like this. He had a desire "to depart, and to be with Christ;" and vast numbers of Christian men have confronted cruel torments for Christ's sake with unshaken fortitude, and have forgotten the sharp pain of the axe and the sword, and the rage of wild beasts, and the fierce heat of the fires of martyrdom, in the triumphant energy of their faith and their passionate longing to see the face of Christ. But to Christ death rose up in appalling terror between Himself and His return to God. He said to His disciples that, if they loved Him, they would rejoice because He had told them that He was going to the Father; but He Himself could not rejoice. Even before He was nailed to the cross, He was overwhelmed with a sorrow which nearly crushed His strength, and under which He felt that He must die.

I

I cannot believe that His terror was caused by His anticipation of the physical tortures of crucifixion. Crucifixion was a very painful form of death, but while these indications of our Lord's dismay in anticipation of His last hours are recorded by the Evangelists, it is significant that not one of them dwells upon the physical anguish which He must have endured upon the cross. Their ample narratives say nothing of the throbbing pain which He must have suffered from the nails which were driven through His hands, nothing of the sharp pangs which must have shot through every fibre of His frame, nothing of the fever which must have been kindled in His blood. But they speak 'John xiv. 29.

of a mysterious spiritual sorrow which forced Him to utter the most bitter cry that can ever break from a human heart; and it was into the dark shadow of this sorrow that He seems to have come as soon as He entered into Gethsemane.

The agony of the garden is, indeed, inexplicable until we see Him on the cross. It was an awful death a death of great physical suffering, but the physical suffering was the least terrible element of its complicated woe. He had come into the world to restore men to righteousness and to God, but during the few hours which preceded His crucifixion there had been committed a series of atrocious sins, and it must have seemed to Him that He had been led to His Death by a dark procession of the basest crimes of which wicked men can be guilty, and their evil and malignant forms surrounded Him in His agony, mocking His sufferings and exulting in His shame. Corrupt and ambitious priests, whose power He imperilled, had conspired and plotted against His life; lying witnesses had charged Him-Him, the Son of God!-with blasphemy; He had been betrayed by a false friend; the people who a few days before had rent the air with cries of "Hosanna," who had brought to Him their sick, their blind, their deaf, their dumb, and He had healed them all, and to some of whom He had given their dead children alive again—the people, maddened with resentment because He refused to satisfy their hopes of secular greatness and glory, savagely cried for His blood; the Roman governor, after pronouncing Him

innocent of the crime that was charged against Him, gave Him up to sacerdotal hatred and popular fury. Those few brief hours had revealed the infirmity of His friends as well as the relentless wickedness of His enemies. His very Disciples, as soon as He was arrested, "all forsook Him and fled." Peter, who had been most vehement in his protestations of devotion, denied Him thrice with oaths and cursings. As He . hung on the cross between two criminals, the object of heartless jests and insults, it seems as though only a solitary Apostle and a few faithful women remained near Him.

All this He could have endured; but there came another and still more appalling sorrow. His fellowship with the Father had been intimate and unbroken. He had lived in the life of God. Till now He could always say, "I am not alone, for the Father is with me," but He can say it no longer. The light of God's presence is lost, He is left in awful isolation, and He cries, "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?" In the "hour of great darkness" which has fallen upon Him He still clings to the Father with an invincible trust and an immeasurable love, and the agony of being deserted of God is more than He can bear. His heart is broken. Death comes upon Him from within as well as from without; and He dies as much from the loss of the sense of God's presence as from the exhaustion of crucifixion.2

I

This is not martyrdom.

Matt. xxvi. 46; Mark xv. 14.

2 Note D.

What is it? He has never sinned.

He is the Son of

God, and inherits the infinite love of the Father. In the hour of His anguish He is consummating the work which is dearest to the Father's heart; but He endures that loss of fellowship with the Divine blessedness, that exile from the joys of God's presence, which is the effect of the Divine wrath in the case of the impenitent.

What is the explanation of this mysterious anguish ? He has come to make known to sinful men the love of God, and He Himself, who has never sinned, is forsaken of God. He has declared that He is the way to the Father, and that no man cometh to the Father except through Him-and now, even to Him, access to God is closed. The Son of God, the only-begotten Son, in whom the Father is well pleased, is not only the victim of human malignity; in the very extremity of His woe, He is deprived of all Divine consolation; He declares that God has forsaken Him!

I decline to accept any explanation of these words which implies that they do not represent the actual truth of our Lord's position. There are times when great suffering may force from our lips words about God of which, when the suffering is over, we repent. We think, we say, that He has forsaken us, and we charge Him unjustly. Did Christ repent that He had uttered this cry? Impossible. There are times when we mistake depression and gloom, which are the effect of purely physical causes, for the effect of the withdrawal of God's presence. Did Christ commit that mistake? I say, again, Impossible.

I take the words in their clear and unqualified

meaning. It is only by taking them in this way that very much that is contained in the previous history of our Lord becomes intelligible. He knew that He was to die this awful death; that He was to be forsaken of God in His last hours. This explains why it was that his mind was filled with the thought of His Death from the very first, and why, as it approached, it filled Him with dismay.

Surely this supreme anguish must have a unique relation to the redemption of mankind. If not, why was it that the anticipation of His Death was associated with some of the greatest moments in His history? Why did He speak of it to Peter, when Peter confessed that He was the Christ, the Son of the living God? Why did it occur to Him when the Greeks came to speak to Him at the Feast? Why did He institute a religious rite to commemorate it?

When I try to discover the meaning of the sorrow of Christ on the cross, I cannot escape the conclusion that He is somehow involved in this deep and dreadful darkness by the sins of the race whose nature He has assumed. If the dread with which He anticipated His Death, and if the Divine desertion which made His Death so awful, are to pass into Doctrine, I can conceive of no other form in which they can appear than that which they assume in the Apostolic Epistles"He was delivered for our offences."I "He died for our sins;" He "suffered, He "suffered, . . . . the Just for the unjust;"3" He was made a curse for us." 4 Rom. iv. 25. 2 1 Cor. xv. 3. 31 Pet. iii. 18.

4 Gal. iii. 13.