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The Sunday next before Easter.

EVENING SERVICE.-Second Lesson: Heb. v.

Verses 7, 8, 9.-" Who in the days of his flesh, when he had offered up prayers and supplications, with strong crying and tears, unto him that was able to save him from death, and was heard in that he feared; though he were a Son, yet learned he obedience by the things which he suffered; and being made perfect, he became the author of eternal salvation unto all them that obey him."

TEARS are the outward expressions of the inward feelings of the heart. We sometimes witness tears of joy, but most frequently they are produced by sorrow; and sorrow in its turn is produced either by pain of body or anxiety of mind. Tears produced by bodily pain are transient; they are dried up when the pain ceases, and if not solely forgotten, they are but little thought of when the immediate cause has been removed. Not so those produced by mental anxiety; they recur again and again long after the immediate cause has been removed. It is the lot of humanity to weep. "Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upwards." No mortal has escaped it, from the fall of Adam to the present day, neither shall any one be free until time shall be no more.

The sources of human sorrow may be regarded as physical and moral. Physical sorrows proceed from the afflictions, the trials, the bereavements, the reverses, and the disappointments of this life. Moral sorrows proceed from the consciousness of our own and of others' sins. David made his bed to swim, and watered his couch with his tears, because he felt the burden of his own delinquencies, and saw the evil which sin produced around him. Jeremiah wept day and night for the slain of the daughter of his people. The cap

tive children wept by the rivers of Babylon when they remembered the desolations of Zion. Peter "went out and wept bitterly," because he had denied his Master; and St. Paul, in writing to the Philippians, tells them, "even weeping," that many of them were "the enemies of the cross of Christ." Still, if you collect all the tears of the human family, from Adam to the consummation of time, they would be but as a drop in the ocean when compared with the tears produced by the agonizing sorrows of the Lord Jesus Christ when, in the days of His flesh, He "offered up prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears unto him that was able to save him from death, and was heard in that he feared." The verses which we have read contain three distinct points of the Passion of our blessed Redeemer, which we shall adopt as the heads of the present discourse. First, The frame of our Saviour's mind here expressed; Secondly, The lesson which He learned; and, Thirdly, The object which He effected.

I. The frame of His mind here expressed. "Who in the days of his flesh, when he had offered up prayers and supplications, with strong crying and tears."

It must be remembered that the Apostle is here speaking of the sacerdotal capacity of Christ, leaving His Divine nature solely out of the question. He is standing in the position of fallen man, as the representative of fallen man, and enduring the penalty due for fallen man's transgression. Regarding Him thus, we may consider under this head, First, the offering which He made; Secondly, the intenseness of His feeling in making the offering; Thirdly, the time of the offering; Fourthly, the Person to whom the offering was made; and, Fifthly, the success of the supplication attending the offering.

1. The offering which He made. He "offered up prayers and supplications." The reference is not to the great final sacrifice which He offered in the act of making atonement for sin; but it is to the preliminary adjuncts which were needful for Him to pass through when He was encompassed with the weakness of our nature. The Lord Jesus Christ

had now made our business His own; He had taken the whole debt of sin and the whole work of satisfaction upon Himself. He was now to manage, as if He alone was the person concerned; and this rendered His prayers and supplications necessary in and to the sacrifice.

Prayers and supplications are here evidently used as synonymous terms, and are intended to express a strong desire for the removal of an impending evil. The Greek word, which is here translated supplications, is not elsewhere employed in Scripture. In other authors it signifies "a bough, or olivebranch," which those who were formally supplicants used to carry in their hands, and lift them up to those whom they supplicated for the obtaining of peace from them, or the reverting of their displeasure. They were called "branches of supplication." Doubtless it was for this reason the learned compilers of our Liturgy selected this portion of Holy Scripture for this evening's Lesson, in reference to the "branches of the palm-tree," which were strewed in the way when He descended from Mount Olivet on His way to Jerusalem. However, Christ's prayers were supplications for peace, or the removal of evil, by the turning away of anger.

2. We observe the intenseness of His feeling in offering up prayers and supplications: "With strong crying and tears." The history of our Lord by the Evangelists does not mention the tears of Christ except when He shed the tears of sympathy at the grave of Lazarus. It is from this place alone we learn that tears accompanied His sacerdotal prayers. But His strong crying is expressly related. The language of prophecy declares that great vehemence would accompany His supplications. In the Book of Psalms especially He is predicted to "roar by reason of the disquietude of His heart." The whole of the twenty-second Psalm represents Him as expressing the emotions of the intensest suffering, commencing with those remarkable expressions which He uttered upon the cross-" My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" In the story of His last sufferings,

recorded by the Evangelists, we learn that all predicted by the prophets was literally carried out.

The prayers intended by the Apostle in the text were those which He offered to God during His passion, both in the garden and on the cross. The first we find declared by St. Luke: "And being in an agony he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was as great drops of blood falling to the earth." The internal feeling is here declared, which our Apostle delineates by its external expressions and signs, in "strong crying and tears," which denotes the highest degree of earnestness, combined with that more awful conflict wherein He was engaged a conflict which no art can describe, no tongue express. Again, on the cross itself He is said by St. Matthew to have "cried with a loud voice." The whole shows the intenseness of His feelings when He underwent the penalty of our sins. Weeping was one of those infirmities of our nature to which He became subject, and by which He expressed the distress and conflict that reached to the soul, until He became sorrowful unto death.

3. We have the time when He offered up prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears: "In the days of his flesh."

By the flesh of Christ we understand generally His assumption of human nature, when "the Word was made flesh," or when He "partook of flesh and blood." This, however, is not meant by the "days of his flesh" here, for in that same nature He still continues on the right hand of God, far beyond the reach of crying and tears. But what is intended here was the whole course of His life upon earth, from Bethlehem to Calvary-from the manger to the grave. During the whole of this time He bore all the sinless infirmities of our nature, with all their painful and grievous effects. Hence, throughout all His days upon earth He was a "man of sorrows and acquainted with grief." With sorrows and grief He was familiarly acquainted; they were companions. which never departed from Him. At the close of those days

all His sorrows, His trials and temptations came to a head. His greatest trials were reserved to the last, when the full weight of our griefs as well as our sins was laid upon Him.

4. Next we have the Person to whom He offered up prayers and supplications: "Unto him that was able to save him from death." Itis God who is here intended, although the Apostle does not name Him. In the supplications to which reference is made, our Saviour Himself called Him both God and Father. In the garden He says, "Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: " and on the cross He says, "My God, my God, why hast thou forgotten me?" But our Apostle waives those expressions, and describes God as “he who was able to save him from death." He does this to manifest the feeling which the Lord Jesus Christ had at that time of God, of death, and of the consequences of it. His design was to declare the frame of Christ's soul in His suffering and offering as well as the causes which originated them. It may not be wrong to say that the human nature of Christ supplicated the Divine in its emergency. The suffering man supplicated the helping God: for we must remember that the Godhead in the Second and Third Persons was as much Father as in the First Person. Christ's Divine nature was the support and consolation of the human; and thus the human, being placed in the very position of the sinner to endure the penalty of his sin, has resort to its stay under the burden of distress. And, my brethren, where should we go for help in our sorrows and distress but to the same source? There only we can receive support and consolation. Christ was a pattern to us when He offered up prayers and supplications to Him who was able to save Him from death.

5. We come to the success of His prayers: "And was heard in that he feared." His sorrows were the effect of His penal desertion. He did not fear the corporeal sufferings that were coming upon Him, great as they were. Those sufferings must have been indeed grievous; but, considering them merely as such, He would have endured them, like His