we find for the first time that which we have
come so far to seek,--the soul of the Holy Land, the inward sense of the
real presence of Jesus.

It is as clear and vivid as any outward experience. Why should I not
speak of it as simply and candidly? Nothing that we have yet seen in
Palestine, no vision of wide-spread landscape, no sight of ancient ruin
or famous building or treasured relic, comes as close to our hearts as
this little garden sleeping in the sun. Nothing that we have read from
our Bibles in the new light of this journey has been for us so suddenly
illumined, so deeply and tenderly brought home to us, as the story of
Gethsemane.

Here, indeed, in the moonlit shadow of these olives--if not of these
very branches, yet of others sprung from the same immemorial stems--was
endured the deepest suffering ever borne for man, the most profound
sorrow of the greatest Soul that loved all human souls. It was not in
the temptation in the wilderness, as Milton imagined, that the crisis of
the Divine life was enacted and Paradise was regained. It was in the
agony in the garden.

Here the love of life wrestled in the heart of Jesus with the purpose of
sacrifice, and the anguish of that wrestling wrung the drops of blood
from Him like sweat. Here, for the only time, He found the cup of sorrow
and shame too bitter, and prayed the Father to take it from His lips if
it were possible--possible without breaking faith, without surrendering
love. For that He would not do, though His soul was exceeding sorrowful,
even unto death. Here He learned the frailty of human friendship, the
narrowness and dulness and coldness of the very hearts for whom He had
done and suffered most, who could not even watch with Him one hour.

What infinite sense of the poverty and feebleness of mankind, the
inveteracy of selfishness, the uncertainty of human impulses and
aspirations and promises; what poignant questioning of the necessity,
the utility of self-immolation must have tortured the soul of Jesus in
that hour! It was His black hour. None can imagine the depth of that
darkness but those who have themselves passed through some of its outer
shadows, in the times when love seems vain, and sacrifice futile, and
friendship meaningless, and life a failure, and death intolerable.

Jesus met the spirit of despair in the Garden of Gethsemane; and after
that meeting, the cross had no terrors for Him, because He had already
endured them; the grave no