THE "THREE HOURS"

INTRODUCTION


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.