and
jeers of the Jewish priests and the heathen soldiers were evidently
confined to the earlier hours of the Crucifixion. Its later stages seem
to have thrilled alike the guilty and the innocent with emotions of
dread and horror. Of the incidents of those last three hours we are told
nothing, and that awful obscuration of the noonday sun may well have
overawed every heart into an inaction respecting which there was nothing
to relate. What Jesus suffered _then_ for us men and our salvation we
cannot know, for during those three hours he hung upon his cross in
silence and darkness; or, if he spoke, there was none there to record
his words. But toward the close of that time his anguish culminated,
and, emptied to the very uttermost of that glory which he had since the
world began, drinking to the very deepest dregs the cup of humiliation
and bitterness, enduring not only to have taken upon him the form of a
servant, but also to suffer the last infamy which human hatred could
impose on servile helplessness, he uttered that mysterious cry, of which
the full significance will never be fathomed by man: _Eli, Eli, lama
Sabachthani?_ ("My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?")

In those words, quoting the psalm in which the early Fathers rightly
saw a far-off prophecy of the whole passion of Christ, he borrowed from
David's utter agony the expression of his own. In that hour he was
alone. Sinking from depth to depth of unfathomable suffering, until, at
the close approach of a death which--because he was God, and yet had
been made man--was more awful to him than it could ever be to any of the
sons of men, it seemed as if even his divine humanity could endure no
more.

Doubtless the voice of the sufferer--though uttered loudly in that
paroxysm of an emotion which, in another, would almost have touched the
verge of despair--was yet rendered more uncertain and indistinct from
the condition of exhaustion in which he hung; and so, amid the darkness,
and confused noise, and dull footsteps of the moving multitude, there
were some who did not hear what he had said. They had caught only the
first syllable, and said to one another that he had called on the name
of Elijah. The readiness with which they seized this false impression is
another proof of the wild state of excitement and terror--the
involuntary dread of something great and unforeseen and terrible--to
which they had been reduced from their former savage insolence. For
Elijah