the brain could no longer receive, or the ear hear. I have known it the outward support of months and years of intense suffering, and of the pains of death; how suffering has been sanctified by the ever-present sight of those sanctifying Sufferings; or how, in life, its presence has quickened the conscience, not to act unworthily of Him, or crucify Him again, our Crucified Lord.

I have not, then, thought it wrong, my Lord, to give a Crucifix to be worn within, upon the chest. I may myself have given it, in some years, to some twelve or twenty friends who wished so to wear it. Since pictures of the Crucifixion, with all the aid of colour, are recognized in our Churches, I know not upon what principle I could take upon myself to think or declare a Crucifix unlawful, so that it became not an object of worship or a cause of scandal. It is not of my own choice that I now defend the lawful use of them thus publicly.

And yet it cannot but be natural to every Christian heart, to love to behold representations of his Crucified Lord. It cannot, dare not, need apology, or defence. The principle, I must repeat, is the same, whether we represent the Nativity, the Flight into Egypt, our Lord's obedience to His parents, His Baptism, Miracles, Teaching, Blessing little children, or His Agony or Crucifixion. In each and all, it is "the Word become Flesh and dwelling among us."

Yet these are subjects, now chosen for religious

distribution, "among the middling classes, the poor Charity Schools, and Church Missionary Societies,” and to take a slight indication of the same return to natural feeling among the dissenters also, I have, while writing this, seen a recent edition of Bogatzky's Golden Treasury, with the Crucifixion represented as by old painters, with St. John, His Mother, and St. Mary Magdalene at its foot, and on the opposite page, a female figure, kneeling, and praying towards the Cross which she is holding in her hand. Nature is truer and more devout than theory or controversy.

VI. The statement proceeds,-"and" [by recommending] "special devotions to our Lord, as e. g. to His Five Wounds."

I own I was surprised, my Lord, when I first heard these devotions objected to, as something Roman. They can have nothing in common with any thing peculiar to the Roman system. They are founded on the doctrine of the Incarnation, the union of our Blessed Lord's two Natures in His One Divine Person. They are borne out by the words of Holy Scripture, "the Blood of God."

Those words, also, of the Prophet Zechariah, "What are these wounds in Thy Hands? Then He shall answer, Those with which I have been wounded in the house of My friends," have been in a secondary sense interpreted of Him, the thought

of Whom was ever in the minds of the Prophets, and, still more, "the testimony of" Whom is "the spirit of prophecy." The next words speak of the Death of our Lord and God, of that Man, Who is, as God, the Equal of the Lord of Hosts. "Awake, O sword, against My shepherd, and against the Man Who is My Fellow, saith the Lord of Hosts."

The piercing of the Hands and the Feet is especially pointed out in that deep Psalm of the sufferings of our Lord, the 22nd: surely, not only to foretel a fact and the mode of His suffering; but that we may, in repeating the Psalm, dwell in adoring love on the details of His Passion which He endured

for us.

"Christ's Passion," says St. Augustine, “is set forth as clearly as the Gospel." We behold Him, speak of Him, in His Very Person, just as if we were on Mount Calvary, and were, with the Beloved Disciple, standing by His Cross. The Holy Ghost, in the Psalms, puts into our own mouths the Sufferings of our Lord, that we may reverently suffer with Him. Whose heart, I may ask, has not, at some time at least, ached, when he repeated the words, My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken ME?" And then the Psalm tells of His Sufferings, not as beheld only, as the Gospels do, but as endured, as felt by Him Who for us endured them. It tells us not only in our Lord's own Person, of the Piercing the Hands and the Feet, and how He was naked, there, "I may tell all My Bones;" the mocking of

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those who stood by, the very words which they so strangely fulfilled by using them; His thirst, "My tongue cleaveth to My gums;" the parting His raiment and casting lots upon His Vesture, but it even sets before our eyes one detail which must have been true, but is not mentioned in the Gospels, the racking and dislocating of His Human Frame upon the Cross: "All My Bones are out of joint," literally, are severed one from the other." But, besides this, the picture-like character of the Psalm is observable. The Gospels mention the "wagging the head;" the Psalmist fills up the picture: "All they that see Me, laugh Me to scorn: they shoot out their lips, and shake their heads;" and "They gape upon Me with their mouths," "They stand staring and looking upon me." It pictures too His Blessed Form, (as the ancient painters were wont, perhaps from this Psalm, to represent it,) dried up and emaciated :

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My strength is dried up like a potsherd." "I may tell all My Bones." It tells us, as from Himself, what cannot be pictured, the Anguish which He allowed to affect His Human Heart, “My Heart in the midst of My Body is even like melting wax," that our hearts may reverently feel with His, because He endured for love of us.

Surely when our Lord's Sufferings are so set before us, both in the Psalm and in the Gospels, it must be meant that we should dwell upon each portion of them, upon every pang which entered into them.

"Such," I said, "is the real contemplation of love. Think we not that such must it have been to those who were on Calvary, love riveting them, while each awful infliction pierced the soul with a sword, and upholding them to endure the pain it gave? But since His love comprehended us, as though we were there, and He beheld us, one by one, from the Cross, and loved us, and shed that precious Blood for us, and each pang was a part of the Price of our Redemption, how must not a living faith, the evidence of things unseen,' be present with Him, and behold the Crucifixion, not 'afar off,' but as brought by the Holy Gospels to the very foot of the Cross, and, if not standing there with His Blessed Mother and the beloved Disciple, yet kneeling at least with the penitent who embraces It? To Love, nothing is of small account. Human love finds a separate ground of love, a separate meaning and expression of that inward, holy loveliness which wins it, impressed on every part even of the pure visible frame of what it loves. Grief loves to recall each separate action, and token of love or holiness, and muses upon them, and revolves them on all sides, to discover the varied bearings of what yet is finite. How much more when the Object of Contemplation is Infinite, and that of love! When the Passion was 'the book of the Saints,' they contemplated it letter by letter, and combined its meanings, and explored its unfathomable depths, the depths of the riches of the mercy and loving-kindness of God; each Wound had its