Good Friday, Seventh scene, “Christ Crucified”
‘Well, what is this?’ (you cry). ‘What is this that we see?
Why should the heavens cry?
Why should they take away
The brightness of the sun just at the height of day?’
The heavens, you rogues, now mourn to see their Lord’s distress;
Shamed by your ruthlessness,
Block out this awful sight:
To see him die, who is the Father of their light.
The clouds which hide the sun from all earth’s teeming crowds
Are your sin’s darkening clouds.
I hear him? Yes, he shouts.
What anguished cry of death now from these clouds bursts out?
Ah, me, it is my Lord! He suffers now his worst.
From hell we hear it burst-
The devils watch in glee-
‘My God, my God, oh, why hast thou forsaken me?’
It is the voice of man, the voice of all who fell
Into the pit of hell;
As one we broke God’s law,
And thus, in one, in him, we are forsaken now.
God’s loved one hangs today (Oh, pain too deep for words)
Forsaken by God’s love,
That he once more might send
God’s friendly love on us, who hated God, our Friend!
Jeremias de Dekker
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It is not easy to recall in calm and happy hours the sensations of an acute sorrow that is past. Nothing, by the merciful ordinance of God, is more difficult to remember than pain. One or two great agonies of that time I do remember, and they remain to testify of the rest, and convince me, though I can see it no more, how terrible all that period was.
Next day was the funeral, that appalling necessity; smuggled away in whispers, by black familiars, unresisting, the beloved one leaves home, without a farewell, to darken those doors no more; henceforward to lie outside, far away, and forsaken, through the drowsy heats of summer, through days of snow and nights of tempest, without light or warmth, without a voice near. Oh, Death, king of terrors! The body quakes and the spirit faints before thee. It is vain, with hands clasped over our eyes, to scream our reclamation; the horrible image will not be excluded. We have just the word spoken eighteen hundred years ago, and our trembling faith. And through the broken vault the gleam of the Star of Bethlehem.
Uncle Silas by J. S. LeFanu
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But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep. For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.
1 Corinthians 15: 20-22
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The story of the Christian Europeans is contained in one short passage from St. John, Chapter 20, verse 8: “Then went in also that other disciple, which came first to the sepulchre, and he saw, and believed.” Mary Magdalene saw the empty tomb and wept, “Because they have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid him.” The Jews saw the empty tomb and put out the story that Jesus’s disciplines had stolen the body. But let us go back to St. John. Why did he see the empty tomb and believe? Was it because he knew the prophetic parts of the Scriptures? No, he tells us that he did not yet know that part of the scriptures. So the question stands before us – How did he know? He knew that Christ was risen because he, John, was the apostle who laid his head on Christ’s sacred heart at the last supper. And it was John who knelt at the foot of the cross during the crucifixion. So who but John, the man who stayed through the dark night of the crucifixion, would we expect to see the dawn of Christ’s resurrection in the empty tomb? Gloucester saw without his outer eyes, because he saw life “feelingly.” And so it was with John, the apostle whom Christ loved. John loved much — he saw life feelingly through the inner eye — and as a result he saw the empty tomb and he believed.
Our Lord said to Thomas, “Thomas, because thou has seen me, thou has believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.” That was our people’s story. They did not see Christ with the exterior eye, but they did, like St. John, kneel at the foot of the cross, and they joined their hearts to His sacred heart. They became the people whom Christ blessed, because they believed without the empirical proof that comes to us from viewing life with the exterior eye. The Europeans believed, with only the proof that comes from the inner eye, the eye of the heart.
The Europeans’ return to paganism, through science, has left them without the Savior. The atheist Pope and the other devotees and minsters in the worldwide ecumenical ‘Church of Jesus Christ without Jesus Christ,’ will not celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ on Easter Sunday. They will celebrate a mind-forged creation of liberalism, they will honor a prophet who is almost, but not quite, the equal of Mohammed, and who is inferior to the sacred negro. That is the current spiritual state of the European people. We are no longer the people who believe that Christ’s crucifixion is the prelude to His glorious resurrection from the dead. We are now the people who see only an ecumenical Christ who was crucified, died, and was buried. We do not see the Christ who was crucified, died, and was buried, and then, on the third day rose again from the dead. Without that faith in the risen Lord, the King of Kings, we are perishing as a people. Swedes, Englishmen, and all the European people are naked to their enemies – the liberals, the colored barbarians, and the Moslems – because they no longer believe, in their hearts, that Christ rose from the dead.
Charles Robert Maturin was not considered a great writer during his lifetime. He wrote in relative obscurity, receiving praise and recognition from only one man – Sir Walter Scott. After Maturin’s death, his book Melmoth the Wanderer became popular as a Gothic horror story, but the book is not a Gothic horror classic. It is a book like unto Uncle Silas (which is also called a Gothic horror classic), and also like unto Dostoyevsky’s novels. There is deep probing into the subterranean cellars of the human soul in Maturin’s masterpiece, but there is also redemption. Maturin believes in the light of the world. If you only judge Melmoth the Wanderer by external events you might call it a “dark” novel. But if you really see the author’s vision you will come away from the book feeling much like you feel at the end of King Lear. There is no doubt that Maturin, like Shakespeare, ultimately believes that the light will overcome the darkness.
Melmoth sells his soul to the devil and then sets out to wander the world in search of other human beings who are willing, in the face of personal tragedy and suffering, to alleviate their personal suffering in return for their “eternal jewel.” But Melmoth fails. No one he meets, despite being tempted, ever sells their soul to gain the world.
No one has ever exchanged destinies with Melmoth the Wanderer. I have traversed the world in the search, and no one, to gain that world, would lose his own soul! –Not Stanton in his cell – nor you, Moncada, in the prison of the Inquisition –nor Walberg, who saw his children perishing with want – nor—another—
Melmoth failed, because the love of Christ still lived in the hearts of the European people. They loved much, they had not yet become intellectual Christians who sneered, like Melmoth, at all things human and all things Christian, labeling the union of the two as “sentimentalism.” But now, Melmoth has triumphed. The European people are willing to sell their souls to gain the world. And ironically, such is always the way with the devil, the Europeans have lost not only their souls, they have also lost the world for which they gave their souls. It is not just Christian Europe which has died; liberal Europe is dying as well. The devil is the great betrayer, he does not care about human beings; in fact he detests them. All those who bargain with him for the things of this world will be betrayed in deepest consequence.
The Moslem invasion of Sweden is a perfect example of the devil’s double dealing. Sweden seemed to be a white paradise in the 1950s and 1960s. They had fused socialism and capitalism, avoiding the extremes of both. But they sold their souls to achieve that paradise. Along with their material prosperity came legalized abortion, pornography and an acceptance of race mixing. They no longer had hearts that loved Christ, they loved the world. And now the white paradise has become hell: the Swedes have lost their souls and the world. But Sweden is not an isolated cesspool of liberalism within Europe. All the European nations have the same plague. They have all sold their souls to the devil, and the organized anti-Christian Christian churches have been the Europeans’ conduits to the devil. They have given religious sanction to liberalism by making the antique Europeans and the God they worshipped into demons. What the ghost of Christmas present said about Christmas, that we should keep Christmas in our hearts for all 365 days of the year, also applies to Good Friday and Easter. We should keep Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection in our hearts for 365 days of the year. How could I even think of my deceased parents without Christ’s birth, death on the cross, and His resurrection in my heart? How can I, or any man, face that terror of terrors without the whole Christian vision in his heart?
The cultural war is a war of faith. The liberals want the Europeans to give up their sentimental attachment to a fairy tale in exchange for… For what? For the negro? For Islam? For the liberals’ kingdom of hell on earth? This Easter and every Easter hereafter let us remember that it is Christ, the Christ of Europe, who is and always shall be, “the grave where buried love doth live.” +