Good Friday

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 14, 2 April 1903, Page 1

Good Friday

A line of one of Longfellow's poems will have it that 'by going wrong all things come right. 1 The bearing of that observation lies in its application. And it seems peculiarly applicable to the change which has of late years come over the attitude of our Anglican friends towards the celebration of Good Friday. Two sturdy protests — with which we are in cordial sympathy — have recently been made by the Anglican clergy und laity in Christchurch and in Invercargill against the desecration of that sacred day by sports carnivals. A generation ago such protests would have been impossible. In Scotland, outside the scattered Catholic fold, no observance of the day took place — it was not even a 'dies non,' or holiday in banks and Government offices. In England Good Friday was a State and bank holiday. The day was — and still is — ushered in by reverberant street cries of ' hot cross-buns '— ' One a penny, buns ; Two a penny, buns ; One a penny, two a penny,

Hot cross-buns^ ' But beyond the quiet rest, the devouring of the small, sugar-browned, cross-marked buns, and the occasional appearance of salt-fish on old-fashioned dinner-tables, there was little to distinguish Good Friday from any

other day of the year from Circumcision to St. Sylves-* tor's. But the spread of Ritualism has altered all that. 'At most of the more frequented places of worship/ rays a well-informed English Catholic writer on the subject, 'our Anglican friends on Good Friday are invited to attend some three, four, or even five different sarr vices. What is more striking, the devotion of the Three Hours' Agony at mid-day has become as firmly established among them as if it had come down on " Continuity " principles from the bishops of the ancient British Church, instead of being the pious invention of a Peruvian Jesuit (Father Alonso Mesial in the eighteenth century. It is not only in churches regarded as distinctly Ritualistic that it has taken root, but it flourishes in Anglican cathedrals and is attended by crowded" congregations under episcopal patronage. Without pretending to enumerate all, the newspapers show that in at least ten of the great cathedrals, including York Minster and St. Paul's, the Three Hours' service is punctually carried out ; while in numerous other churches less immediately subiect to episcopal influence, we hear of "Mass of the Presanctified," of "Adoration of the Cross," of " Tenebrae," and the open-air processions of the "Way of the Cross." '

The service of the Three Hours' Agony is well known to members of the Anglican Church in every part of Australasia. We understand that Presbyterians suitably observe that sacred day in America : a mighty change from the' not far-ofl times when Scottish and New England laws punished with fine or lash or prison-cell those who kept holy any of the old festivals of the Catholic Church. In 1895 Dr. Parker (Congregationalist) celebrated the day in the City Temple, London, with music and oratory, in what was termed by the ' Daily Telegraph' 'a spirit of decorous jollity.' The Congregationalist leader missed the significance of that solemn day as much as the ill-advised sports who make it the occasion for inopportune merry-making, and the soft voluptuaries who would ostracise from men's minds every thought of pain and suffering as if it were an accursed thing. But, happily, the Churches are fast veering round to the true Catholic feeling which regards Good Friday as the saddest and most solemn day in all the circling year. The Church, the Spouse of Christ, does not mourn over His death in the sense that she would have it reversed : she weeps in sympathy for the bitter storm of agony through which He passed for us, especially in those closing scenes upon the hill of Calvary.