ship in every step of His path, that it was impos- sible for Him to fear that the great purpose of His life would bo left unfulfilled on account of His premature death. His rebuke of tlie ' little faith ' (Mt 8^") of His disciples during tlie storm at sea would have been applicable to Himself had He cherished any such fear.
(3) A much more profound view is offered to our consideration, when not tlie death itself, but the circumstances of the death, are represented as the cause of Jesus' agony. He regarded His death not only as a sacrifice wliich He was willing to offer, not only as a tragedy which He was ready to endure, but as a crime of man against God from wliicli He shrank with horror. That the truth and grace of God in Him should meet with this insult and injury from the race which He had come to save and liloss — tliis it was that caused His agonj'. He could nut endure to gaze into ' the al)ysiual deptlis' of human iniquity and impiety, whicli the murder of tlie Holy One and the Ju.st opened to view. Surely this apocalypse of sin was not necessary as a condition of the apocalypse of grace. If we look more closely at the conduct of the actors in this drama, we shall better under- stand how appalling a revelation of sin it must have appeared to Jesus. The fickleness of the multi- tude, tlie hypocrisy and bigotry of the Pharisees, the worldliness and selfishness of the priesthood, tlie treachery of Judas, the denial by Peter, the antagonism of the disciples generally to the Master's saving purpose, the falsehood of His accusers, the hate and the craft of His persecutors, — all these were present to the consciousness of Jesus as an intolerable offence to His conscience, and an un- speakable grief to His heart. To His moral insight and spiritual discernment these were not single misdeeds, but signs and proofs of a wicked- ness and godlessness spreading far and wide in tlie life of mankind, reaching deep into the soul of man. Must this antagonism of sin to God be forced to its ultimate issue? Could He not save mankind by some mode of sacrifice that would involve the men concerned in it in less heinous guilt? Must He by persevering in His present course dri\e His enemies to do their worst against Him, and thus by His fidelity to His vocation must He involve all who opposed Him in this greater iniquity? That sucli questions cannot have been present to the mind of Jesus, who can confidently affirm? He foresaw the doom of the guilty nation, and He also saw that it was the crime about to be committed against Him that would seal its doom. That He shrank from being thus the occasion of its judgment cannot be doubted. But if in Gethsemane Jesus anticipated distinctly and accejited deliberately what He so intensely experienced on the Cross, then this solici- tude for all who were involved in the crime of His death does not at all exhaust His agony. The words of darkness and desolation on the Cross, 'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?' (Mt 27'"'), must be our clue to the mystery of this experience.
(4) Tlie only view that seems to the present writer at all adequate is that what Jesus dreaded and prayed to be delivered from in the experience of death was the sense of God's distance and abandonment. His sorrow unto death was not the fear of death as physical dissolution, nor of dying before He could finish His work on the Cross, but the shrinking of His filial soul from the sting of death, due to sin, the veiling in dark- ness of His Father's face from Him. His prayer was answered, for He was saved from death, inasmuch as the experience of darkness and desolation was momentary, and ere He gave up the ghost He was able to commit Himself vrith
AGONY
AGRICULTUEE
tliikllike trust unto His Father. 'Father, into thy hands I commend ray spirit' (Lk 23*). His agony in Gethsemane was worthy of Him as the Son of Go*l, for it was the recoil of His filial spiiit from the interruption of His filial communion with His Father, which appeared to Him to be neces- sarily involved in the sacrifice which He was about to offer for the sins of the world.
It is not the function of this article to offer a theological interpretation of Jesus' experience in Gethsemane; but a justification of the above answer to the question of tlie nature of Jesus' agony may be briefly ofl'ered in a psychological analysis of His experience. First of all, then, we note Jesus' sense of solitude. He must leave behind Him the disciples except three, and even from these three He must withdraw Himself (Mt 2&>^-'^). He sought this outward isolation because He felt tliis inner solitude. Since His announcement of His Passion (Mt 16"') the dis- ciples had been becoming less and less His com- panions, as they were being more and more estranged from His purpose. At last He knew that they would abandon Him altogether, their outer distance but the sign and proof of their- inward alienation. Yet the comfort of the Father's presence would remain with Him: 'Behold, the hour cometh, yea, is come, that ye shall be scat- tered eveiT man to his own, and shall leave me alone : and yet I am not alone, because the Father is with me' (Jn 16^=). But now in Gethsemane He liegan to realize that it might be necessary for the accomplishment of His sacrifice that even tlie Father's presence should be w itlidra«n from Him. That dread drives Him to the Fathers presence, but the assurance that there is no ground for this fear does not come to Him. Again He turns to His disciples. Secondly, therefore, we note His need of sympathy. When He withdrew from the three. He asked them to watch with Him ; wlien, returning. He found them sleeping, His words are a pathetic reproach : ' AVliat, could ye not watch with me one hour?' (Mt 26*). He craved sympathy, not only because He felt solitary, but because this solitude was due to His love for man. The sacrifice He was about to otter, in wliich the sense of His Father's abandonment was the sting of death, was on behalf of, and instead of man ; and yet not even tlie men He had chosen would sorrow with Him, although He was suttering for all mankind. Tims man's denial of sympathy must have made Him feel more keenly tlie dread that even God's comfort and help might be -with- held from Him. Tliirdly, we note that this dread was not groundless, but was rooted deep in His experience and vocation. We nmst then go be- yond any of tlie words uttered in Gethsemane Itself to discover all that was involved in His agony there. As tlie incarnate love, mercy, and grace of God, His exjierience was necessarily vicarious. He suiiered with and for man. He so identified Himself with sinful mankind, that He shared its struggle, Iwre its burden, felt its shame. Him.self sinless, knowing no sin. He was made sin for mankind in feeling its sin as it were His very own. The beloved of God, He became a curse in experiencing in His own agony and desolation the consequences of sin, although as innocent He could neither feel the guilt nor bear the penalty of sin. So completely had He become one with mankind in being made sin and a curse for man, that even His consciousness of filial union and communion with God as His Father was ob- scured and interrupted, if even for only a moment, by His consciousness of the sin of man. God did not withdraw Himself from, or abandon His only- begotten and well-beloved Son, but was with Him to sustain Him in His sacrifice; but the Son of