We follow out of the garden to the meeting-place of the Sanhedrin, to the Judgment seat of Pilate, to the palace of Herod.  Any impulse to criticise S. Peter is speedily suppressed:  we have denied so often under such trifling provocation.  S. Peter was frightened from participation in the act of our Lord’s sacrifice through mortal fear of his life.  We have stayed away from the offering of the Holy Sacrifice, how often! from mere sloth, from disinclination to effort, from the fact that our participation would prevent us from joining in some act of worldly amusement.  S. Peter, following to the high Priest’s palace to see the end, looks heroic beside our frivolity.  We follow through the details of the trial, we go to Herod’s palace and see the brutal treatment of our Lord, and we remember of these men that their conduct was founded in ignorance.  We do not for a moment believe that they would have spit upon our Lord and buffeted Him, and crowned Him with a crown of thorns, if they had believed that He was God.  But we believe that He is God.  Our desertion of Him when we sin, our contempt of His expressed ideals when we compromise with the world, our departure from His example when we excuse ourselves on the ground of very minor inconveniences from keeping some holy day or fasting day, are not founded in ignorance at all.  They can hardly be said to be founded in weakness, so slight is the temptation that we do not resist.  As we meditate on the Passion, as we keep Good Friday, very pitiful all our idleness and subterfuges appear to us.  But we so easily shake off the effect!  We emerge from our meditation almost convinced that the stinging sense of the truth of our conduct which we are experiencing is the equivalent of having reformed it.  We go out with a glow of virtue and by night realise that we have sinned again!

It is no doubt well that we should not be permanently depressed about our spiritual state, but only because we have taken all the pains we can to heal the wounds of sin.  There is no need that any one should abide in a state of sin because there has been in the Precious Blood a fountain opened for sin and for uncleanness, and by washing therein, though our souls were as scarlet, they shall become white as snow.  We have the right to a certain optimism about ourselves if it be founded on actual spiritual activity which ceaselessly tries to reproduce the Christ-experience in us, even the experience of the Passion by the voluntary self-discipline to which we subject ourselves.  A brilliant writer has spoken of those whose view of their lives is drawn from “that fountain of all optimism—­sloth.”  That is a true saying:  our optimism is often no more than an idle refusal to face facts; a quaint and good-natured assumption that nothing very much matters and that everything will be all right in the end!