be transcended by one far more lofty and divine, and
though this end of all her high hopes must have tried her faith with an
overwhelming and unspeakable sorrow, yet she was true to him in this
supreme hour of his humiliation, and would have done for him all that a
mother's sympathy and love can do. Nor had he for a moment forgotten her
who had bent over his infant slumbers, and with whom he had shared those
thirty years in the cottage at Nazareth. Tenderly and sadly he thought
of the future that awaited her during the remaining years of her life on
earth, troubled as they must be by the tumults and persecutions of a
struggling and nascent faith. After his resurrection her lot was wholly
cast among his apostles, and the apostle whom he loved the most, the
apostle who was nearest to him in heart and life, seemed the fittest to
take care of her. To him, therefore--to John whom he had loved more than
his brethren--to John whose head had leaned upon his breast at the Last
Supper, he consigned her as a sacred charge. "Woman," he said to her, in
fewest words, but in words which breathed the uttermost spirit of
tenderness, "behold thy son;" and then to St. John, "Behold thy mother."
He could make no gesture with those pierced hands, but he could bend his
head. They listened in speechless emotion, but from that hour--perhaps
from that very moment--leading her away from a spectacle which did but
torture her soul with unavailing agony, that disciple took her to his
own home.

It was now noon, and at the Holy City the sunshine should have been
burning over that scene of horror with a power such as it has in the
full depth of an English summer-time. But instead of this, the face of
the heavens was black, and the noonday sun was "turned into darkness,"
on "this great and terrible day of the Lord." It could have been no
darkness of any natural eclipse, for the Paschal moon was at the full;
but it was one of those "signs from heaven" for which, during the
ministry of Jesus, the Pharisees had so often clamored in vain. The
early Fathers appealed to pagan authorities--the historian Phallus, the
chronicler Phlegon--for such a darkness; but we have no means of testing
the accuracy of these references, and it is quite possible that the
darkness was a local gloom which hung densely over the guilty city and
its immediate neighborhood. But whatever it was, it clearly filled the
minds of all who beheld it with yet deeper misgiving. The taunts