nds a perfect example; in that
death an infinite redemption. As he contemplates the Incarnation and the
Crucifixion, he no longer feels that God is far away, and that this
earth is but a disregarded speck in the infinite azure, and he himself
but an insignificant atom chance-thrown amid the thousand million living
souls of an innumerable race, but he exclaims in faith and hope and
love: "Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men; yea, he will be their
God, and they shall be his people." "Ye are the temple of the living
God; as God hath said, I will dwell in them, and walk in them."

The sun was westering as the darkness rolled away from the completed
sacrifice. They who had not thought it a pollution to inaugurate their
feast by the murder of their Messiah, were seriously alarmed lest the
sanctity of the following day--which began at sunset--should be
compromised by the hanging of the corpses on the cross. And horrible to
relate, the crucified often lived for many hours--nay, even for two
days--in their torture. The Jews therefore begged Pilate that their legs
might be broken, and their bodies taken down. This _crurifragium_, as it
was called, consisted in striking the legs of the sufferers with a heavy
mallet, a violence which seemed always to have hastened, if it did not
instantly cause, their death. Nor would the Jews be the only persons who
would be anxious to hasten the end by giving the deadly blow. Until life
was extinct the soldiers appointed to guard the execution dared not
leave the ground. The wish, therefore, was readily granted. The soldiers
broke the legs of the two malefactors first, and then, coming to Jesus,
found that the great cry had been indeed his last, and that he was dead
already. They did not therefore break his legs, and thus unwittingly
preserved the symbolism of that Paschal lamb, of which he was the
antetype, and of which it had been commanded that "a bone of it shall
not be broken." And yet, as he might be only in a syncope--as instances
had been known in which men apparently dead had been taken down from the
cross and resuscitated--and as the lives of the soldiers would have had
to answer for any irregularity, one of them, in order to make death
certain, drove the broad head of his _hasta_ into his side. The wound,
as it was meant to do, pierced the region of the heart, and "forthwith,"
says St. John, with an emphatic appeal to the truthfulness of his
eye-witness--an appeal which would be s