Good Friday: "the passion being as it were represented before our eyes"

Charles Wheatly, in his A Rational Illustration of the Book of Common Prayer (first published in 1710, re-published numerous times throughout the 18th century), describes three characteristics of the Prayer Book provision for Good Friday - fasting, the reading of the Passion according to Saint John, and the solemn collects:

The commemoration of our Saviour's sufferings hath been kept from the very first age of Christianity, and was always observed as a day of the strictest fasting and humiliation; not that the grief and affliction they then expressed did arise from the loss they sustained, but from a sense of the guilt of the sins of the whole world, which drew upon our blessed Redeemer that painful and shameful death of the cross. 

The Gospel for this day (besides its coming in course) is properly taken out of St. John rather than any other Evangelist, because he was the only one that was present at the passion, and stood by the cross while others fled: and therefore, the passion being as it were represented before our eyes, his testimony is read who saw it himself, and from whose example we may learn not to be ashamed or afraid of the cross of Christ ...

In imitation of which divine and infinite love, the Church endeavours to shew her charity to be boundless and unlimited, by praying in one of the proper Collects, that the effects of Christ's death may be as universal as the design of it, namely, that it may tend to the salvation of all, Jews, Turks, Infidels, and Hereticks.