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WE are NOT ignorant; we KNOW that Christ died, inasmuch as we have the testimony of all the four Evangelists to this effect, the testimony of the Apostle Paul, and through him that of all the other Apostles; we have also the certainty that the centurion in charge of the soldiers at the Crucifixion would not have committed so grave a breach of discipline as the delivery of the body to Joseph and Nicodemus, unless he had felt quite sure that life was extinct; and finally we have the testimony of the Church for sixty generations, and that of myriads now living, whose experience assures them that Christ died and rose from the dead; in addition to this tremendous body of evidence we have also the story of the spear wound recorded in a Gospel which even our opponents believe to be from a Johannean source in its later chapters; and though, as has been already stated, this wound cannot be insisted upon as in itself sufficient to prove our Lord's death, yet it must assuredly be allowed its due weight in reviewing the evidence.
The chapel contained no pulpit, but on a marble altar stood a life-size figure of a woman clinging to the cross: and on the walls hung paintings representing the Crucifixion, the Descent, the Resurrection and the Mater Dolorosa; while in a niche at the extremity, behind the altar, an Ecce Homo of carved ivory was suspended above a gilt cross, and just beneath it glittered the motto "Faith, Hope, Charity". Every morning and evening the band of women gathered here, and recited the Apostles' Creed, and the Lord's Prayer; but on Sabbath the members attended the church best suited to their individual tenets.
This came from the fact that the common form of execution for all subjects of the Roman Empire except Roman citizens was crucifixion. Two such different words as tavern and tabernacle, the one meaning an inn and the other the most sacred part of the sanctuary in a church, are doublets from the Latin word tabernaculum, "tent."
And when the centurion, which stood over against Him, saw that He so cried out, and gave up the ghost, he said, Truly this man was the Son of God. Mark xv. 21-39. The narrative of the crucifixion is, in Mark's hands, almost entirely a record of what was done to Jesus, and scarcely touches what was done by Him.
There would be many coming and going on the adjoining road, most of them too busy about their own affairs to delay long; for crucifixion was a slow process, and, when once the cross has been lifted, there would be little to see. But they were not too busy to spit venom at Him as they passed.
Evidently they thought that He was already condemned to be crucified; and anyone condemned to crucifixion seems, after being scourged, to have been handed over to the soldiery to be handled as they pleased, just as a hunted creature, when it is caught, is flung to the dogs.
If this is the Atonement, there is little wonder that thoughtful minds will have nothing to say to it and that so many good people are puzzled to know what to think about it. +The human causes of the crucifixion of Jesus.+ If the death of Jesus took place under similar circumstances to-day, we should be in no doubt as to what to call it.
On this sea floated the fighting Biremes, Triremes, and Quinquiremes of the Greeks, Carthagenians, and Romans; and here the Egyptians and Phoenicians trained their ships three thousand years before the crucifixion.
For the first few days of my captivity my brain was literally seething with schemes for effecting my escape, most of them wildly impossible, I admit; but some there were that seemed to promise just a ghost of a chance of success until I attempted to put them into effect, when the vigilance of my guards with the fear of crucifixion, head downward, before their eyes invariably baffled me.
She suffered more reluctantly their tenderness for the old, old crucifixion figured in sculpture at one corner of the cemetery, where the anguish of the Christ had long since faded into the stone from which it had been evoked, and the thieves were no longer distinguishable in their penitence or impenitence; but she parted friends with them when she saw how much they seemed taken with the votive chapel of the noble Holzschuh family, where a line of wooden shoes puns upon the name in the frieze, like the line of dogs which chase one another, with bones in their mouths, around the Canossa palace at Verona.
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