Parochial and Plain Sermons

" Se was oppressed, and Se toas afflicted, yet He opened not Sis mouth; He is Irought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so He openeih not Sis mouth."

or. PETER makes it almost a description of a Ctiristian, that he loves Him whom he has not seen; speaking' of Christ, he says, " whom having not seen, ye love; in whom, though now ye see Him not, yet believing, ye rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory/' Again he speaks of "tasting that the Lord is gracious \'' Unless we have a true love of Christ, we are not His true disciples; and we cannot love Him unless we have heartfelt gratitude to Him; and we cannot duly feel gratitude, unless we feel keenly what He suffered for us. I say it seems to us impossible, under the circumstances of the ease, that any one can have attained to the love of Christ, who feels no distress, no miseiy, at the thought of His bitter pains, and no self-reproach at having through • his own sins had a share in causing them.

I know quite well, and wish you, my brethren, never to forget, that feeling is not enough; that it is not enough merely to feel and nothing more; that to feel grief for Christ's sufferings, and yet not to go on to obey Him, is not true love, but a mockery. True love both feels right, and acts right; but at the same time as warm feelings without religious conduct are a kind of hypocrisy, so, on the other hand, right conduct, when unattended with deep feelings, is at best a very imperfect sort of religion. And at this time of year' especially are we called upon to raise our hearts to Christ, and to have keen feelings and piercing thoughts of sorrow and shame, of compunction and of gratitude, of love and tender affection and horror and anguish, at the review of thoa awful sufferings whereby our salvation has been purchasi

Let us pray God to give us all graces; and while, the first place, we pray that He would make us holyf really holy, let us also pray Him to give us the beauty holiness, which consists in tender and eager affecti towards our Lord and Saviour; which is, in the case the Christian, what beauty of person is to the outwa: man, so that through God's mercy our souls may have^ not strength and health only, but a sort of bloom and comeliness; and that as we grow older in body, we may, year by year, grow more youthful in spirit. 1 Passion-tide.

You will ask, how are we to learn to feel pain and anguish at the thought of Christ^s sufferings? I answer, thinking of them, that is, by dwelling on the thought. f I This, through God''s mercy, is in the power of every one. [ No one who will but solemnly think over the history of those sufferings, as drawn out for us in the Gospels, but will gradually gain, through God^s grace, a sense of i them, will in a measure realize them, will in a measure ( be as if he savr them, will feel towards them as being I not merely a tale written in a book, but as a true I histoiy, as a series of events which took place. It is \ indeed a great mercy that this duty which I speak of, ■ though so high, is notwithstanding so level with the powers of all classes of persons, learned and unlearned, if they wish to perform it. Any one can think of Christ^s sufferings, if he will; and knows well what to think about. *' It is not in heaven that thou shouldst say. Who shall go up for us to heaven and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it? Neither is it beyond the sea that thou shouldst say. Who shall go over the sea for us?... but the word is very nigh unto thee;" very nigli, for it is in the four Gospels, which, at this day at least, are open to all men. All men may read or hear the Gospels, and in knowing them, they will know all that is necessary to be known in order to feel aright; they will know all that any one knows, all that has been told us, all that the greatest saints have ever had to make them full of love and sacred fear.

Now, then, let me make one or two reflections by way of stirring up your hearts and making you mourn over) Christ's sufferings, as you are called to do at this season.

I. First, as to these sufferings you will observe thai our Lord is called a lamb in the text; that is. He was as defenceless, and as innocent, as a lamb is. Since then Scripture compares Him to this inoffensive and unprotected animal, we may without presumption or irreverence take the image as a means of conveying to our minds those feelings which our Lord's sufferings should excite in us. I mean, consider how very horrible it is to; read the accounts which sometimes meet us of cruelties^ exercised on brute animals. Does it not sometimes make us shudder to hear tell of them, or to read them in some chance publication which we take up? At one time it is the wanton deed of barbarous and angry owners who ill-treat their cattle, or beasts of burdei and at another, it is the cold-blooded and calculating of men of science, who make experiments on bruf animals, perhaps merely from a sort of curiosity. I donot like to go into particulars, for many reasons; but one of those instances which we read of as happening inij this day, and which seems more shocking than the rest, is, when the poor dumb victim is fastened against a wall,, pierced, gashed, and so left to linger out its life. Now| do you not see that I have a reason for saying this, and( am not using these distressing words for nothing? ForJ what was this but tlie very cruelty inflicted upon our,

[Lord? He was gashed with the scourge, pierced through

^hands and feet, and so fastened to the Cross, and there

[left, and that as a spectacle. Now what is it moves our very hearts, and sickens us so much at cruelty shown to

.poor brutes? I suppose this first, that they have done

I no harm; next, that they have no power whatever of

\ resistance; it is the cowardice and tyranny of which they

\ are the victims which makes their sufferings so especially

I touching. For instance, if they were dangerous animals, take the case of wild beasts at large, able not only to defend themselves, but even to attack us; much as we

! might dislike to hear of their wounds and agony, yet our feelings would be of a very different kind; but there is something so very dreadful, so satanic in tormenting those who never have harmed us, and who cannot defend themselves, who are utterly in our power, who have weapons neither of offence nor defence, that none but very hardened persons can endure the thought of it.

Now this was just our Saviour^s case: He had laid aside

His glory. He had (as it were) disbanded His legions of

Angels, He came on earth without arms, except the arms of truth, meekness, and righteousness, and committed

Himself to the world in perfect innocence and sinless-

ness, and in utter helplessness, as the Lamb of God. In the words of St. Peter, ^^Who did no sin, neither was guile found in His mouth; who, when He was reviled, reviled not again; when He suffered. He threatened not; but committed Himself to Him that judgeth right-

eously\" Think then, my brethren, of your feelin<>s at| cruelty practised upon brute animals, and you will gainjj one sort of feeling which the history of Christ's Crouj and Passion ought to excite within you. And let m«l add, this is in all cases one good use to which you may turn any accounts you read of wanton and unfeeling acts shown towards the inferior animals; let them remind you, as a picture, of Christ's sufferings. He who is higher than the Angels, deigned to humble Himself even to the state of the brute creation, as the Psalm says, " I am a worm, and no man; a very scorn of men, and the outcast of the people^.'"'

2. Take another example, and you will see the same thing still more strikingly. How ovei-powered should we be, nay not at the sight only, but at the very hearing of cruelties shown to a little child, and why so? foi the same two reasons, because it was so innocent, and because it was so unable to defend itself. I do not like to go into the details of such cruelty, they would be S( heart-rending. What if wicked men took and crucifiec a young child? What if they deliberately seized ii poor little frame, and stretched out its arms, nailet them to a cross bar of wood, drove a stake through it' two feet, and fastened them to a beam, and so left it ti die? It is almost too shocking to say; perhaps, yoi will actually say it is too shocking, and ought not to be said. O, my brethren, you feel the horror of this, am » 1 Pet. ii. 22, 23. - Ps. xxii. 6.

i^et you can bear to read of Christ's sufferings without iorror; for what is that little child's agony to His? ind which deserved it more? which is the more innojent? which the holier? was He not gentler, sweeter, meeker, more tender, more loving, than any little child? W^hy are you shocked at the one, why are you not shocked at the other?

Or take another instance, not so shocking in its cir-

Dumstances, yet introducing us to another distinction, lin which Christ's passion exceeds that of any innocent

, sufferers, such as I have supposed. When Joseph was

; sent by his father to his brethren on a message of love,

[they, when they saw him, said, "Behold, this dreamer

comethj come now, therefore, and let us slay him\''

iThey did not kill him, however, but they put him in a

;pit in spite of the anguish of his soul, and sold him as a slave to the Ishmaelites, and he was taken down into

[a foreign country, where he had no friends. Now this

: was most cruel and most cowardly in the sons of Jacob;

and what is so especially shocking in it is, that Joseph iwas not only innocent and defenceless, their younger i brother whom they ought to have protected, but besides i that, he was so confiding and loving, that he need not have come to them, that he would not at all have been

: in their power, excejpt for his desire to do them service.

Now, whom does this history remind us of but of Him concerning whom the Master of the vineyard said, on sending Him to tlie husbandmen^ " They will reverence My Son ^V " But when the husbandmen saw the Son, they said among- themselves, This is the Heir, come, let us kill Him, and let us seize on His inheritance. And they caught Him, and cast Him out of the vineyard, and slew Him/' Here, then, is an additional circumstance of cruelty to afl'ect us in Christ's history, such as is suggested in Joseph's, but which no instance of a brute animal's or of a child's sufferings can have; oiK Lord was not only guiltless and defenceless, but He hai come among His persecutors in love.

3. And now, instead of taking the case of the young innocent, and confiding, let us take another instanol which will present to us our Lord's passion undeiif another aspect. Let us suppose that some aged an( venerable person whom we have known as long as w« could recollect any thing, and loved and reverenced suppose such a one, who had often done us kindnessei who had taught us, who had given us good advice who had encouraged us, smiled on us, comforted us ii trouble, whom we knew to be very good and religioua very holy, full of wisdom, full of heaven, with grej hairs and awful countenance, waiting for AlmightJ God's summons to leave this world for a better place; suppose, I say, such a one whom we have ourselvei known, and whose memory is dear to us, rudely seized by fierce men, stripped naked in public, insulted, driven > Matt. xxi. 37—39.

bout here and there, made a laughing-stock, struck, pit on, dressed up in other clothes in ridicule, then everely scourged on the back, then laden with some

Lcavy load till he could carry it no longer, pulled and

I iragged about, and at last exposed with all his wounds

' 0 the gaze of a rude multitude who came and jeered lim, what would be our feelings? Let us in our mind

\ ihink of this person or that, and consider how we should

)e overwhelmed and pierced through and through by

I But what is all this to the suffering of the holy Jesus,,which we bear to read of as a matter of course! Only 'think of Him, when in His wounded state, and without garment on. He had to creep up the ladder, as He could, which led Him up the cross high enough for His muriderers to nail Him to it; and consider who it was that [was in that misery. Or again, view Him dying, hour ■after hour bleeding to death; and how? in peace? no; I with His arms stretched out, and His face exposed to;view, and any one who pleased coming and staring at Him, mocking Him, and watching the gradual ebbing, of His strength, and the approach of death. These are, some of the appalling details which the Gospels contain, and surely they were not recorded for nothing; but that we might dwell on them.

Do you think that those who saw these things hadmuch heart for eating or drinking or enjoying themselves? On the contrary, we are told that even " the people who came together to that sight, smote their breasts and returned'." If these were the feeUngs oi' the people, what were St. John's feelings, or St. ^Mary MagdaleneX or St. Mary's, our Lord's blessed mother? Do we desire to be of this company? do we desire, according to His own promise, to be rather blessed tlian the womb that bare Him, and the paps that He sucked? do we desire to be as His brother, and sister, and mother*? Then, surely, ought we to have some portion of that mother's sorrow! When He was on the* cross and she stood by, then, according to Simeon'sl prophecy, " a sword pierced through her soul '." What is the use of our keeping the memory of His cross anUi passion, unless we lament and are in sorrow with her? I can understand people who do not keep Good Frid at all; they are indeed very ungrateful, but I kno what they mean; I understand them. But I do n understand at all, I do not at all see what men meai who do profess to keep it, yet do not sorrow, or at leaa try to sorrow. Such a spirit of grief and lamentati is expressly mentioned in Scripture as a charaeterisi of those who turn to Christ. If then we do not sorro have we turned to Him? "I will pour upon the hou; of David," says the merciful Saviour Himself, befo: He came on earth, speaking of what was to com^ " upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the spirit of graO and of supplications; and they shall look upon "^k » Luke xxiij. 48. ^ Matt. xii. 46, &c. » Luke ii. 35.

hom they have pierced, and they shall mourn for Him, « one moumeth for his only son, and shall be in bitterress for Him, as one that is in bitterness for his firsttorn.

One thing I will add: — if there be persons here present yho are conscious to themselves that they do not feel the l^ef which this season should cause them, who feel now iS they do at other times, let them consider with them- elves whether perhaps this defect does not arise from pheir ha\dng neglected to come to church, whether during vhis season or at other times, as often as they might.

Our feelings are not in our own power; God alone can rule our feelings; God alone can make us sorrow, when we would but cannot sorrow; but ^oill He, if we have not diligently sought Him according to our oppor-

^tunities in this house of grace? I speak of those who might come to prayers more frequently, and do not. I

•know well that many cannot come. I speak of those iwho can, if they will. Even if they come as often as jthey are able, I know well they will not be satisfied

;with their own feelings; they will be conscious even

• then that they ought to grieve more than they do; of

, course none of us feels the great event of this day as he ought, and therefore we all ought to be dissatisfied with ourselves. However, if this is not our own fault, we need not be out of heart, for God will mercifully lead us forward in His own time; but if it arises from our not coming" to prayers here as often as we might, then our coldness and deadness are our own fault, and I bepyou all to consider that that fault is not a slight one. It is said in the Book of Revelation, " Behold He Cometh with clouds; and every eye shall see Him, and they also which pierced Him: and all kindreds of the earth shall wail because of Him'." We, my brethren, every one of us, shall one day rise from our graves, and see Jesus Christ; we shall see Him who hung on thi cross, we shall see His wounds, we shall see the marksin His hands, and in His feet, and in His side. Do wc wish to be of those, then, who wail and lament, or oi| those who rejoice? If we would not lament at th( sight of Him then, we must lament at the thought o Him now. Let us prepare to meet our God; let us come into His Presence whenever we can; let us tr\ to fancy as if we saw the Cross and Him upon it; le us draw near to it; let us beg Him to look on us as H< did on the penitent thief, and let us say to Him, " Lon remember me when Thou comest in Thy kingdom ^."

Let this be added to the prayer, my brethren, with wh,ic] you are about to leave this church. After I have give) the blessing, you will say to yourselves a short prayei Well; fancy you see Jesus Christ on the cross, and sa; to Him with the penitent thief, " Lord, remember m when Thou comest in Thy kingdom;" that is, " Re member me. Lord, in mercy, remember not my siu^ » Eev. i. 7. = Luke xxiii. 42.

lut Thine own cross; remember Thine own sufferings, emember that Thou sufferedst for me^ a sinner; remember in the last day that I, during my lifetime, felt Thy ufferings, that I suffered on my cross by Thy side. (Remember me then, and make me remember Thee lliow/'