gorgeous pavements of the temple,
and as they mechanically conduct the ministrations of the day, cast
significant glances on each other, and pause here and there to converse
in anxious whispers.

Ah there is one voice which they have often heard beneath those
arches--a voice which ever bore in it a mysterious and thrilling
charm--which they know will be hushed to-day. Chief priest, scribe, and
doctor have all gone out in the death procession after him; and these
few remaining ones, far from the excitement of the crowd, and busied in
calm and sacred duties, find voices of anxious questioning rising from
the depths of their own souls, "What if this indeed were the Christ?"

But pass we on out of the city, and what a surging tide of life and
motion meets the eye, as if all nations under heaven had dashed their
waves of population on this Judean shore! A noisy, wrathful, tempestuous
mob, billow on billow, waver and rally round some central object, which
it conceals from view. Parthians, Medes, Elamites, dwellers in
Mesopotamia and Egypt, strangers of Rome, Cretes and Arabians, Jew and
Proselyte, convoked from the ends of the earth, throng in agitated
concourse one on another; one theme in every face, on every tongue, one
name in every variety of accent and dialect passing from lip to lip:
"Jesus of Nazareth!"

Look on that man--the centre and cause of all this outburst! He stands
there alone. The cross is ready. It lies beneath his feet. The rough
hand of a brutal soldier has seized his robe to tear it from him.
Another with stalwart arm is boring the holes, gazing upward the while
with a face of stupid unconcern. There on the ground lie the hammer and
the nails: the hour, the moment of doom is come! Look on this man, as
upward, with deep, sorrowing eyes, he gazes towards heaven. Hears he the
roar of the mob? Feels he the rough hand on his garment? Nay, he sees
not, feels not: from all the rage and tumult of the hour he is rapt
away. A sorrow deeper, more absorbing, more unearthly seems to possess
him, as upward with long gaze he looks to that heaven never before
closed to his prayer, to that God never before to him invisible. That
mournful, heaven-searching glance, in its lonely anguish, says but one
thing: "Lo, I come to do thy will, O God."

Through a life of sorrow the realized love of his Father has shone like
a precious and beautiful talisman in his bosom; but now, when desolation
and anguish have come upon him as