atigue and burning with thirst,
He grasped the cup eagerly and lifted it without suspicion to His lips.
But, as soon as He tasted it and felt the fumes of the stupefying
ingredient, He laid it down and would not drink.

It was a simple act, yet full of heroism. He was in that extremity of
thirst when a person will drink almost anything; and He was face to
face with outrageous torture. In subsequent times many of His own
faithful martyrs, on their way to execution, gladly availed themselves
of this merciful provision. But He would not allow His intellect to be
clouded. His obedience was not yet complete; His plan was not fully
wrought out; He would keep His taste for death pure. I have heard of a
woman dying of a frightful malady, who, when she was pressed by those
witnessing her agony to take an intoxicating draught, refused, saying,
"No, I want to die sober." She had caught, I think, the spirit of
Christ.

This is a very strange place in which to alight on the problem of the
use and abuse of those products of nature or art which induce
intoxication or stupefaction. Roots or juices with such properties
have been known to nearly all races, the savage as well as the
civilised; and they have played a great part in the life of mankind.
Their history is one of the most curious. They are associated with the
mysteries of false religions and with the phenomena of heathen prophecy
and witchcraft; acting on the mind through the senses, they open up in
it a region of mystery, horror and gloomy magnificence of which the
normal man is unconscious. They have always been a favourite resource
of the medical art, and in modern times, in such forms as opium and
other better-known intoxicants, they have created some of the gravest
moral problems.

On the wide question of the use of such substances as stimulants we
need not at present enter; it is to their use for the opposite purpose
of lowering consciousness that this incident draws attention. That in
some cases this use is both merciful and permissible will not be
denied. The discovery in our own day, by one of our own countrymen, of
the use of chloroform is justly regarded as among the greatest benefits
ever conferred on the human race. When the unconsciousness thus
produced enables the surgeon to perform an operation which might not be
possible at all without it, or when in the crisis of a fever the sleep
induced by a narcotic gives the exhausted system power to continu