Friday Collect we pray for those now estranged from Him, that they may be saved among the remnant of the true Israelites, and be made one fold under one Shepherd, Jesus Christ the righteous. There are thousands now scattered, as sheep having no shepherd, whom yet the Good Shepherd longs to see brought into His fold, and received by the arms of His mercy. Let us pray, then, that this longing of His, this desire of the Son of God to receive the heathen for His inheritance, and the utmost parts of the earth for His possession, may be accomplished through the agency of His Church, which He has appointed to carry the standard of the Cross from one end of the earth to the other. At the time when Christ stretched out His arms upon that Cross, which, as in its height it points to heaven and earth, reconciling God and man, so in its breadth points to the opposite ends of the world, typifying the power of the Cross to bring them all together under its influence-at this time let us pray that that power may be more fully manifested, and may spread outwards to hearts which as yet have never even known its name.

Oh! there is virtue yet in the Cross of Christ to reach every child of man-virtue as potent for the millionth soul it reaches as for the first; exhaustless flows the fountain for sin and for uncleanness, limited in its effects only by the slowness of the Church to bring mankind to its healing waters; and there is

power in your prayers and your lives to aid the coming of that time when its saving power shall be known wherever there is a human heart to love the Saviour, and a human voice to confess Him; when all the ends of the earth shall remember themselves, and be turned to the Lord, and all the kindreds of the nations shall worship before Him.

99

SERMON VIII.

SIMON THE CYRENIAN.

Good Friday.

S. LUKE, Xxiii. 26.

'And as they led Him away, they laid hold upon one Simon, a Cyrenian, coming out of the country; and on him they laid the cross, that he might bear it after Jesus.'

AROUND the closing scene of the life of Jesus,

the Evangelists have grouped a great variety of persons and characters, subsidiary agents in that awful work as in depicting some great event of the world's history, the mighty masters of art love to crowd their canvas with a multiplicity of figures, subordinate to those in whom the main interest centres. In the immediate fore-ground, closely surrounding the Person of our Lord Himself, the great centre of the picture, we observe a few figures who took the most prominent part in the drama. Judas, who betrayed Him; Peter, who denied Him; the high-priest, who condemned Him; Pilate, who gave Him up to His enemies; the thieves, who were

crucified with Him; John and the Blessed Virgin, who watched beside His Cross. More broadly sketched in the back-ground are the shifting multitude, among whom Priest and Scribe are gliding here and there with their suggestions of malice; and the Roman soldiers doing their bloody work with the stolid indifference of habit, and gambling in sight of the Cross. But among these again a few figures emerge into momentary distinctness, as they come into brief contact with the chief actors-the young man on whom the officers that took Jesus laid hold, and who left the linen cloth, and fled from them naked; the maid whose question provoked the denial of S. Peter; the daughters of Jerusalem, whose lamentations alone caused the Divine Sufferer to break silence between the Judgement-hall and Calvary; and the Centurion who pronounced the memorable testimony, 'Truly this man was the Son of God.'

One other such figure is brought before us in the words of my text, which occur also, in substance, in the first two Gospels. As the long tumultuous procession surged out in the bright April morning from the eastern gate of the city, a solitary figure came in view, advancing towards them from the opposite direction-from Bethany and the Mount of Olives. It was at this moment that Jesus, Who thus far, according to the custom of condemned criminals, had carried His own Cross, became

evidently too much exhausted, tried as He had been by the protracted sufferings of the previous night, to carry it any further. It was a rough jest, which suited the humour of the soldiers, to lay hands upon a chance way-farer, whom they had met accidentally at the moment, and compel him to take the place of Jesus. No sooner suggested than done. On this 'Simon the Cyrenian, coming out of the country, they laid the cross, that he might bear it after Jesus.'

Thus, as we follow the suffering footsteps of Christ, does this man glance across our path for a moment, and then vanish again into the obscurity out of which he came. Many characters in Scripture, like him, float before our eyes in a brief vision, and then disappear for ever; 'like ships which, when night is spread over the sea, emerge for a moment from the darkness, as they cross the pathway of the moon-beams, and then are lost in utter gloom." Yet if we view them aright, even these transitory appearances are not without instruction: and assuredly, of the figures which surround the dying Jesus, none are unable to yield us some lesson, if only we view them with reference to the great central Object of faith, and read their story in the light of the Cross.

Who then was this Simon the Cyrenian? We do not know. He is to us a name, and nothing more. S. Mark adds, that he was the father of

'Bishop Wilberforce's Sermons.