the days when David traversed them in flight from Absalom.

The beams laid on our Lord proved too heavy in the steeper ascents for
His exhausted strength, and His slow advance so delayed the procession
that the guard became impatient. Here comes a foreigner! A Jew of
Cyrene! Harmless and inoffensive, gladly would he make way for the
crowd. Why should he not bear this burden under which Jesus of
Nazareth is falling to the ground? The insolent soldiers, with oath
and jest, constrain him, and he dares not resist. Probably Simon had
no previous knowledge of Him for whom he bore this load, and loathed
the service he was compelled to render; but that compulsory
companionship with Jesus carried him to Calvary. He beheld the
wondrous tragedy, heard the words which we are to recite; from that day
became, with his family, a humble follower of Jesus. We at least infer
this from Mark's emphatic mention of the fact that he was father of
Alexander and Rufus; whilst the Apostle Paul, in the Epistle to the
Romans, tenderly refers to Rufus and his mother. This is not the only
instance in the history of Christianity, when the compulsion of an
apparent accident has led a man to Christ. Many a time has compulsory
cross-carrying led men to the Crucified.

Of the vast multitude who followed Jesus, a large contingent consisted
of women. From the men, in that moving crowd, He does not appear to
have received one word of sympathy. Timidity, or questioning with
their own hearts, or inveterate hatred closed their lips. But the
women expressed their sorrow with all the outcry of Oriental grief,
rending the air with piercing cries. "Weep not for Me," the Saviour
said, ever more thoughtful for others than Himself; "but for yourselves
and your children." And He who had been mocked because of His claim to
be a King, and who would shortly from the cross begin to minister as a
Priest, then as Prophet foretold the approaching fate of that fair
city, asking significantly, since the Romans dealt thus with Himself an
innocent sufferer, what would they not do when exasperated by the
pertinacious resistance of the Jewish people in the protracted siege.

Just outside the city gates, by the side of the main road, was a little
conical eminence which, from its likeness to the shape of a skull, was
called in the Aramaic _Golgotha_, in the Greek _Cranion_, in the Latin
_Calvary_. As we speak of the _brow_ of a hill, they called the bald
eminence