ARTICLE IV.
"SUFFERED UNDER PONTIUS PILATE, WAS CRUCIFIED, DEAD, AND BURIED."
"SUFFERED UNDER PONTIUS PILATE, WAS CRUCIFIED"] How Necessity necessary the knowledge of this Article, and how assiduous the pastor should be in stirring up, in the minds of the faithful, the frequent recollection of our Lord's passion, we learn from the apostle when he says, that he knows nothing but Christ, and him crucified. [1] In illustrating this subject, therefore, the greatest care and pains should be taken by the pastor, that the faithful, excited by the remembrance of so great a benefit, may be entirely devoted to the contemplation of the goodness and love of God towards us.
The first part of this Article (of the second we shall treat hereafter,) proposes to our belief, that when Pontius Pilate governed the province of Judea, under Tiberius Caesar, Christ the Lord was nailed to a cross. Having been seized as a malefactor, mocked, outraged, and tortured, in various forms, he was finally crucified. Nor can it be matter of doubt that his soul, as to its inferior part, was not insensible to these torments; for as he really assumed human nature, it is a necessary consequence that he really, and in his soul, experienced a most acute sense of pain. Hence these words of the Saviour: " My soul is sorrowful, even unto death." [2] Although human nature was united to the divine person, he felt the bitterness of his passion as acutely as if no such union had existed; because in the one person of Jesus Christ were preserved the properties of both natures, human and divine; and, therefore, what was passible and mortal remain ed passible and mortal; and again, what was impassible and immortal, that is his divine nature, continued impassible and immortal.
But, if we find it here recorded with such historical minuteness, that Jesus Christ suffered when Pilate was procurator of Judea, [3] the pastor will explain the reason it is, that by fixing the time, as the apostle does, in the sixth chapter of his first Epistle to Timothy, so important and so necessary an event may be ascertained by all with greater certainty; and to show that the event verified the prediction of the Saviour; "They shall deliver him to the Gentiles, to be mocked, and scourged, and crucified." [4]
That he suffered the particular death of the cross is also to be traced to the economy of the divine councils, " that whence death came, thence life might arise." The serpent, which overcame our first parents by the fruit of the tree, was himself overcome by Christ on the wood of the cross. Many reasons, which the
