ver of Egypt; the mount of fruitfulness, from which the springs
of Jordan descended to the valleys of Israel? Along its mighty forest
avenues, until the grass grew fair with the mountain lilies, His feet
dashed in the dew of Hermon, He must have gone to pray His first
recorded prayer about death; and from the steep of it, before He
knelt, could see to the south all the dwellings of the people that had
sat in darkness, and seen the great light, the land of Zabulon and of
Naphtali, Galilee of the nations,--could see, even with His human
sight, the gleam of that lake by Capernaum and Chorazin, and many a
place loved by Him, and vainly ministered to, whose house was now left
unto them desolate; and chief of all, far in the utmost blue, the
hills above Nazareth, sloping down to His old home; hills on which yet
the stones lay loose that had been taken up to cast at Him when He
left them for ever.

"And as He prayed, two men stood by Him." Among the many ways in which
we miss the help and hold of Scripture, none is more subtle than our
habit of supposing that, even as man, Christ was free from the fear of
death. How could He then have been tempted as we are?--since among all
the trials of the earth, none spring from the dust more terrible than
that fear. It had to be borne by Him, indeed, in a unity which we can
never comprehend, with the foreknowledge of victory,--as His sorrow
for Lazarus with the consciousness of His power to restore him; but it
_had_ to be borne, and that in its full earthly terror; and the
presence of it is surely marked for us enough by the rising of those
two at His side. When, in the desert, He was girding Himself for the
work of life, angels of life came and ministered to Him; now in the
fair world, when He is girding Himself for the work of death, the
ministrants come to Him from the grave. But, from the grave,
conquered. One from that tomb under Abarim, which His own hand had
sealed long ago; the other, from the rest into which he had entered
without seeing corruption. "There stood by Him Moses and Elias, and
spake of His decease." Then, when the prayer is ended, the task
accepted, first, since the star paused over Him at Bethlehem, the full
glory falls upon Him from heaven, and the testimony is borne to His
everlasting Sonship and power. "Hear ye Him."

If, in their remembrance of these things, and in their endeavour to
follow in the footsteps of their Master, religious men of bygone days,
closin