! And at last He is to find it. The Soul through which such strong agonies have passed, is to sink into that peaceful place of refreshment and light where the souls that have served God according to their graces are awaiting that First Advent of their Redeemer. The Body that has borne so great a burden and heat of the day, that has been wearied with labours, and bowed down by sorrows — and, at last, has been beaten, pierced and broken by the hands of those for whom such labours were borne — this Body of His is to be laid in the cool rock-tomb, with WTappings of soft linen, soaked in spices and myrrh, to await once more the inbreathing of the Divine Energy which again shall pass through every vein, sinew and muscle, transforming each utterly back again to the unmarred Divine Image, in which, once again, now no longer subject to any law of hmitation or weariness and waste, the Soul that can never sorrow again, shall eternally rejoice.

Our Friend sleeps at last.

II. The Peace of God that passes all understanding is by far His greatest gift, beyond health or wealth, — beyond, in a sense, all virtues themselves, since it is their crown and their final reward. It is this Peace in Christ that is the one thing needful, as He Himself tells us: it is that ^'good part," better than all activities and energies which "shall not be taken away."

It is this for which we look at death — the one hope that reassures and reconciles us to that violent cessation of activities which is to an energetic and vital soul the chief imaginative horror of death. It is even sometimes (so great is its attraction) — we might almost say that it must be — for every soul that is really taking part in the conflict of life, the chief attraction of death. For Hfe must become from time to time an all but intolerable strain — not only is there that weariness of body which arises from its incapacity to rise always to the demands of the soul; but there is that further weariness of soul arising from its effort to respond always as it ought, to the excitations and demands of grace. If it only were possible, we cry, to cease from striving, to rest wholly on God without even an effort of the will, to relax and to sink into Him who alone is our Rest. And yet we must not; for this is Quietism — that strangely seductive system which means relaxation and lethargy — that drowsy sleep of a soul that is created that it may act, of a will that must actively adhere, so long as it can merit or demerit at all. It is only in the "divine necessity" of Purgatory that such a state is possible; and then, only, because it is necessary.

Yet there is a Peace of God even while we live; and it is for lack of this Peace that so many souls fret and beat themselves to Death against the encaging bars of their own Hmitations.... And it must come from one thing and one thing only, namely, a perfect balance in the environment for which our souls were made — not as of a bird sleeping on the water, but of a bird poised in the air — a perfect response, that is to say, on the part of our loving and lovable nature to the one adorable Nature which alone can support and can understand us — in a word, that Peace can alone be found in that of which we have been treating throughout, in an intimate, intelligent, affectionate and voluntary Friendship with Christ, who made us for Himself, and designed His own Incarnation that the union might be complete.

Activities, then, are good and necessary in their proper place. God's work cannot be done without them. But it is absolutely vital that, if these activities are to accomplish their objects, the soul engaged in them must possess Interior Peace. We go to and fro; we succeed or we fail; and it does not greatly matter which, since we have no final standard in this world by which we may estimate the one or the other. But Interior Peace is necessary; since our true ''Kfe is hid with Christ in God" ^ — that Peace which. He Himself tells us, the world can neither give nor take away — a Peace, that is, which, unlike other satisfying emotions, is wholly independent of external things. It is this Peace into which Christ Himself entered, body and soul,

• Col. iii: 3.

when He committed His Spirit into His Father's hands — that Sabbath Peace which He first inaugurated, and which ^^remaineth... for the people of God." ^

Death is no longer frightful; and Life is no longer burdensome. For beneath the chilling stillness of death and the maddening rush of Hfe, Christ and the soul dwell together in that tiny chamber of the heart, hewed out in that which is harder than any rock. It is not this rock that is rent when the graves are opened, and terrors stalk to and fro, and all Jerusalem is in panic; but here at last, when we have learned to die to all save Christ, when He is our All, He also is our Peace.

Let us look up for the last time at that Sacred Body hanging on the Cross. The Blood is all run out, the Soul is departed, and our Friend is at rest. Then let us go, that we may be buried with Him. And may our own souls, and the souls of all the faithful, both living and departed, rest in Him!

• Heb. iv: 9.