"HOLY-CROSS DAY" was the occasion of an "Annual Christian Sermon,"
which the Jews in Rome were forced to attend; and the poem which bears
this title is prefaced by an extract from an imaginary "Diary by a
Bishop's Secretary," dated 1600; and expatiating on the merciful
purpose, and regenerating effect of this sermon. What the assembled Jews
may have really felt about it, Mr. Browning sets forth in the words of
one of the congregation.

This man describes the hustling and bustling, the crowding and
packing--the suppressed stir as of human vermin imprisoned in a small
space; the sham groans, and sham conversions which follow in their due
course; and as he thus dwells on his national and personal degradation,
his tone has the bitter irony of one who has both realized and accepted
it. But the irony recoils on those who have inflicted the
degradation--on the so-called Christians who would throttle the Jew's
creed while they "gut" his purse, and make him the instrument of their
own sins; and is soon lost in the emotion of a pathetic and solemn
prayer; the supposed death-bed utterance of Rabbi Ben Ezra.

The prayer is an invocation to the justice, and to the sympathy of
Christ. It claims His help against the enemies who are also His own. It
concedes, as possible, that He was in truth the Messiah, crucified by
the nation of which He claimed a crown. But it points to His Christian
followers as inflicting on Him a still deeper outrage: a belief which
the lips profess, and which the life derides and discredits. It urges,
in the Jew's behalf, the ignorance, the fear, in which the deed was
done; the bitter sufferings by which it has been expiated. It pleads his
long endurance, as testimony to the fact, that he withstands Barabbas
now, as he withstood Christ "then;" that he strives to wrest Christ's
name from the "Devil's crew," though the shadow of His face be upon him.