which you adorn your homes on Christmas Day are but

the emblems of that newness with which the virtues are renovated in the breast of every Christian. Go, then, this day and adore your Redeemer in Bethlehem, and lay at His feet the homage of your affections. Burn upon the altar your enmities, your resentments, and all the other passions. Bring home, as the companion of your way and the inmate of your houses that peace which the Infant Jesus offers to all mankind. It is by cultivating that peace you will be enabled to promote the glory of God on earth, and afterwards to enjoy His peace and glory in heaven. Amen.

ON THE PASSION OF OUR LORD.

"Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not over me, but weep for yourselves and for your children."-LUKE, xxiii. 28.

WE are told by the Evangelist that when Jesus was led to be crucified He was followed by a great multitude of people of either sex, who lamented His fate, and wept over the severity of His sufferings. Struck with the innocence of the Redeemer's life, they generously expressed their sorrow that He was made the victim of the rulers of the Jewish Synagogue. Yet, my dear Christians, this was still but a compassion merely human, a pity such as one feels for the misfortunes of a fellowcreature, and which regarded not the cause of the suffering of Jesus. It was this tender but blind compassion of the Jewish women that awakened feelings of genuine and sincere pity in the breast of the Redeemer. Seeing.

how they felt for His misfortunes while they were insensible to their own, He seems to reproach their unseasonable tenderness by telling them, "Weep not over Me, ye daughters of Jerusalem, but weep for yourselves and for your children." Thus He checks the indulgence of their grief, or rather directs it to its legitimate object. He wishes to signify to them that for Him they might spare their tears, but that there were other evils far more deserving of their compassion. He labours to impress on them the enormity of their guilt in rejecting all the graces, and extinguishing all the lights with which they had been hitherto favoured. And, touched with a deep and generous sensibility, He strives to divert the current of their grief from Him who was the victim to the consideration of that cause which had inflicted His sufferings. It is true there never was a victim more deserving of compassion than our suffering Redeemer. If innocence the most immaculate, condemned by a tribunal the most iniquitous, and subjected to the cruelest torments that patience could endure, can possess any claims to the sympathy of a generous heart, never was there an individual who possessed so many claims to it as the Sufferer whom we commemorate this day. There was, however, another object, in the contemplation of which Christ forgot His own sorrows; and that object was sin. In imitation therefore, of our Redeemer, I propose this day to make you turn your attention to your own transgressions. I mean not by any high-wrought picture of our Saviour's Passion to wind up your feelings to a transient and unproductive sensibility. But I mean, through the sufferings of Christ, to show you the hideous deformity of that sin which inflicted them. Following, therefore, the narrative of the Passion, in the order in which it is told by the inspired historians, I shall exhibit to you those lessons of compunction which it teaches, after saluting

the cross, that sacred symbol of our faith and pledge of our salvation, Ave Crux, &c.

To enable you to conceive a true horror for sin, only reflect that it is the cause of that bloody tragedy which this festival commemorates over all the Christian world. The majesty of God was outraged by the disobedience of our first parents, and nothing less than infinite satisfaction could atone for the infinite enormity of the insult. Accordingly, God in His mercy promised that from the woman's seed should spring one who would crush the head of the serpent. During the long period that elapsed from the fall to the redemption, a series of prophets appeared, foretelling the time and circumstances of His coming. At length He descends on earth, preaches His Gospel, and establishes His divinity by miracles the most incontestable, restoring the sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, speech to the dumb, and health to those who were oppressed with infirmities. He preached penance unto the remission of sins, and those who were burdened with the weight of iniquity He dismissed after comforting them by His merciful consolations. Yet those acts of kindness and compassion which should have awakened the gratitude of the Jews, stirred up their envy, and the miracles by which He established His power only exasperated their desire of revenge. Such was the purity of His doctrine, exemplified in the unimpeachable integrity of His life, that multitudes became His disciples. But after the stupendous miracle of raising Lazarus from the tomb, the priests and princes of the people were so stung with rage that without further provocation they resolved upon His death. The time fixed by the decrees of the Almighty was now fast approaching. On the eve before His Passion Christ calls His Apostles together, He celebrates the Jewish Passover, and bequeaths to them the

last legacy of His affection in the Blessed Sacrament of the Eucharist, in which He refreshed them with His own Body and Blood. After supper was concluded He returned, with some of His Apostles, to the garden of Gethsemani, beyond the torrent of Cedron, where He was often wont to retire during the still solitude of the night, to converse with His Father on the stupendous plan of man's redemption, which had been meditated from all eternity. Here commences the first scene of that bloody tragedy which was consummated on Calvary. The Son of God, who had displayed through life a calmness and tranquillity which nothing could disturb, becomes on a sudden violently agitated. His soul is sorrowful even unto death; a dreadful terror seizes His entire frame; the intense acuteness of His agony forces drops of bloody sweat to come over His Body, until, unable to sustain the overwhelming pressure of His sorrows, He falls prostrate on the ground, uttering the melancholy prayer: "O my Father, if it be possible, let this chalice pass from Me. Nevertheless, not as I will but as Thou wilt." What, it may be asked, could have thus subdued our Redeemer, invested with the strength of the Godhead, or saddened with such unutterable grief a soul that was in the constant contemplation and possession of supreme happiness? Was it the fear of His approaching death, or the desertion of the Apostles, or the ignominy of the cross, which could have thus troubled the peace of Jesus and stirred up such an intestine war within His breast? No; to ascribe His agony to any of those causes would not be conceiving a just idea of the sufferings of the Man-God. He could not have been frightened by the shame of that cross which was afterwards to become the badge and instrument of His triumphs, nor was He appalled by the terrors of approaching death, which He rather courted than

feared: "And I have a baptism wherewith I am to be baptised, and how am I straitened until it be accomplished." No; all this was incapable of afflicting the Son of God. It was the weight of the load of the sins of mankind that thus prostrated Him on the earth.

Whilst the priests and rulers of the nation, assembled in the house of Caiphas, were devising their iniquitous purpose of putting Him to death, Jesus, without any prejudice to His own innocence, considered Himself charged with the accumulated iniquities of the world, and destined to sustain in His own Person the collected weight of the divine vengeance that was due to them all. For God, according to the language of the prophet, "hath laid on Him all our iniquities." In consequence of this transfer made by the Almighty, the just One, who knew not sin, became an imputed sinner; and in the language of St. Paul, "Him who knew no sin He hath made sin for us, that we might be made the justice of God in Him." Now, only represent to yourselves a God gifted with the clearest knowledge of all that was to happen, as well as all that was passed, who alone could conceive the majesty of the Divinity and the deformity of sin by which He was insulted; imagine to yourselves a frame endued with the liveliest and most exquisite sensibility that ever was bestowed upon man, and you will still form only an imperfect notion of the horror that seized the soul of the Man-God when the hideous catalogue of the sins of the world rose in dreadful review before His unclouded mind-its frauds, its injustices, its murders, its blasphemies, its impurities, its calumnies, and its sacrileges, the heresies by which His own seamless garment was to be rent asunder, and the Blood of His covenant to be made void; in short, the collected mass of all the sins of every age and country and condi1 St. Luke, xii. 50. ? Isai. liii. 6.

3 2 Cor. v. 21.