CHAP. VII.

THE CRUCIFIXION.

1. ALL the events of our Lord's life, in connexion with which our Lady has hitherto been contemplated, appear to look forward to the Crucifixion : they seem calculated, some of them more and some of them less, yet each in its degree, to prepare her for the part in our Redemption she was to bear there. In one sense it is true to say, that Christ trod the winepress alone: just as it is true to say, that God alone creates us. Yet as in creating us he does not dispense with the passions of our parents and that brute estate, which is as it were the star under which our nativity in sin is cast, so in creating us anew he did not dispense with the bitter pains of his own Mother. Hence the holy Fathers style Mary the Mother of all living. Eve was so called, because she was a type of Mary, not because she ever actually was else than the mother of all dying. Just as the mother of Joseph is said in prophecy to come and bow down to him, which she did not do in Egypt, being dead before the time they went down.

a

Compare also the following expressions: Dixit Deus planè dicimus. Dicimus etiam, Dixit propheta. A. Serm. ii. §. 5. So Ego sum lux mundi,' and vos estis lux mundi.'

b

Aug. Epist. 199. §. 39. Illum Joseph mater certe adorare non potuit quæ ante de

functa est quam Jacob venisset ad filium, ut illius somnii prophetici veritas adimplenda Christo Domino servaretur. This reasoning is parallel to St. Epiphanius's. Panar. Hær. lxxviii. §. 18. Given below, chap. xii.

thither, but because even the seeming literal fulfilment of that prophecy was itself but the typical foretelling of a real spiritual fulfilment: so under the name given to Eve, the new Eve was foretold, that as in the old Eve all die, even so in Mary all might be made alive. As none die in the old Adam except through Eve, so none are made alive in Christ except through Mary. Christ is the firstborn and the only Son by nature of Mary, all others are his brethren by grace, and by consequence Mary's sons by grace. What then we have to attend. to in this chapter, is not the Crucifixion of Christ considered alone and by himself, but the Crucifixion of Christ considered as having Mary at his side, or, in other words, the part then assigned to Mary in the great work of our Redemption. I am aware the bare utterance of such words will be distressing to a protestant reader: such distress happens to the pious protestant from a real love for our Lord, it may be, in several instances. Where such love exists, it will be backward in thinking evil even of those who seem thus recklessly to shock his feelings. One thus backward to think evil, will be glad to see what can be said for those who use such language. He will heartily rejoice, if it can be made unmistakeably clear, that instead of taking away from Christ's sole prerogative and dignity, it only tends immeasurably to enhance and illustrate them. For the present, it is hoped he will so far take this assertion upon faith, as to listen to what may be said to prove it.

2. The wordCrucifixion' is capable of two very distinct meanings: it may mean the act of fixing Jesus to the Cross, or it may mean the state of being crucified. The latter is all it commonly means in

protestant mouths, and that for this plain reason, that nothing is explicitly said in Scripture about the act of crucifying our Lord. But we, who make the Gospel our law, think ourselves bound to aim at not being behind the Old Testament saints in meditating thereon, and consequently endeavouring by devout contemplation to fill out, each in his own way, the outline God has given us. The attempt to do this has reached from the man of ordinary piety up to the beatified and canonized saint. In some instances, persons of this latter sort have put into writing their experiences (so to speak) of what the Holy Ghost spoke in them during meditation. The concordant testimony of persons of eminent sanctity has commanded respect, and their usual mode of viewing and stating things has become, or is in the course of becoming, the received opinion upon many such matters. Still in many also we are at liberty to take such of these accounts of things for our use, as best suit our purposes at the time-as best serve to bring any phase of doctrine contemplated at the time most vividly before us.

3. Now supposing our Lord is to be fixed to a Cross, it is plain the process must go on by some natural mechanical means. He did not crucify himself for us, nor did he order the angels, or suffer the devils, to do it: it was by wicked men's hands that he was fixed to the Cross. These hands nailed

Acts ii. 23. in the Greek. The present Latin text has 'affligentes,' dashing him down, i. e. on to the Cross, instead of 'affigentes,' nailing him to it, which the old editions have in conformity with the Greek, προσπήξαντες. The reasons of

this deviation from the Greek, I do not know; but if Latin Mss. justify it, the critics say nothing of it on the Greek text. Only Griesbach conjectures προσπαίξαντες, as if he took 'affligentes' in a moral, not a physical, sense. But it seems

him to it with coarse ordinary instruments, regardless of the bluntness of what pierced his hands, or the roughness with which they used their tools. In St. Bridgett's revelations it was shewn to her, that the hands and feet of our blessed Lord were first unmercifully drilled through, and afterwards fixed by nails to the place required. The contraction of the muscles owing to the pain of the sufferers may have rendered it necessary to have the holes for the nails ready before they could drive them into the wood and the soldiers were more likely to think how they could save themselves trouble, than how they could spare their victims pain. This or some other method necessarily must have been adopted, if the Cross was first erected, and God the Son was afterwards nailed on to it. But the general opinion now is, that Christ was nailed to the Cross upon the ground, and was afterwards moved to the place where he died. A hole was then dug: the Cross was put into it, and the ground beaten in round it with heavy mallets, so as to shake the tree and the Fruit that hung upon it, and to fill him with new and excruciating torments.

4. No doubt his Mother, who had met him before, followed him, and looked on the while. She saw him stripped almost naked: she saw him dashed rudely on to the ground; she saw him hold out his

quite allowable to avail one's self of the reading of all the Greek Mss. There is a similar dif. ficulty about the word yap in Mal. iii. 9. which means, according to Grammarians, to rob:' but St. Jerome's Jew, following tradition, and the Chaldee use of the word, told him it was 'affigere.' A Concordance gives

affligere' in this passage also. d Gretser de Cruce, i. 21. The places he gives from the Fathers against the received opinion are chiefly figurative, and arose perhaps out of the Greek addition, regnavit Dominus a ligno, where and y seem to have been jumbled together.

hands patiently to be drilled: she saw him with lacerated back dragged along to his hard bed: she saw him laid upon that bed-the rough Cross: she saw him have his arms rudely tugged to make the holes come where they were to be nailed: she saw him fastened first by one hand: she saw one hand after another uncoiled to take the nail, and the muscles, whose animal force had already done homage to the pain, forced to prostrate themselves flat upon the Cross: she saw the left arm tugged to meet the other arm of the Cross from which it shrunk she saw the feet shrink too, and rudely forced to their place: she saw the precious Blood, all one with God, flow in red streams upon the dust. And oh! we might well ask, in what school has this woman been, that she looks coolly on? is she some tigress or lioness athirst for blood, and revelling in the sight of blood, and that too her Son's blood, her God's Blood? How is it that she has not swooned away? If this were so, Mary, where is the Mother's heart? where the bowels of compassion? are you come to fulfil the prophecy of Deuteronomy before its time, and to feed upon your own child, so far as eyes can feast upon him, and Roman ruffians will allow you? Indeed, you would have fainted long ago, had not your Son been God, and able in the midst of his sufferings to give out grace and strength, and to obey your command, to enable you to bear up, while you shared his sufferings; or rather by reflecting them, served as a mirror to increase them in. For when Jesus saw his Mother, he was putting forth as it were every capacity which his sacred humanity had for suffering, and while he obeyed her injunctions to enable her to pass through the whole tragedy, he also gratified his extreme love of suffering