nt with him. There were
periods, lasting sometimes for days together, clouding Him when He
awoke, stifling Him as He tried to sleep, dulling the very savour of the
Sacrament and the thrill of the Precious Blood; times in which the
darkness was so intolerable that even the solid objects of faith
attenuated themselves to shadow, when half His nature was blind not only
to Christ, but to God Himself, and the reality of His own
existence--when His own awful dignity seemed as the insignia of a fool.
And was it conceivable, His earthly mind demanded, that He and His
college of twelve and His few thousands should be right, and the entire
consensus of the civilised world wrong? It was not that the world had
not heard the message of the Gospel; it had heard little else for two
thousand years, and now pronounced it false--false in its external
credentials, and false therefore in its spiritual claims. It was a lost
cause for which He suffered; He was not the last of an august line, He
was the smoking wick of a candle of folly; He was the _reductio ad
absurdam_ of a ludicrous syllogism based on impossible premises. He was
not worth killing, He and His company of the insane--they were no more
than the crowned dunces of the world's school. Sanity sat on the solid
benches of materialism. And this heaviness waxed so dark sometimes that
He almost persuaded Himself that His faith was gone; the clamours of
mind so loud that the whisper of the heart was unheard, the desires for
earthly peace so fierce that supernatural ambitions were silenced--so
dense was the gloom, that, hoping against hope, believing against
knowledge, and loving against truth, He cried as One other had cried on
another day like this--_Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani!_ ... But that, at
least, He never failed to cry.

One thing alone gave Him power to go on, so far at least as His
consciousness was concerned, and that was His meditation. He had
travelled far in the mystical life since His agonies of effort. Now He
used no deliberate descents into the spiritual world: He threw, as it
were, His hands over His head, and dropped into spacelessness.
Consciousness would draw Him up, as a cork, to the surface, but He would
do no more than repeat His action, until by that cessation of activity,
which is the supreme energy, He floated in the twilight realm of
transcendence; and there God would deal with Him--now by an articulate
sentence, now by a sword of pain, now by an air like the