The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1876-04-22 00:00:00

GOOD FRIDAY SERVICE at St. PAUL'S

CATHEDRAL.

At the forenoon sersice-at-St. -Paul's there was a
; large congregation. Therieivas full choral service, but
as is customary on Good Friday, the organ Wag not
' med. The sermon was preached by the Rev. W. R.
Savage. The text was taken from the 27th chapter of
the Gospel by Sit. Matthew, and the 42nd verse—" He
saved 'fthers ; Himself He cannot save," These, he said,
were the mocking and bitter words of the chief
priests. and scribes, and elders who had come out
from IJerusalem on that Good Friday morning to
• Batista their greedy eyes with the protracted sufferings
of Jeinis of Nazareth. Long had they lain in wait
to shad his blood, and at last their efforts had been
brought to a successful issue. They had suborned
false witnesses; they bad accused Him of blasphemy,
inasmuch that He, being a man had, as they said,
made Himself equal with God, and when they
saw that an accusation of so extraordinary a kind
rather predisposed the Roman Governor in favour of
their prisoner they changed their ground, and charged
Him with sedition. They said He had made Himself
King, and therefore deserved to die. Impressed by.
His native majesty, and more than all by His mys-
terious claim of a kingdom which, though not of this
world, appeared to have a reality about it, Pilate
would have released Him • but the chief priests urged
him to condemn Him, and, fearing lest he should be
involved in the- charge of disloyalty to his Imperial
master, he endeavoured to clear his conscience, as he
washed his halals, by saying that he was innocent of
the blood of this just person, and then he delivered Him
up to be crucified. The scourging, the spitting on Him,
the stripping, and putting Him en a scarlet robe—these
Indignities were all over, and Jesus had been taken out
to a piece called Golgotha, and hither had the chief
priests and scribes and elders come to see the end of a
man whom they both feared and hated. They
had got their victim nailed to the cross, helpless
and in agony, but this eight, which one would
• have thought would have melted the stoniest heart,
only added feel to the team of their bate and
mocking Him they said, "He saved others, Himself
He cannot save. If He be the King of Israel, let Him
now come down from the Cross, and we will believe
Him. He trusted in God, let Him deliver Him now;
for He said, lam the Son of God." Had they not
been blinded by malice they must have shuddered at
the sound of their own voices, for all unconsciously
they were playing their-own fore-ordained part in that
moat momentous and terrible of all the world's dramas.
The very words used by them had been anticipated a
thousand years before. In the 22nd Psalm, and in the
7th and Bth verses' there were written the words, "All
they that see Me laugh Me to scorn ; they shoot out
the lip, they shake the head, saying, He trusted on the
Lord that he would deliver Him; let Him deliver Him,
seeing He delighted in Him." These men, fulfilling
their own scriptures, bore unconscious testimony
to the genuineness of the claims of Jesus Christ
to be the Son of God. They had witnessed,
and had no doubt of the reality of the
iracles which he wrought. Unlike our modern
philosophers and sceptics, they knew that His restoring
health to the sick, giving sight to the blind, casting
out devils, and raising the dead to life, were no mere
popular delusions. They said "This man doeth many
miracles, and if we let him alone all men will believe
on him." They did violence to their own consciences
in compassing the destruction of such a man, and they
furnished us with most important evidence of the truth
of the religion which was received among us. He could
have saved Himself even as He saved others. He laid
down His life that He might take it again. No man
took it from Him; but He laid it down Himself. In
one sense the seeing of thesis priests was true, "He
saved others; Himself He cannot save." For had He
saved Himself He could not have saved us. He
laid down His life for our sakes. He died that we
might enter into eternal life. He saved us, and
gave Himself a sacrifice for us. Now let us sup-
pose that He bad not only shrunk from this self-
imposed task, as we know that He did at Gahm',
mane, but that He bad utterly declined to die on our
behalf. For one instant we have cause to believe
the destinies of the universe were actually trembling
in the balance. Christ had a baptism to be baptised
with that His disciples knew nothing of, the baptism
of blood. When He was about to be made sin for us,
being exceeding sorrowful, even unto death, his human
nature threatened to overcome him, inasmuch as he
exclaimed, "Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass
from Me." But succoured by angelic ministration,
his strength revived, and he said, Not my will but
Thy will be done." Now, let us suppose that He
would not have drunk of this cup, what would have
become of us was awful even in the thought; how
much more would it have been in the reality I Then,
indeed, through fear of death we should all our life-
time have been subject to bondage, for we should have
been still in our sins, without God, without hope either
in this world or in that which is to come. Then, in-
deed, might'. have been written aver our graves the
eentence that was inscribed over a dreadful prison of
old, " Whoso entereth here leaves all hope behind."
In the great day of judgment we should have hai
no one to take our part. When the books
were opened, and it was said that our sins were
more in number than the hairs of our head, we could
not then have pleaded the shedding of the blood of our
Redeemer as a satisfaction for our sins, and the hor-
rible pit and the unquenchable fire would have been
our portion for ever. But by his sacrifice our prospects
were bright and full of glory, for we had an Advocate
with the Father, Jesus Christ, who was a propitiation
for our sins. He had abolished death and brought life
and immortality to light through the Goapel. All this
was ours if we would accept it. But, elite, how many
would not. How many seemed to think there was no
salvation for them. Some seemed to think that the
plan of salvation which God had provided was too
good to be true; others went about in their own
righteousness not accepting the righteousness of God.
To a third, the pleasures of sin were too sweet to be
renounced, but by-and-by, when the world had no
more to offer, he would listen to what they had to
say about Christ. There were, it was to be feared,
untold millions who bad gone and who were now going
down to th,ir graves without any living assurar.ce that
they were saved by His name. Within a short time
of our Lord's death a great company of the Jews
became obedient to the faith. They had an excuse
for not coming to Him before, which we are without.
Though they killed the Prince of Life they did it
through ignorance, and so found mercy in the day of
visitation If any of us perished, it would not be for lack
of knowledge; it would be because we chose darkness
rather than light, the thraldom of sin rather than the
service of perfect freedom. If we died in our sins
it would be because we would not come to Jeans.
He was calling us st• 11, and if by our obstinacy
we still remained in our sins, we crucified the Lord
afresh and put Him to shame. Let us crucify the flesh
with its affections and lusts, and live soberly and
righteously in this present world, and taking up our
cross let us walk iii the footsteps of our Lord; let us
be followers of God as dear children, and walk
in love, as Christ also bath loved us; let all
bitterness and wrath and anger and clamour
and evil-speaking be put away from us, and all malice,
and let us be kind one to another, tender-hearted, for-
giving one another, even as God for Christ's sake bath
forgiven us. Some seemed to think that the sacrifice
Christ had made was not enough, and that they must
merit salvation by some works of their own. His most
earnest prayer was that we should be guarded from
this false faith with which our age was too deeply
tainted; that God would give us an increase of grace
which should bring forth the fruits of the Spirit, so
that when we have fought the good fight, and have
finished our course, and served our generation, we may
depart in peace, and be made partakers of everlasting
glory, through our Lord and:Saviour Jesus Christ.

•. • • • f
WESTMINSTER ABBEY.
The congregation at Westminster was not so large
as it usually is on great festivals.. Canon Protherp
preached at both services, his text in the morning
being taken from the lesson of the day, John xix. 4 :
"Pitate therefore went forth again and said unto them,
'Behold I bring him forth tn you that you may know I
find no fault in him." In the history of the day which
they commemorated two figures stood forth in
striking contrast—our Lord overcome with sorrows
and yet victorious; Pilate, on the other hand,
in the fulness of his power and of the pride
of his place' yet struggling with weakness—the
one a type of Divine power in the midst of apparent
weakness, the other a type of human weakness in the
midst of earthly pride and greatness. From the charac-
ter of this heathen governor they might learn much.
It was his uffice to do justice in all cases, but his
position at Jerusalem was one of very peculiar
difficulty, and it perhaps rendered him little careful of
life, if by stretching a pointhe could soothe a turbulent
and excitable population, and keep them submissive to
the R iman rule. They could not but see how evi-
dently alive he was to the difficulties which surrounded
him, and yet how at times be felt the sen*e of justice
mostag powerfully within him without daring to follow
its impulses. Conscience pleaded with him in vain,
and after the common fashion of men he did wrong,
and tried to stifle conscience by declaring that the act -
Was not his—that he washed his hands of it. Pilate
seemed to him to represent a large if not the ordinary
class of men, weighing, as men would do, justice
against expediency--.-their future reward against their
present gain; the approbation of the conscience
against the approbation of the world. Men in the
present, in every age, were actuated by the
same motives as. he was; were influenced by
the same fears, were tempted into wrong by
the same selfish preference for ease. Could they
see any clue to the glaring inconsistencies of the judge?
If they could, they would-probably see what it was
which led to so much inconsistency in the lives of men,
wherein, perhaps, there was -nothing so much to be
dsplored as the general approbation of what was right,
coupled with the individual following of what was
wrong. First, and, as the cause of all that followed,
they observed Pilate's hesitation to act according to his
conviction of our Lord's innocence. Who amongst
them did not deplore trouble and misery resulting from
this hesitation to do that to which conscience spurred
them? .'How many a conscience-stricken'one among
them did not trace backidaysi of anxiety and misery to
this fatallesitestioni s.h. BOW many a man had in vain
laboured for years to tear himself away-horn the inexor-
able chains forkid fr.m hue single act of folly I But if
'there Was &trig& in be.sitation when a duty was clearly
before thein,. there was as great a danger in the habit
of weighing duty against pleasure, of we;ghing profit
against' the difficulties which might arise in the
path of duty- itself. •• Having. hesitated to do whist
.was rihtPilme :next,svight ,in the pleasure of his
ps-pfit Of a etrengthened rule,
. increa
in sed e dt
er ithaeriti
tyieteh
which he iinmediatelY avoided,
e
a cionfirtion ot. the wisd a oni the course he was
meditating.- • giltativas to Min s.n.easy matter, as it
was for any ohe who found.hiraself fact d by a duty he
dialiked: • When they had inice begun to consider how
they could esOapairinn the ;obligations of duty, it was
only a step ftn.ther to finding excuses end a pallistien.
for doing s They 'stood to-day more hearty the
i:Poiition of the Roman judge as regarded Christ than
they were apt to think. Each one of them, in respect
of his allegiance to Christ, was exactly in the position
of Pilate, aud amongst his own circle of friends and
neighblurs stood out just as prominently. In the
midst .of an outward Christianity which seemed .tp,
permeate all things, it was just as much a question,.
now-a-days whether Christ was to be followed trul
on that day when a wave of the. hand or a single!.
sentence would have turned the seals ill his favour.