and the false Messiah. "Ah! you who can break down the temple and build it up again in three days, can you save yourself from the cross?" cried one, while the rest applauded his sally. "If you really are the Son of God, why don't you come down?" was caught up from mouth to mouth among another group. We are expressly told that the high priests and Scribes hurled at him the taunting challenge: "There hangs the Messiah, · Israel's mighty king! If he will but come down from the cross, we will all believe in him." Nay, so infectious is the spirit of reviling mockery that the very robbers who were crucified with him caught up the cry, — as if they found some alleviation in their pain by venting their rage and spleen on Jesus.

According to the Gospels, even his own deeds of mercy were now thrown in his teeth: "He saved others, but he cannot save himself!" And since the primitive Christians regarded the twenty-second Psalm as the programme of the sufferings of the Messiah, Matthew goes the length, in the face of all likelihood, of making the councillors cry: "He trusted in God! Then let Him deliver him, if He takes pleasure in him; for he said, I am the Son of God!"" We need not stay to consider this any further; but we would fain know, were it possible, whether the words of scorn went home, and what was passing in the sufferer's heart during these hours. But here we can only guess; for Jesus, with unbroken firmness, preserved a lofty, a heroic, a majestic silence. He had not so deadened his human feelings by fanatical exaltation as to rejoice, as many martyrs have done, in the midst of his sufferings. But he showed such strength of soul, such self-command, that in the midst of hideous tortures not a sigh or lamentation broke from his lips, at any rate until the very hour of his death. Such was the fruit of his unrelaxed self-discipline, and, at the last, of his prayer in Gethsemane ! 2 So after all we are not wholly without indications of the mood in which he met his death. He had done all he could to keep his consciousness unclouded, and even in these hours he lived with God. He doubtless thought of his suffering and death, since the event had shown that they were inevitable, as a part of his life-task, needful to insure the establishment of the kingdom of God. He had been faithful, he had shrunk from nothing, and it was not in vain that he had braved the worst. He could think of the past without self-reproach; and the 1 See Psalm xxii. 7-9; compare vol. ii. pp. 308–310. 2 See pp. 424, 425.

future was rich in the fairest hopes.

His eye was turned to heaven with unbroken trust in God; with unextinguished love for man he looked down from his cross upon those blinded multitudes and that city that murdered the prophets !

To a certain extent at least his thoughts are strikingly interpreted by a few sentences which the third Evangelist lays upon his lips. He tells us that as Jesus was being fixed to the cross, or immediately afterwards, he said: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!" But at this moment he was surrounded only by the Roman soldiers, who were simply doing their duty; whereas the prayer must, from the nature of the case, be referred to the Jews, and especially the members of the Sanhedrim. And yet, even if he did not give it utterance, there lived in the soul of Jesus through these hours of horror an exceeding love even of those who hated him, — and hated him because of his fidelity to God, — which might well force a prayer for them to his lips; there lived an unshaken reverence for human nature which could not admit the possibility of a wanton crime committed with open eyes. Again, when the Jewish elders mocked him, and the soldiers while offering him vinegar followed their example, Luke makes him speak a second time. One of the two robbers, he says, had been reviling him and saying, "Are not you the Messiah? Well, then, rescue yourself and us!" But the other rebuked him and said: "Have you no fear of God while undergoing the same punishment as this man? And we indeed rightly, for we are receiving what our deeds deserve; but he has done no wrong." Then he turned to the cross that stood between them and said: "Jesus, think of me when you come with your kingdom!" Upon which Jesus spoke the words of comfort: "Of a truth I tell you that this very day you shall be with me in paradise." Here again we are unable to accept the words as historical; partly because the first two Gospels leave no room for them, and because of their reference to the paradise in the underworld; 2 but chiefly because they represent the malefactor as expecting Jesus to return to earth as the Messiah, and to raise up and judge the dead. But, for all that, the unshaken confidence in his own future, the desire to save the lost even now, and the lofty sense of conscious dignity which are here ascribed to Jesus, unquestionably reflect with perfect fidelity his tone of heart and mind even in these hours of horror.

1 See pp. 228 ff., 175: compare Acts vii. 60 and Isaiah liii. 12.
2 See ante, pp. 40, 42.

Another exclamation is recorded by our oldest winesses, Matthew and Mark, as uttered from the cross. About three in the afternoon, it seems, when his life was fast ebbing, his suffering became for a moment more than he could bear, and at last he broke the lofty silence he had hitherto preserved by a piercing cry of pain that almost sounded like a cry of despair. The Evangelists accordingly, with the twenty-second Psalm still in their minds, interpret the cry by the opening words of that poem: “Eli, Eli! lama sabacthani? ” — “ My God, my God! why hast thou forsaken me?" Now some of those who were standing by, the Evangelists go on to say, when they heard his cry, exclaimed in mockery, "Listen! he is calling for Elijah!" upon which one of them ran up, and dipping a sponge into the vinegar put it on the end of a cane, reached it up to his lips to refresh him a little, and said, “Well, then, let us see whether Elijah will come and take him down." Or perhaps these latter words were spoken by some of the others who held their companion back: “Let it alone! we must see whether Elijah comes to take him down." Now this supposed exclamation of Jesus has sometimes been interpreted very perversely, and has even given rise within the Church to such offensive doctrines as that Jesus lost his faith in himself and his cause, or that God did actually desert him because of the sins of mankind. But in any case it seems to us far more probable that these words of the Messianic passion-psalm were put into the mouth of Jesus by tradition than that he really uttered them. The sequel, too, throws great suspicion on the report; for the Jews were not allowed to approach the cross, and what did the Roman soldiers know about Elijah? Besides, if the Jews had really heard him cry Eli!" or "Eloi!" they would hardly have mistaken the words of the twenty-second Psalm for a cry to the precursor of the Messianic kingdom, a mistake which their raillery is made to depend. We must, therefore, put aside these words, as in all probability unhistorical; but, on the other hand, there is not the least reason to doubt the uniform tradition that a few moments before his death Jesus uttered a cry of pain, and that, as he was gasping almost in the death-throe, some one refreshed him by putting a sponge to his lips, dipped in the soldiers' sour drink,- a mixture of vinegar, water, and eggs, — a cruse of which would certainly be there for the use of the sentries.1

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upon

Only a few minutes afterwards, in the very death-struggle

1 Compare Luke xxiii. 36; John xix. 28, 29; Hebrews v. 7.

itself, followed a second cry, which Luke interprets, again at the suggestion of a passage in a psalm,1 as his last prayer of trust: "Father! into thy hands I commend my spirit." Then his head sunk upon his breast, a deadly pallor overspread his face, and all was over.

The struggle was at an end; the suffering was done. Comparatively speaking, it had not been long. Jesus certainly breathed his last before sunset, and apparently soon after three in the afternoon. He had, therefore, only been upon the cross six, or at most eight, hours. But all that he had already gone through during the last few days and weeks, especially the evening, the night, and the morning that had just passed, together with the scourging and maltreatment he had undergone, and above all his intense mental suffering, had already almost completely exhausted his powers (as we saw on the way from the judgment hall), and his remaining strength fast ebbed away. It has sometimes been supposed that the great cry he uttered at the moment of his death was caused by sudden cessation of the action of the heart, the bursting of a blood vessel in the heart or brain, or the rupture of an artery. But all this is the merest guess-work.

For us, let us confess it, it is a great relief that his sufferings were not protracted. In the midst of all the mysteries which perplex the course of human events, there is something unspeakably dark and painful in such an end to such a life. But the darkness is not unrelieved by light. Proof against the fiercest trials, unflinching when called to the supremest sacrifice, unconditionally faithful to the lofty task of his life, obedient without reserve to the holy will of his Father, Jesus did in truth lay the foundations of the kingdom of God, though far otherwise than he conceived; he did in truth bind the world to him by eternal ties of deepest obligation, and make himself the Christ. The apostolic age did well to emphasize the fact that God, when he would bring many sons to glory, that is to the realization of their exalted and

blessed destiny as men, - had made the accomplisher of their salvation rise through suffering to a spotless moral perfection, and thereby also to the highest rank in the kingdom of heaven.2 For Jesus himself made perfect, and mankind bound to him with eternal ties, even that cross on Golgotha is not too high a price!

It is but natural that the imagination of the Christians in every age, even the earliest, should have seized upon this 2 Hebrews ii. 10, v. 8, 9.

1 Psalm xxxi. 5.

scene of the Master's death upon the cross; and since the gross dishonor done to him outrages our sense of the fitness of things even now, after so many centuries, we can hardly wonder that Christian feeling early demanded some immediate compensation, some visible and instantaneous glorification of Jesus, to blot out at once the deep humiliation and shame of his execution. God's sacred protest at the murder of his Son must have taken some concrete shape; the blessed fruits of the Lord's self-sacrifice, the glorious triumph of the rejected one over the hostile powers which seemed to have subdued him, must have found some visible expression; and all this must have appeared in forms so palpable and overwhelming that the spectators returned from the hill with their hearts filled with reverence, while all who had been indifferent or hostile were covered with dismay and shame. Hence all those metaphors in our Gospels which became more than metaphors almost immediately; hence those fresh lines which were constantly added to the picture of the crucifixion to make the rehabilitation of the crucified more and more complete.

Even the oldest accounts we have mention two wonders: During the last hours of the life of Jesus we are told, from noon till three o'clock, darkness came over all the earth. Perhaps the period indicated is intended to cover the whole time when Jesus was upon the cross. Now, since the Passover is always celebrated at full moon, an actual eclipse of the sun is of course out of the question; but the symbolical significance of the story is as clear as possible. Nature herself mourned for the murder of the Messiah. The sun refused to look upon the scene of horror, and concealed his splendor while the "Light of the World" was setting. At the very moment, we are further told, when Jesus breathed his last, the heavenly adorned and embroidered tapestry that hung as a curtain between the Holy and the Holy of Holies in the temple was rent in two from top to bottom. Here also it would be absurd to look for an historic fact; but the thought at once suggests itself, that at the death of Jesus the partition behind which the thrice Holy One withdrew from every eye in mysterious obscurity was taken away, and access to Him was made free to all while the priestly dignity was annulled, or rather made the portion of every one, and the fear of the Lord was superseded by trustful communion with the Father. In place of this, the Gospel of the Hebrews 1 Compare Hebrews ix. 7 ff., x. 19 ff.