t, there was a
divine fitness in their act; and wisdom was, even through their sin,
fulfilling her own intention. There are some persons with faces so
handsome that the meanest dress, which would excite laughter or disgust
if worn by others, looks well on them, and the merest shreds of
ornament, stuck on them anyhow, are more attractive than the most
elaborate toilets of persons less favoured by nature. And so about
Christ there was something which converted into ornaments even the
things flung at Him as insults. When they called Him the Friend of
publicans and sinners, though they did it in derision, they were giving
Him a title for which a hundred generations have loved Him; and so,
when they put on His head the crown of thorns, they were unconsciously
bestowing the noblest wreath that man could weave Him. Down through
the ages Jesus passes, still wearing the crown of thorns; and His
followers and lovers desire for Him no other diadem.

Fourthly, this scene teaches the lesson of patience in suffering.

I remember a saint whom it was my privilege to visit in the beginning
of my life as a minister. Though poor and uneducated, she was a person
of very unusual natural powers; her ideas were singularly original, and
she had a charming pleasantness of wit. Though not very old, she knew
that she was doomed to die; and the disease from which she was
suffering was one of the most painful incident to humanity. Often, I
remember, she would tell me, that, when the torture was at the worst,
she lay thinking of the sufferings of the Saviour, and said to herself
that the shooting pains were not so bad as the spikes of the thorns.

Christ's sufferings are a rebuke to our softness and self-pleasing. It
is not, indeed, wrong to enjoy the comforts and the pleasures of life.
God sends these; and, if we receive them with gratitude, they may lift
us nearer to Himself. But we are too terrified to be parted from them
and too afraid of pain and poverty. Especially ought the sufferings of
Christ to brace us up to endure whatever of pain or reproach we may
have to encounter for His sake. Many would like to be Christians, but
are kept back from decision by dread of the laughter of profane
companions or by the prospect of some worldly loss. But we cannot look
at the suffering Saviour without being ashamed of such cowardly fears.
If the crown of thorns now becomes Christ so well as to be the pride
and the song of men and angels, be a