Thomas More.  The Sadness of Christ: and Final Prayers and Benedictions.  New York: Scepter, 1993.

Book Review by: Pastor Kenneth Lahners

Many of you may be familiar with Sir Thomas More from the movie A Man for All Seasons.  More was a sixteenth century English lawyer, judge, and diplomat.  He was also a noted writer and scholar.  His book Utopia introduced that word into general English usage.  He was also a very devout Christian and a defender of the Roman Catholic Church during the time of the Protestant Reformation.
King Henry VIII appointed More Lord Chancellor (an office similar to prime minister) in 1529 but he resigned three years later because of Henry’s increasing domination of the Church.  In 1534 More was imprisoned in the Tower of London for refusing both to endorse Henry’s second marriage (to Anne Boleyn) and to acknowledge Henry as head of the Church in England.  After fifteen months imprisonment, he was executed on July 6, 1535, proclaiming that he was “the king’s good servant, but God’s first.”  More was declared a saint by the Roman Catholic Church in 1935.
The Sadness of Christ was written while More was in prison.  It is an examination of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, where he is weighed down with sadness and fear.  However, Jesus did not give into these temptations, but stayed awake and ready by praying (in contrast to his disciples, who repeatedly fell asleep).  It is through prayer that Christ received the strength to meet his imminent arrest and execution.  More argues that we, like Christ, must be very attentive in prayer, remembering who we are addressing and what is at stake.  When we are in distress, Christ should be our example and strength:

Whoever is utterly crushed by feelings of anxiety and fear and is tortured by the fear that he may yield to despair, let him consider this agony of Christ, let him meditate on it constantly and turn it over in his mind, let him drink deep and health-giving draughts of consolation from this spring.  For here he will see the loving Shepherd lifting the weak lamb on His shoulders playing the same role as he himself does, expressing his very own feelings, and for this reason: so that anyone who later feels himself disturbed by similar feelings might take courage and not think that he must despair.

From what we know of More, he followed this example of Jesus throughout his life as well as during the difficult days of his imprisonment. 

Also included in this edition are several prayers and Scripture quotations More wrote and collected in his last days.  This is a profound devotional that demands attentive reading, but which urges us on to constant prayer, especially in times of trial.

Church history reveals a . . . formula for the penetration of unbelief, repeated  . . . in modern Protestantism with disheartening uniformity: First the demand for toleration, then the demand for equal rights, finally the use of the ecclesiastical machinery for the disenfranchisement and suppression of the dissident orthodox minority.
Arthur Carl Piepkorn, 1937