nd, as they marked His
increasing favour with the multitude, their envy and indignation became
ungovernable. They accordingly seized Him at the time of the Passover,
and, on the charge that He said He was the Son of God, He was condemned
as a blasphemer. [27:2] He suffered crucifixion--an ignominious form of
capital punishment from which the laws of the empire exempted every
Roman citizen--and, to add to His disgrace, He was put to death between
two thieves. [27:3] But even Pontius Pilate, who was then Procurator of
Judea, and who, in that capacity, endorsed the sentence, was constrained
to acknowledge that He was a "just person" in whom He could find "no
fault." [27:4] Pilate was a truckling time-server, and he acquiesced in
the decision, simply because he was afraid to exasperate the Jews by
rescuing from their grasp an innocent man whom they persecuted with
unrelenting hatred. [27:5]

The death of Christ, of which all the evangelists treat so particularly,
is the most awful and the most momentous event in the history of the
world. He, no doubt, fell a victim to the malice of the rulers of the
Jews; but He was delivered into their hands "by the determinate counsel
and foreknowledge of God;" [28:1] and if we discard the idea that He was
offered up as a vicarious sacrifice, we must find it impossible to give
anything like a satisfactory account of what occurred in Gethsemane and
at Calvary. The amount of physical suffering He sustained from man did
not exceed that endured by either of the malefactors with whom He was
associated; and such was His magnanimity and fortitude, that, had He
been an ordinary martyr, the prospect of crucifixion would not have been
sufficient to make Him "exceeding sorrowful" and "sore amazed." [28:2]
His holy soul must have been wrung with no common agony, when "His sweat
was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground," [28:3]
and when He was forced to cry out--"My God, my God, why hast thou
forsaken me?" [28:4] In that hour of "the power of darkness" He was
"smitten of God and afflicted," and there was never sorrow like unto His
sorrow, for upon Him were laid "the iniquities of us all."

The incidents which accompanied the death of Jesus were even more
impressive than those which signalised His birth. When He was in the
garden of Gethsemane there appeared unto Him an angel from Heaven
strengthening Him. [28:5] During the three concluding hours of His
intense anguish on the cro