The value, to the worshippers, of the Devotion of the Three Hours' Agony
is in proportion to the degree in which they understand that they are
watching not so much the tragedy of nineteen hundred years ago as the
tragedy of their own lives and times. Merely to dwell on the Death of
Christ on Calvary would scarcely avail them more than to study the
details of the assassination of Caesar at the foot of Pompey's statue.
Such considerations might indeed be interesting, exciting, and even a
little instructive or inspiring; but they could not be better than this,
and they might be no better than morbid and harmful.
The Death of Christ, however, is unique because it is, so to say,
universal. It is more than the crowning horror of all murderous
histories; it is more even than the _type_ of all the outrages that men
have ever committed against God. For it is just the very enactment, upon
the historical stage of the world, of those repeated interior tragedies
that take place in every soul that rejects or insults Him; since the God
whom we crucify within is the same God that was once crucified without.
There is not an exterior detail in the Gospel which may not be
interiorly repeated in the spiritual life of a sinner; the process
recorded by the Evangelists must be more or less identical with the
process of all apostasy from God.
For, first, there is the Betrayal of Conscience, as a beginning of the
tragedy; its betrayal by those elements of our nature that are intended
as its friends and protectors--by Emotion or Forethought, for example.
Then Conscience is led away, bound, to be judged; for there can be no
mortal sin without deliberation, and no man ever yet fell into it
without conducting first a sort of hasty mock-trial or two in which a
sham Prudence or a false idea of Liberty solemnly decide that Conscience
is in the wrong. Yet even then Conscience persists, and so He is made to
appear absurd and ridiculous, and set beside the Barabbas of a coarse
and sturdy lower nature that makes no high pretensions and boasts of it.
And so the drama proceeds and Conscience is crucified: Conscience begins
to be silent, breaking the deepening gloom now and again with protests
that grow weaker every time, and at last Conscience dies indeed. And
thenceforward there can be no hope, save in the miracle of Resurrection.
This Cross of Calvary, then, is not a mere type or picture; it is a
fact identical with that so dreadfully familiar to us in spiritual life.
For Christ is not one Person, and Conscience something else, but it is
actually Christ who speaks in Conscience and Christ, therefore, Who is
crucified in mortal sin.
Let us, then, be plain with ourselves. We are watching not only Christ's
Death but our own, since we are watching the Death of Christ _Who is our
Life_.