their way." And the fright into
which they were thrown made them forget His followers in their anxiety
to secure Himself.

This was as He intended. St. John, in narrating it, makes the curious
remark, that this was done that the saying might be fulfilled which He
spake, "Of them which Thou gavest Me have I lost none." This saying
occurs in His great intercessory prayer, offered at the first Communion
table; but in its original place it evidently means that He had lost
none of them in a spiritual sense, whereas here it seems to have only
the sense of losing any of them by the swords of the soldiers or by the
cross, if they had been arrested with Him. But a deep hint underlies
this surface meaning. St. John suggests that, if any of them had been
taken along with Him, the likelihood is that they would have been
unequal to the crisis: they would have denied Him, and so, in the
sadder sense, would have been lost.

Jesus, knowing too well that this was the state of the case, made for
them a way of escape, and "they all forsook Him and fled." It was
perhaps as well, for they might have done worse. Yet what an
anticlimax to the asseveration which everyone of them had made that
very evening, "If I should die with Thee, I will not deny Thee in any
wise!" I have sometimes thought what an honour it would have been to
Christianity, what a golden leaf in the history of human nature, had
one or two of them--say, the brothers James and John--been strong
enough to go with Him to prison and to death. We should, indeed, have
missed St. John's writings in that case--his Revelation, Gospel and
Epistles. But what a revelation that would have been, what a gospel,
what a living epistle!

It was not, however, to be. Jesus had to go unaccompanied: "I have
trodden the winepress alone; and of the people there was none with Me."
So they "bound Him and led Him away."

[1] _Speira_=cohors, tenth part of legion. See Ramsay, R.A., 381.

[2] _katephilesen_. It is used of the woman who was a sinner, when she
kissed the feet of the Saviour.

[3] Psalm lv. 13-14.

[4] Other instances in Sueskind, _Passionsschule_, _in loc_.

[5] See fuller details in _Imago Christi_, last chapter.

CHAPTER II.

THE ECCLESIASTICAL TRIAL

Over the Kedron, up the slope to the city, through the gates, along the
silent streets, the procession passed, with Jesus in the midst;
midnight stragglers, perhaps, hurrying forward from point to point