other of thy Son. Who.

Having partaken of thy heavenly table, we humbly beseech thy
clemency, O Lord, our God, that we who honour the Assumption
of the Mother of God, may, by her intercession, be delivered
from all evils. Through.

OLD CATHOLIC.

The way of the Cross is indeed a Sorrowful Way. We have meditated upon
it so often that we are familiar with all the details of our Lord's
action as He follows it from the Judgment Seat of Pilate to the Place of
a Skull. I wonder if we enough pause to look with our Lord at the crowds
that line the way, or at those who follow Him out of the city. It is not
a mere matter of curiosity that we should do so, or an exercise of the
devout imagination; the reason why we should examine carefully the faces
of those men who attend our Lord on the way to His death is that
somewhere in that crowd we shall see our own faces: it is a mirror of
sinful humanity that we look into there. All the seven deadly sins are
there incarnate.

It is extremely important that we should get this sort of personal
reaction from the Passion because we are so prone to be satisfied with
generalities, to confess that we are miserable sinners, and let it go at
that! But to stop there is to stop short of any possibility of
improvement, because we can only hope to improve when we understand our
lives in detail, when we face them as concrete examples of certain sins.

There was pride there. It was expressed by both Roman and Jewish
officialism which looked with scorn on this obscure fanatic who claimed
to be a king! Pilate had satisfied himself of His harmlessness by a very
cursory examination. This Galilean Prophet with His handful of
followers, peasants and women, who had deserted Him at the first sign of
danger, was hardly worth troubling about. The only ground for any action
at all was the fear that the Jewish leaders might be disagreeable. Those
Jewish leaders took a rather more serious view of the situation because
they knew that through the purity of His teaching and His obvious power
to perform miracles, a power but just now once more strikingly
demonstrated in the raising of Lazarus, He had a powerful hold on the
people. They, these Jewish leaders, declined a serious examination of
the claims of such a man in their pride of place and knowledge of the
Scriptures. They were concerned to sweep Him aside as a possible leader
in a popular outbreak, not as one whose claim to the Messiahshi