the crowd wearies
and scatters, and only here and there a little whispering group remains.
The day waxes to its greatest heat; the soldiers lie or stand silent;
the centurion sits motionless on his motionless, statue-like horse; the
stillness of death falls upon the scene, only broken at intervals by a
groan from one or other of the crosses. Suddenly through this silence
there sound the words, "Woman, behold thy son: son, behold thy
mother."--words which remind us that all this dreadful scene which makes
the heart of the stranger bleed has been witnessed by the mother of the
Crucified. As the crowd had broken up from around the crosses, the
little group of women whom John had brought to the spot edged their way
nearer and nearer till they were quite close to Him they loved, though
their lips apparently were sealed by their helplessness to minister
consolation.

These hours of suffering, as the sword was slowly driven through Mary's
soul, according to Simeon's word, who shall measure? Hers was not a
hysterical, noisy sorrow, but quiet and silent. There was nothing wild,
nothing extravagant, in it. There was no sign of feminine weakness, no
outcry, no fainting, no wild gesture of uncontrollable anguish, nothing
to show that she was the exceptional mourner and that there was no
sorrow like unto her sorrow. Her reverence for the Lord saved her from
disturbing His last moments. She stood and saw the end. She saw His head
lifted in anguish and falling on His breast in weakness, and she could
not gently take it in her hands and wipe the sweat of death from His
brow. She saw His pierced hands and feet become numbed and livid, and
might not chafe them. She saw Him gasp with pain as cramp seized part
after part of His outstretched body, and she could not change His
posture nor give liberty to so much as one of His hands. And she had to
suffer this in profound desolation of spirit. Her life seemed to be
buried at the cross. To the mourning there often seems nothing left but
to die with the dying. One heart has been the light of life, and now
that light is quenched. What significance, what motive, can life have
any more?[28] We valued no past where that heart was not; we had no
future which was not concentrated upon it or in which it had no part.
But the absorption of common love must have been far surpassed in Mary's
case. None had been blessed with such a love as hers. And now none
estimated as she did the spotless innocence of t