Lord. Such a fact is not unique. Others have slept under the pressure of intense grief arising from sudden affliction, or expected and near death.

The words of Christ on his return are not ad to

oppose the view I have taken. "What! could ye not watch with me one hour? Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak." Here is a rebuke, indeed, but it is addressed to Peter, because he had particularly exposed himself to it by his selfconfident protestations of fidelity, but who now, in an hour after his courageous resolution, is overcome by his own bodily weakWith this delicate rebuke is conveyed one of the most affectionate apologies we can conceive of."The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak." Thy disposition is good, but thou canst not accomplish that to which thy sympathies would urge thee! T'is as well. My conflict thou canst not fight for me.

ness.

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Again Jesus returns to the throne grace, "saying the same words;" again he revisits his disciples, and again leaves them.

This repeated departing and returning shows the depth of the distress that bears him down. But after his third departure, and during his third prayer, we have an unparalleled exhibition of the weight of his sorrow. Says the evangelist Luke, with touching simplicity: "And being in an agony he prayed more earnestly; and his sweat was, as it were, great drops of blood falling down to the ground." Deeply intense must have been the suffering of the spirit that wrought so powerfully upon the physical nature! inconceivably intense, that could so operate upon the emotions of the perfect man Christ Jesus, whose whole nature was under just and complete control! Recollect, again, that it was past the middle of the night, and cold, toocold that the soldiers who came to arrest him, built a fire afterwards to warm themselves; that the Saviour was in a shady valley into which the warmth of the sun penetrated but for a few hours during the middle of the day, and where the chill fogs of the season settled in the damp evening. Yet here, the agony of Jesus throws him into an entire perspiration, and forces the blood through

OS

the pores of the skin, till it stands in large clammy drops upon the surface, staining his garments, and falling down to the ground. What mighty weight of grief is it that here presses open that fountain of blood which ceases not to flow till the heart is exhausted on the cross?

During this, his agony, and in his last prayer, an answer is vouchsafed to him from the Father. An angel descends from heaven and strengthens him. He brings the message of the Father from the throne of Justice, to the man Christ Jesus, and he is consoled by it. The look of deep dejection and distress passes from his brow, and he rises from the earth and returns to his disciples. While he is giving to them his last warning in the flesh, a warning to watch and pray, the cautious tread of the traitor and his band, falls upon his ear, and he is led away by them, "like a lamb to the slaughter," to drink of a cup which Justice poured out for us.

This scene has connected with the garden of Gethsemane a gloom deeper than the shade which dwells under its dark green olive-trees, and which infuses a feeling of

sympathetic sadness into the breast of every Christian traveller that sits within its dilapidated enclosures. But I cannot leave the contemplation of this scene without pondering a moment upon its cause, and asking the reader to do the same.

Why was the Saviour thus bowed down in unprecedented sorrow? He had no sins, no compunctions of his own to harrow up his soul with remorse. He was of no timorous disposition to shrink from the bodily pain of dying. Others have embraced the stake and have gone rejoicing to the cross, and we cannot think so irreverently of the Son of God as to suppose him inferior in physical or moral courage, to frail, sinful men. We cannot admit that He who is our example endured all this agony through apprehension of the insults of the Jews, and the cruelties of the Romans. No. He came voluntarily here, when he knew Judas' plans, and that here he would seek him. He went voluntarily before the sanhedrim. He asked no help from Peter, none from his attendant guards of angels. He went voluntarily to the cross. He came to die on the cross, and "he was straitened

till it was accomplished."* It was not, I am confident, his simple passage through the scenes before him, that whelmed him in this agony. He cannot be our Saviour from death and hell if he quailed before the tortures of the cross. There must have been either another or a superadded cause of his overwhelming sorrow; one far greater in comparison than this. What weight of sorrow, then, was it that oppressed the Son of God in the garden of Gethsemane? We may expect to find it in the earnest supplications that he then offered. He prayed for deliverance; but from what? "O, my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me.' Mark declares,† that he "prayed that, if it were possible, the hour might pass from him." The sources of his sufferings he designates by the term "cup" and "hour;" a term which he often employed to denote his death and its attendant circumstances. We cannot suppose that his prayer respected his present distress, for "the cup" was still before him after the agony was past; as he directly intimates in his rebuke of Peter when he drew his sword in his Master's defence; † Mark xiv. 35.

*See Luke xii. 50.