, the great prophet of the Old Covenant, was inextricably mingled
with all the Jewish expectations of a Messiah, and these expectations
were full of wrath. The coming of Elijah would be the coming of a day of
fire, in which the sun should be turned into blackness and the moon into
blood, and the powers of heaven should be shaken. Already the noonday
sun was shrouded in unnatural eclipse; might not some awful form at any
moment rend the heavens and come down, touch the mountains and they
should smoke? The vague anticipation of conscious guilt was unfulfilled.
Not such as yet was to be the method of God's workings. His messages to
man for many ages more were not to be in the thunder and earthquake, not
in rushing wind or roaring flame, but in the "still small voice"
speaking always amid the apparent silences of Time in whispers
intelligible to man's heart, but in which there is neither speech nor
language, though the voice is heard.

But now the end was very rapidly approaching, and Jesus, who had been
hanging for nearly six hours upon the cross, was suffering from that
torment of thirst which is most difficult of all for the human frame to
bear--perhaps the most unmitigated of the many separate sources of
anguish which were combined in this worst form of death. No doubt this
burning thirst was aggravated by seeing the Roman soldiers drinking so
near the cross; and happily for mankind, Jesus had never sanctioned the
unnatural affectation of stoic impassibility. And so he uttered the one
sole word of physical suffering which had been wrung from him by all the
hours in which he had endured the extreme of all that man can inflict.
He cried aloud, "I thirst." Probably a few hours before, the cry would
have only provoked a roar of frantic mockery; but now the lookers-on
were reduced by awe to a readier humanity. Near the cross there lay on
the ground the large earthen vessel containing the _posca_, which was
the ordinary drink of the Roman soldiers. The mouth of it was filled
with a piece of sponge, which served as a cork. Instantly some one--we
know not whether he was friend or enemy, or merely one who was there out
of idle curiosity--took out the sponge and dipped it in the posca to
give it to Jesus. But low as was the elevation of the cross, the head of
the sufferer, as it rested on the horizontal beam of the accursed tree,
was just beyond the man's reach; and therefore he put the sponge at the
end of a stalk of hyssop--abou