Charles Williams : The New Christian Year

1st Saturday in Lent (February 28th, 2009)

Solomon saith, "Man goeth to his long home."  Short preparation will not fit so long a journey.  O let me not put it off to the last, to have my oil to buy when I am to burn it, but let me so dispose of myself, that when I am to die I may have nothing to do but die.

Thomas Fuller: Good Thoughts in Bad Times.

Human nature is so subject to deception that it can frustrate, by some pollution or other, almost every dispensation but death.

Sarah Grubb: Journal.

And he came and found them asleep again: for their eyes were heavy.

Matthew 26:43

  He seeks some consolation at least in his three dearest friends and they sleep.  He entreats them to stand by him a little, and they neglect him utterly, having so little compassion that it could not delay their sleep for an instant, and Jesus is thus left alone beneath the wrath of God.

Pascal: Pensées, 533.

And he left them, and went away again, and prayed the third time, saying the same words.

Matthew 26:44

  Jesus is alone on earth, without any to feel and share his pain, without any to even know it; heaven and he are alone in that knowledge.

Pascal: Pensées, 553.

  I am no companion for myself, I must not be alone with myself, for I am as apt to take as to give infection; I am a reciprocal plague; passively and actively contagious; I breathe corruption, and breathe it upon myself; and I am the Babylon that I must go out of, or I perish.

John Donne: Sermons.

And being in an agony he prayed more earnestly: and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground.

Luke 22:44

  He alone . . . for us to thee both Victor and Victim and therefore Victor because the Victim; for us to thee Priest and Sacrifice, and therefore Priest because the Sacrifice; making us to thee of servants sons, by being born of thee, and serving us.

St. Augustine: Confessions.

  When the time drew near that our blessed Lord was to enter upon his last great sufferings, viz., the realities of that second death through which he was to pass, then it was that all the anguishing terrors of a lost soul began to open themselves in him; then all that eternal death which Adam had brought into his soul when it lost the light and spirit of heaven began to be wakened in the Second Adam, who was come to stand in the last state of the fallen soul. . . . The progress of these terrors is plainly shown in our Lord's agony in the garden, when the reality of this eternal death so broke in upon him, so awakened and stirred itself in him, as to force great drops of blood to sweat from his body.

William Law: An Appeal.