uman body which soon became a weight of agony.

It was probably at this moment of inconceivable horror that the voice of
the Son of Man was heard uplifted, not in a scream of natural agony at
that fearful torture, but calmly praying in divine compassion for his
brutal and pitiless murderers--aye, and for all who in their sinful
ignorance crucify him afresh forever: "Father, forgive them, for they
know not what they do."

And then the accursed tree--with its living human burden hanging upon it
in helpless agony, and suffering fresh tortures as every movement
irritated the fresh rents in hands and feet--was slowly heaved up by
strong arms, and the end of it fixed firmly in a hole dug deep in the
ground for that purpose. The feet were but a little raised above the
earth. The victim was in full reach of every hand that might choose to
strike, in close proximity to every gesture of insult and hatred. He
might hang for hours to be abused, outraged, even tortured by the
ever-moving multitude who, with that desire to see what is horrible
which always characterizes the coarsest hearts, had thronged to gaze
upon a sight which should rather have made them weep tears of blood.

And there, in tortures which grew ever more insupportable, ever more
maddening as time flowed on, the unhappy victims might linger in a
living death so cruelly intolerable that often they were driven to
entreat and implore the spectators or the executioners, for dear pity's
sake, to put an end to anguish too awful for man to bear--conscious to
the last, and often, with tears of abject misery, beseeching from their
enemies the priceless boon of death.

For indeed a death by crucifixion seems to include all that pain and
death _can_ have of horrible and ghastly--dizziness, cramp, thirst,
starvation, sleeplessness, traumatic fever, tetanus, publicity of shame,
long continuance of torment, horror of anticipation, mortification of
untended wounds--all intensified just up to the point at which they can
be endured at all, but all stopping just short of the point which would
give to the sufferer the relief of unconsciousness. The unnatural
position made every movement painful; the lacerated veins and crushed
tendons throbbed with incessant anguish; the wounds, inflamed by
exposure, gradually gangrened; the arteries--especially of the head and
stomach--became swollen and oppressed with surcharged blood; and while
each variety of misery went on gradually increasing