Tracts for the Christian Seasons.

GOOD FRIDAY.

Christ crucified.

GOOD indeed was this day for us, and the better we think it for our salvation the worse will appear to us the sufferings which it brought to Him who saved us. We have indeed already entered upon some estimation of those sufferings, as we saw them commence in His agony of spirit and bloody sweat in the garden. But to-day they are exhibited in a body, suffering openly the most shocking death of crucifixion. To that Cross our eyes must be directed; there we must behold the Sacrifice once offered for the sins of the whole world, and confess in it our own vileness, and unthankful rebelliousness, and the unsearchable riches of the love of the Father who could give His Son, and of the Son who could give Himself, for the world, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life. Is it not a day in

deed of constraint upon all worldly appetite, a day of humiliation of every affection which exalts itself upon the hopes and joys of this life. The Bridegroom has been taken away, shall not the children of the bridechamber fast and mourn? (Matt. ix. 15.) Can any one have at all in mind the tremendous event which distinguishes this day, and spend it like other days? Alas that so many should spend it not as other days, not in keeping the fast, but in making it a day of feast and pleasure. What notion can they have of Him who on this day fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah, (liii. 3,)“ He was despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief and we hid, as it were, our faces from Him; He was despised, and we esteemed Him not." And who can understand his own heart, and know to his thorough conviction his place as a fallen being, who has forsaken his first estate of blessedness and first habitation in the place assigned him by God, if he do not bring home to his heart the treatment which the Saviour of the world experienced from the world on this day, when all the stores of the treachery, of the malice, the pride, the hypocrisy, the cruelty of our nature were emptied out against Him? Do Judas, and Caiaphas, and

Pilate, and Herod, with all the assembled people crying, "Crucify Him," stand alone? However your heart may abhor the characters and deeds of these men, yet it is from its very feeling that it is the same human heart with theirs, and from its experience of its deceitfulness, and from its continual struggle for maintaining the sovereignty over its rebelliousness, that it is enabled to understand them, and to condemn them. And more especially as to the people of God at that day, who, when the Word came unto His own, received Him not, it can estimate the brightness of the light which our heart can quench, the open conviction which it can shut out. And all this too under pretence of zeal for God. What then will it not do without any such pretence at all? And in what a state of extreme peril must that man be living who is not in the habit of watchfully bringing this inward dweller and ruler of his senses and affections to a strict account.

But of all things nothing is so hateful to unspiritual man as that the thoughts of his heart should be revealed. But this revelation was from the very first the power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. What wonder then that against the holy child of God, Jesus, whom He had

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anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate with the Gentiles, and the people of Israel, were gathered together, (Acts iv. 27.) Yes! even they, who were set at deepest enmity against each other, could all for a season forego it, to make common cause against one whom, from their common wickedness, they reckoned for their common enemy. On this day Pilate and Herod, who had been hitherto at enmity, were made friends over the sufferings of Jesus. this day Pilate and the high-priest, who were always quarrelling upon points which the Jews deemed religious, made up their differences, and agreed in crucifying the Lord of glory. On this day, the world, represented most fully by its Jewish and Gentile heads, Caiaphas and Pilate, and making a mocking proclamation of the sufferings and death of the Christ of God, through its languages of government, literature, and revealed religion, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, publicly despised and rejected Him. And, as if this was not enough, His own disciples had done with Him. Judas had betrayed Him, Peter had denied Him, the rest had forsaken Him and fled. Not even one familiar friend stood by Him at His trial, and thus represented, we did indeed hide our faces from Him.

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And what, I ask, are we doing but hiding them still, if in our daily conversation we consent to this world if we crucify not its affections. and lusts, are we not manifestly indulging those agents which crucified the Son of God? And if we indulge them, are we not led by them, and if led by them, are we not ready to do the same over again which they have already done against Christ. Is there any thing wanting but the occasion to provoke us? Here is a terrible thought for us. Whom are we really following? Can our conscience bear witness to us that we are following Christ, and not the world? Or do we feel in the bottom of our hearts an indifference to the cause of the Captain of our salvation, does a secret mockery of unbelief extinguish the motions of conscience, does an unwillingness to forego worldly enjoyment make the demands of holiness to be distasteful, and the lessons of God's word to be disregarded, the example of His followers to be an object of contempt, and is not an angry or specious defence set up against conscience, whenever, as sometimes it will, it bestirs itself, as a person half asleep does, from one side to the other? Here is a state of mind which every one will allow to be but too common, whenever he looks out upon