foretold its mission ended and its hour of destruction come, and the veil which hid the Holy of Holies from the common gaze was rent from top to bottom. Then the sun, breaking through the clouds, looked down with a smile of heaven's love upon the scene of crucifixion, and bathed in a glory that time has never dimmed the silent form of the victorious sufferer.

The priests had already left the hill of execution. The centurion and the soldiers alone remained. Awe-stricken not less by the sublimity of Christ's death* than by the supernatural portents which accompanied it, they testified their sense of his divinity even in his death by the public but tardy confession, "Truly this was the Son of God.”

When, an hour or two later, the soldiers, in compliance with the commands of the procurator, proceeded to put an end to the lingering tortures of the condemned, Jesus was evidently dead. The guard, under Roman law, answered for their prisoners with their life. To prevent the possibility of error, one of the soldiers thrust his spear into Jesus's side. Clots of extravasated blood and water flowed from the wound. The heart, already weakened by the agony in the garden, had broken beneath the greater agony of Calvary. It was not the protracted anguish of the cross that slew Jesus. Rarely, if ever, did the victim of crucifixion perish in less than twenty-four hours. It was not the spear-thrust of the soldier. He was then already dead. It was the inexplicable anguish of bearing the sins of the whole world. Exhausted by the vigils of the night before, the spiritual agony of that hour seems to have ruptured his heart. Literally, it was the sins for which he was sacrificed that slew him. Literally, he died at last of a broken heart.

Joseph of Arimathea, a wealthy and honored member of the Sanhedrim, hitherto a secret disciple of Jesus, but after his death a disciple in secret no longer, demanded the body + Matt. xxvii., 54.

*Mark xv., 39.

John xix., 34. See note at end of this chapter.