sleep. Christ's work had to be done alone.

The tradition is, that the Mount of Transfiguration was the summit of
Tabor; but Tabor is neither a high mountain, nor was it in any sense a
mountain "_apart_;" being in those years both inhabited and fortified.
All the immediately preceding ministries of Christ had been at Cesarea
Philippi. There is no mention of travel southward in the six days that
intervened between the warning given to His disciples, and the going up
into the hill. What other hill could it be than the southward slope of
that goodly mountain, Hermon, which is indeed the centre of all the
Promised Land, from the entering in of Hamath unto the river of Egypt;
the mount of fruitfulness, from which the springs of Jordan descended to
the valleys of Israel. Along its mighty forest avenues, until the grass
grew fair with the mountain lilies, His feet dashed in the dew of
Hermon, He must have gone to pray His first recorded prayer about death;
and from the steep of it, before He knelt, could see to the south all
the dwelling-place of the people that had sat in darkness, and seen the
great light, the land of Zabulon and of Naphtali, Galilee of the
nations;--could see, even with His human sight, the gleam of that lake
by Capernaum and Chorazin, and many a place loved by Him, and vainly
ministered to, whose house was now left unto them desolate; and, chief
of all, far in the utmost blue, the hills above Nazareth, sloping down
to His old home: hills on which yet the stones lay loose, that had been
taken up to cast at Him, when He left them for ever.

Sec. 49. "And as he prayed, two men stood by him." Among the many ways in
which we miss the help and hold of Scripture, none is more subtle than
our habit of supposing that, even as man, Christ was free from the Fear
of Death. How could He then have been tempted as we are? since among all
the trials of the earth, none spring from the dust more terrible than
that Fear. It had to be borne by Him, indeed, in a unity, which we can
never comprehend, with the foreknowledge of victory,--as His sorrow for
Lazarus, with the consciousness of the power to restore him; but it
_had_ to be borne, and that in its full earthly terror; and the presence
of it is surely marked for us enough by the rising of those two at His
side. When, in the desert, He was girding Himself for the work of life,
angels of life came and ministered unto Him; now, in the fair world,
when He is girding Himself