CHAP. VIII.

THE CRUCIFIXION CONTINUED.

1. It has been attempted in the last chapter to shew, that if Mary's conduct was not cruel and unnatural in holding out firm under the sight of God's sufferings, it was altogether and throughout supernatural. Any mother of ordinary tenderness of heart must otherwise have sunk under it. But she was not the only person whose conduct requires some theory of this sort to explain it. There was a youth there who had left his home to follow Jesus, who had been admitted to his friendship and love in a most distinguished manner, and had had that love so stamped upon himself, that he who wished to learn from holy writ what love is, would select his writings as containing the clearest inspired teaching upon the subject. Next to the blessed Virgin herself, Jesus seems to have loved him most: perhaps he is next to her in purity, and next to her in ability to rescue from contrary temptations: next also to her in ability to grasp and teach the profound doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. The great doctor of the Incarnation and the great doctor of grace have each left us a long commentary upon his Gospel. It seems as though Jesus had a sort of partiality for his very name, and he had written the name of John oftener in the book of life than that of any other Saint. We see in Scripture a sort of delicacy of feeling in St. John, which is not to be

found perhaps in the other Apostles: this may be instanced in his respectfulness to St. Peter. He waits for St. Peter to suggest it before he asks Jesus who is the traitor: he sacrifices his own desire to keep close to Jesus, in order to go out and bring in St. Peter, whose burning love he knew so well: he waits again for St. Peter to look into the tomb before himself when he had outrun him, as if reproaching himself for taking advantage of his own youth in so outrunning the prince of the Apostles. Possibly he was of somewhat gentler extraction than several of the Apostles for we find his father had hired men under him, and in the text more immediately before us, we find he had a home of his own in Jerusalem: moreover, he was known to the high priest, which seems to mark a higher grade of life than that of the other fishermen. The qualifications of refinement of feeling and of possessing a home may be looked upon as natural qualifications, fitting him in some measure to have the charge of our blessed Lady, when her Son was dead. Yet they are at the same time just the qualifications which would make him feel our Saviour's sufferings most acutely the utter loss of every thing he saw in God the Son, who had no where to lay his head on the Cross, would reproach him for possessing a home: the dire and blasphemous ill-usage of him he loved, would keenly cut that tender heart, which saw the breast of Jesus there, but could not lie upon it, as it did a little while before, when he was going to ordain him a priest. The natural qualifications of St. John then were such as to lead us to suppose he required some supernatural support to enable him to stand when St. Peter fell.

2. His supernatural qualifications lead us to the same conclusion. So great was his purity of heart, that no Christian has I believe ever accused him of sin. He himself says, 'If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves.' But who else can be found to say St. John had sin such as man could take cognizance of? This purity of heart is what enables to see God. Now in proportion as John saw God in Jesus, in that proportion the extreme humiliation of God the Son would be afflicting and bewildering to him. How could he come now to lay aside his respect for St. Peter, and think himself worthy to stay when St. Peter was gone? St. Peter had been prepared for this as much as himself; he had heard Christ foretell it: he had seen his glory on the mount with St. John: he had been as close to him as St. John when he suffered his Agony: if the revelation of glory on mount Thabor had been given to St. John to nerve his courage for the sight now before him, so had it been also given to St. Peter. It is neither in accordance with what have been here called his natural gifts, nor with his supernatural gifts, for him to stay when St. Peter had gone. It requires a distinct supernatural gift and inspiration to enable him to do so. Neither can we suppose that his love for his Master's Mother put St. Peter out of his mind. For this would be to suppose that it put Jesus out of his mind also.

3. The question is, how came he to be able to bear the sight of his beloved Master so calmly, as to linger on there when St. Peter was gone; how came he to gaze on God the Son in agony so patiently? If his unsuspecting innocence and purity was such, that he mingled with the women in the dark, mindless of what lewd heathen soldiers would have said,

that very purity would enable him to see God. The darkness was no darkness to him, and the night as light as the day to that soul of purity to whom the Lord God and the Lamb were the light. Some special grace had armed him for that sight, and called him to the spot, asleep to the storm around him, and entranced in the vision of the Almighty hanging on the Cross, with his eyes open to behold Mary in the midst of all her desolation and her agony. Of all men whom his Master was lifted up to draw to himself, St. John was the sole representative. If we do not look upon him as our representative, we have no male to stand for us, and the Cross, even when actually suffered, had not actually that power that was promised to it. Whatever we might hope from it as it was suffered, St. John stands alone as the voucher, at the time, that it had the power which was promised to it. It is not then an absurdity to take St. John at that time as the representative of the whole race of Christians. What was said to him, was said to all, and for all.

4. Next, it is no slight preeminence to be the favourite of God made flesh. If we take a glance back into God's predestinating love, and view him as planning our Redemption, we shall see him planning first his own sacred humanity, next, and nearest to it, Mary's. But to whom can we give the next place, if we do not give it to that disciple whom Jesus loved? He has planned beforehand all the good works his saints are to walk in: and shall we think his own sacred humanity was led by random fancy and chance feelings of the hour, to concentrate its own unsearchable affections upon one man more than another? He knew all his members, while as

yet there was none of them made; he who before his birth as man would so often have gathered Jerusalem's children as a hen her chickens under his wing, surely did not, when he came, deal out his human love irrespectively of his divine foreknowledge and predestination. Without then insisting upon what we cannot be sure, viz. that of all the saints of this earth John came nearest to Mary in the book of the predestinate, still it is clear we cannot regard the love of Jesus to him as the friendship of a few years only, but as something which, while we view it floating on the surface of Christ's life on earth, yet has its reflection in the deep ocean of his eternal Person as God. God is love, says St. John, and Love incarnate had him for his beloved disciple. We may expect then that from this love something would come, marvellous and supernatural in its character. Is it much to say, that a divine inspiration was breathed forth from it into St. John, and the unction of courage too, a gift bestowed even on the renegade Saul? Armed with these, St. John is able to endure the sight of his Master on the Cross: he is invited to his Master's death-bed, to be our representative there, and to obtain a legacy in the name of us all. Jesus was not stupified by the chalice of his Passion: he knew the mysterious dereliction just about to follow, and before it came he gave St. John his legacy. Just before he shut out from his own sacred soul all the sweets of the present consciousness of its immutable union with God, and let in the night upon himself, still awake as it were to his own dignity, he gives a gift to his greatest friend, his beloved disciple. 5. Let us try to mingle now awhile among the

St. Ephrem in 1 Reg. p. 352. A. p. 366. A.