GIFT OF 
 
 QE WT & SHEUW6 
 
GOLGOTHA 
 
 A Study of the Sweet, Sad 
 Story of the Cross 
 
 D. J. KAVANAGH, S. J. 
 
 TIIK J 
 
 1189-1124 
 
 -1124 MISrjIOX .-ST. , , i 
 AX FHANt/ISM/Oj')^ 
 
COPYRIGHT, 1915 
 
 BY 
 D. J. KAVANAGH, S. J. 
 
Imprimi potest 
 
 REV. R. A. GLEESON, S. J., 
 Praepositus Provincialis 
 
 Californiae 
 
 Imprimatur 
 
 EDWARDUS J. HANNA, 
 Administrator 
 
 Sancti Francisci 
 
 3G2G?j 
 
010 tli? gmutij ntnt attft iromuj roottten of 
 3Frattri0r0 roljo tttatujurateft tlj^ mow- 
 m? ttt for tl|0 "S^it^r^nt 09ha^rtiattr0 nf (Sflflft 
 Jrfiag/' atti iulj0, for % past four tpatB* 
 haur lahnrri 00 ncalously attin 00 frmtfulhj 
 Ui mahfttg tip $mtt, 0a& 0t0 
 m0r? tmb^lg lutnmu attiJ inurp itrplu 
 tl|t0 little b00k 10 
 
PREFACE 
 
 A desire to contribute, in an humble way, 
 towards the realization of the policy of our Holy 
 Father, Pope Benedict XV, which, as he tells 
 us, is to cause ."the charity of Christ to prevail 
 among men," has prompted the publication of 
 these little reflections on the Passion of our Di- 
 vine Savior. 
 
 The world has tried human love-motives and 
 the human love-motives have failed. It has tried 
 human brotherhoods and they have fallen 
 with a fearful crash. It has placed exaggerated 
 confidence in the natural goodness of man, and 
 the natural goodness of man has proved to be 
 but a new name for a very old and a terribly 
 dangerous thing called selfishness. Human mo- 
 tives are pitiably insufficient to meet the demands 
 of the world. Man needs a motive that is not 
 of the world, if he is in earnest quest of a love 
 that is not worldly. "A new commandment I 
 give unto you," said Christ on the eve of His 
 death, "that you love one another, as I have 
 loved you." This is the very marrow of Chris- 
 tianity, this it is that makes Christianity lovable 
 and fruitful of good; but a passive admiration 
 of its sublimity will not do. We must study how 
 
8 Preface 
 
 Christ loved us, if we wish to put in practice 
 this sublime precept of love which formed His 
 last will and testament. 
 
 The final chapter in the life of Christ tells us, 
 as nothing else can, how He loved the world, 
 it teaches a love that is not selfish, a love that 
 is universal, a love that does not grow cool 
 when a sacrifice is demanded, even though the 
 sacrifice be death. The story of His Passion 
 summarizes His whole career on earth and 
 though, by every event of His life, we are 
 strongly impelled to love our fellow men, we are 
 irresistibly impelled to love by a detailed study 
 of His death. 
 
 The thoughts here offered for prayerful con- 
 templation have been gathered from various 
 sources, chiefly from L'Homme-Dieu Souffrant 
 of the fervent Passionist, Pere Seraphin, and 
 from The Watches of the Passion, by Father 
 Gallwey, S. J. Many ideas, too, have been bor- 
 rowed from the eloquent sermons of Father 
 Bernard Vaughan, S. J., of Father Robert Kane, 
 S. J., and of the lamented Father Hugh Benson. 
 
 The method followed throughout is that of St. 
 Ignatius, who, in his book of "Spiritual Exer- 
 cises," insists a great deal on what he calls "Con- 
 templation," which consists in studying the per- 
 sons, the words and the actions of the sacred 
 
Preface 
 
 narrative, with a view to spiritual and lasting 
 profit. 
 
 Finally, the author wishes to state that this 
 little book is intended chiefly as a souvenir of 
 the Lectures delivered at St. Ignatius Church, 
 on the Wednesday evenings of Lent, 1915. "Gen- 
 uine Christian Science" was the subject of the 
 Lenten Lectures and "Genuine Christian Science" 
 is the subject of this little book. St. Paul taught 
 the substance of Christian Science when he wrote 
 to the Corinthians: "And I, Brethren, when I 
 came to you, came not in loftiness of speech, or 
 of wisdom, declaring unto you the testimony of 
 Christ. For I judged not myself to know any 
 thing among you, but Jesus Christ and Him 
 crucified" 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Prologue 13 
 
 The Three Tribunals 21 
 
 The Mob 32 
 
 Father Forgive Them ! 42 
 
 The Divine Healer 54 
 
 Mary, His Mother 68 
 
 Forsaken ! 81 
 
 I Thirst 95 
 
 It Is Finished 106 
 
 Epilogue 114 
 
PROLOGUE 
 
 It was Thursday night, one of those bright, 
 starlit nights, we may suppose, of an Oriental 
 spring. The soft rays of the rising moon fell 
 in streams of silver upon the Temple and the 
 closely-huddled dwellings of the Holy City. Jeru- 
 salem slept and presented to view the appearance 
 of a vast collection of sepulchres. How like to 
 death is sleep ! How like and yet how unlike ! 
 Quietude and rest and dreams accompany both, 
 but in the case of sleep the quietude and rest are 
 real and the dreams but empty nothingness, while 
 in death, the dreams, if indeed they may be 
 called dreams, are real and sometimes fearfully 
 real, and the peaceful rest, it may be, is only an 
 appearance. On that memorable Thursday night 
 Jesusalem slept, but not all Jerusalem; there 
 were two distinct groups of men awake and, as 
 we shall see, very much awake. 
 
 In the house of Caiphas, a magnificent palace 
 that crowned Mount Sion and looked with 
 haughty disdain upon the city, even as its occu- 
 pants looked with haughty disdain upon the peo- 
 ple, there was held a council of High Priests. 
 There was a thorn in their side that must be 
 plucked out. They could no longer endure the 
 
Golgotha 
 
 popularity of Jesus of Nazareth. For three 
 years He had been winning the applause of men ; 
 the holiness of His life, the sublimity of His 
 doctrine, the power He possessed and the good- 
 ness which ever accompanied its exercise, all 
 these things united to win the people to His 
 cause. But a few days previously they shouted 
 their Hosannas of welcome and even proclaimed 
 Him King of the Jews. It was more than 
 Caiphas and his fellow priests could endure. 
 They wanted to control things, they wanted to 
 be leaders, socially, politically, religiously, and 
 Jesus of Nazareth stood in their way. That is 
 why a council was in session on that memorable 
 Thursday night. 
 
 The other group whom sleep has not yet con- 
 quered are strangers, as the expression was, in 
 Jerusalem : they are Galileans. Twelve of them 
 walk slowly and sadly through the silent streets 
 and out towards the Garden of Gethsemane. 
 Their Master is none other than Jesus of Naza- 
 reth against Whom the priests are plotting. He 
 is sad, sad even unto death, that is to say, so 
 sad that His Sacred Heart is ready to break. 
 He takes three of His followers apart from the 
 others, asks them to watch with Him and then 
 prostrating Himself on the ground begins to 
 pray. 
 
Golgotha 
 
 To pray ! What is the use ? What good does 
 it do? Can prayer relieve the sufferings of the 
 world? Can it feed the hungry or clothe the 
 naked? Wait a moment. In the council of 
 High Priests they do not pray, they have lost 
 all knowledge of the art of prayer, they think 
 worldly thoughts and devise worldly things. 
 Do they feed the hungry or clothe the naked? 
 Wait and see how it fares with Jesus of Naza- 
 reth at their hands, with Jesus of Nazareth, 
 Who never did an unkind deed, Who never 
 spoke an unkind word, but went about from 
 place to place doing good and teaching the 
 world to imitate His example. 
 
 Between the prayerless plotters and the prayer- 
 ful Savior there is a connecting link. It is the 
 traitor, a disciple of Jesus of Nazareth. He 
 hastens through the silence of the night in a 
 direction opposite to that taken by his Master. 
 He feels his heart throb, he looks back, he hesi- 
 tates and then rushes on again. His eyes glare, 
 his brow is knit, his teeth set, still onward he 
 urges his hurrying steps until he reaches the 
 palace that crowns Mount Sion. "Caiphas !" 
 he cries. "I want to speak to Caiphas !" "Judas," 
 someone whispers, "one of the twelve!" He 
 casts his glaring eyes from one priest to another 
 and when he has recognized Caiphas, he speaks. 
 
1 6 Golgotha 
 
 You need not enter that assembly to hear the 
 traitor's words; you can hear them from with- 
 out, you can hear them ringing down the long 
 stretch of centuries, you can hear them now on 
 all sides and from all classes of men ; they have 
 become, it might almost be said, the standard of 
 human activity: "What will you give me and I 
 will betray Him unto you?" 
 
 Now the great drama has begun. The history 
 of the world knows no work similar to that 
 which Christ is facing. Men have saved their 
 country from wars, from invasion, from destruc- 
 tion. Statesmen have constructed laws and 
 founded empires and have ruled nations. It is 
 all glorious work and ennobling, but the great- 
 est human endeavor is transitory, a mere ripple 
 on the ever changing surface of human history, 
 a bubble doomed, sooner or later, to burst and 
 be no more. Now you may contemplate the 
 beginning of a Divine work. Christ is about to 
 take upon himself the sins of the world, the 
 sins of all men from Adam to the last child of 
 the race. As God He sees it all, the Almighty 
 dethroned to make room for beastly passions, 
 heresies breaking with the Truth, blasphemies 
 unutterable, rebellions against legitimate author- 
 ity, revolutions that shed torrents of human 
 blood, impurities that defile human nature, hurl- 
 
Golgotha 17 
 
 ing it from the dignity of angels to the level of 
 the brute, dishonesty and drunkenness, lying and 
 hypocrisies, in one word, humanity in the sordid 
 grasp of moral defilement, as God He sees it 
 all and as Man He bows beneath the burden, 
 and takes upon Himself the sins of the world. 
 He becomes the vicarious Sinner, that is to 
 say, He offers Himself to stand between the 
 sinner and the justice of an all holy God. 
 
 This voluntary substitution of Himself in 
 place of the sinner is not without a struggle. 
 "Father," He cries, "if possible let this chalice 
 pass," spare Me this monstrous burden against 
 which My whole being rebels, "yet nevertheless 
 not My will, but Thine be done !" He under- 
 stands what it means, He sees the horrors 
 awaiting Him, He seems to falter but does not 
 really falter. His prayer is in substance this: 
 "My Father, the burden is heavy, the impending 
 sufferings strike terror into My human soul, 
 still if it is Thy will I bow beneath the burden 
 and offer Myself for the suffering." He knew 
 that it was His Father's will. He knew that 
 God so loved the world as to give His only 
 begotten Son for its Redemption and so, though 
 the prayer is a petition, it is at the same time, a 
 voluntary oblation. He is to suffer because He 
 wills it. "Father," the prayer may be inter- 
 
1 8 Golgotha 
 
 preted, "since it is Thy will to save the souls 
 of men by My Passion and Death, I offer my- 
 self for the momentous work. I take upon My- 
 self the sins of the world. Let Thy justice 
 strike Me, wound Me, bruise Me, but spare the 
 sinner !" 
 
 If you wish to study the circumstances of that 
 prayer, you may recall the details of the Gospel 
 narrative, how the words were repeated three 
 times, how the inward conflict caused a sweat 
 of Blood, how, during it, the Savior was left 
 alone by the sleeping Apostles and how He 
 lovingly complained that they could not watch 
 one hour with Him. But perhaps you will get 
 a more vivid impression of what took place if 
 you recall the words of the prophet. "Who is 
 this," he asks, "that cometh from Edom with 
 dyed garments?" "It is I," he answers in the 
 person of Christ, "It is I that speak justice and 
 am a defender to save." "But why is Thy ap- 
 parel red and Thy garments like those that 
 tread the wine-press?" "Because I have trod- 
 den Gethsemane alone." 
 
 Truly alone, but not for long. While the 
 Apostles slept the traitor was awake, the priests 
 were awake and toiled in exaggerated prepara- 
 tion for the seizure of their Enemy. A strange 
 band had been hastily gotten together, Jewish 
 
Golgotha 19 
 
 soldiers who formed the Temple Guard, were 
 joined by a contingent of the Roman Garrison 
 from the Tower of Antonia, and to these were 
 added the servants of the High Priests, all heav- 
 ily armed with swords and spears and clubs, 
 and all feeling the importance of the great 
 work in hand. A great work indeed! They 
 were to seize One Who knew no weapon other 
 than goodness and love! They were provided 
 with lanterns and torches to seek for One Who 
 had spoken openly and moved fearlessly through 
 the Holy City and Who in secret had done 
 nothing. 
 
 The details of the arrest of the Savior are 
 familiar. The two groups of men meet. 
 Weakness encounters strength, love is on the 
 one side and unspeakable hatred on the other. 
 There is the kiss of the traitor, the exagger- 
 ated zeal of Peter, the manifestation of power 
 by Christ, whose gentle answer, "I am He," 
 "had in it a strength greater than the Eastern 
 wind, or the voice of thunder, for God was in 
 that 'still voice' and it struck them to the 
 ground"; there is the dispersion of the Apos- 
 tles and then the binding with cords and chains 
 and Jesus of Nazareth is led away a captive! 
 It is all over now; beautiful were the lessons 
 He taught, majestic His life amongst men and 
 
20 Golgotha 
 
 wonderful was the exercise of His power and 
 goodness, but He is a Prisoner now. No signs 
 appear in the heavens, there is no roar of thun- 
 der, no lightning flash, no devouring fire from 
 heaven to consume the impious captors. Noth- 
 ing but a weary unarmed Man surrounded by 
 a band of soldiers is seen by the few terrified 
 Galileans who had followed Him for three 
 years. The hands that were never used except 
 in deeds of mercy and of love are weighted 
 down with chains; the eyes that could penetrate 
 into the very sanctuary of one's soul are 
 dimmed with tears, the ears that listened with 
 compassion to the wail of the sick and life- 
 weary are now filled with insults and boastful 
 jeers of a despicable band of soldiers, and He 
 is urged along through the night, over the 
 brook of Cedron, up the steep slope beyond, to 
 the palace of Caiphas. 
 
THE THREE TRIBUNALS 
 
 The strange Prisoner is subjected to several 
 trials and to indescribable ignominy. We may, 
 however, for purposes of contemplation, reduce 
 the trials to three. Christ had taught us that, 
 to gain eternal life, we must encounter and 
 overcome a threefold enemy, the World, the 
 Flesh and the Devil. He now allows Himself, 
 for our instruction, to be conducted before three 
 distinct tribunals, which symbolize the great 
 trilogy of wickedness. To-day many spurn the 
 teachings of Christ, some even go so far as to 
 say: "We love the World, we pamper the Flesh, 
 we defy the Devil." Let them see how it fares 
 with the Savior at the hands of these enemies 
 of man's immortal soul! 
 
 The division which is here followed is alto- 
 gether arbitrary ; in no single trial was there but 
 one influence at work. All of those who as- 
 sumed the character of judges of Jesus Christ 
 were prompted by the World, the Flesh and the 
 Devil. Still, in each case, there seems to stand 
 out preeminently some special passion or some 
 pronounced influence. St. Thomas Aquinas tells 
 us that the three tribunals before which Christ 
 appears may be viewed as symbols of the three 
 
22 Golgotha 
 
 concupiscences; the Court of Pilate symbolizes 
 the Concupiscence of the Eyes, that of Herod, 
 the Concupiscence of the Flesh, while the tri- 
 bunal of High Priests is an impersonation of 
 the Pride of Life. Such a division harmonizes 
 better with the degree of malice manifested by 
 the different persons concerned, but, to keep to 
 the chronological order of events and the Scrip- 
 tural order of the Concupiscences, we may study 
 the Savior encountering Worldliness in the pal- 
 ace of Caiphas, Luxury in Herod's Court, and 
 Diabolical Wickedness in the trial before Pilate. 
 The Jewish nation was eminently religious, 
 but the representatives of that religion became 
 mere creatures of pagan authority. The Su- 
 preme Council, and the High-priesthood itself, 
 were usurped by sceptics, generally known as 
 Sadducees, who believed neither in a future 
 life, nor in the guiding Providence of God. 
 Religion was for them to end with this life, it 
 was a profitable means of securing peace and 
 order, but it had nothing supernatural in it. 
 Between the Sadducees and the people there 
 were the Doctors of the Law, or Pharisees. 
 They troubled themselves about the letter of the 
 law and missed its spirit. Their religious sense 
 was blunted by the prevalent materialism of the 
 age and they sought for a kingdom in this 
 
Golgotha 23 
 
 world. No wonder the people lost all sense of 
 their destiny and of the supernatural and looked 
 for the coming of a kingdom on earth in their 
 intoxication of pride! Their hopes, like those 
 of the present day humanitarians and social- 
 ists, were the hopes of madmen. 
 
 It was into the midst of this people that 
 Christ came. He came with a religion that 
 was, in every sense of the word, supernatural. 
 Any one sentence of His doctrine such as, 
 "Blessed are the poor in spirit," overturns all 
 worldliness ; studied as a whole, it manifests 
 other-worldliness at every angle. In the first 
 place He was the Son of God, equal to His 
 Father, His religion had nothing transitory 
 about it; nothing imperfect, nothing finite, noth- 
 ing exclusive. It embraced all men, all time, all 
 truth, all goodness. In a word it was Divine 
 because its purpose was to lift men to God, 
 because the means used for the accomplishment 
 of this purpose were intended for the sanctifica- 
 tion of men's souls. 
 
 The Pharisees and Sadducees and the people 
 knew this supernatural phase of His teaching, 
 but they did not want it. They wanted inde- 
 pendence of Roman rule, they wanted an earthly 
 kingdom, they wanted a Messias who would 
 change earth into a paradise, and so the decisive 
 
24 Golgotha 
 
 question at His first trial was this: "Tell us 
 plainly, art Thou Christ the Son of the Blessed 
 God? Answer, I adjure Thee, in the name of 
 the living God !" 
 
 They did not ask the momentous question in 
 the spirit of those moderns who represent the 
 "sonship" of God as the common privilege of 
 all mankind ; they asked it in the spirit in which 
 Christ claimed this divine Sonship. They 
 wanted to know if He was in truth and by na- 
 ture, not merely in figure and by adoption, the 
 Son of the Most High God. It was with them 
 a question of the Divinity of Jesus Christ. 
 
 "Tell us plainly; art Thou Christ the Son of 
 the Blessed God?" they asked. 
 
 "I am !" was the brief answer of the Prisoner. 
 
 "He hath blasphemed!" shouts one. 
 
 "What need have we of further testimony?" 
 asks another. 
 
 "He is worthy of death!" concludes a chorus 
 of voices and thus the WORLD condemns the 
 supernatural claim of Christ's teaching and the 
 supernatural character of His Divine Person. 
 
 Their present-day imitators, who profess rev- 
 erence for Him because He was the Son of God 
 just as we all are the sons of God, if we 
 would but realize our sonship, though appar- 
 ently asserting the dignity of man against the 
 
Golgotha 
 
 materialism of the world, are in reality denying 
 the claims of Jesus Christ and exclaiming with 
 the godless priesthood: He hath blasphemed. 
 
 Repeatedly had Christ claimed to be the 
 Eternal Son of God, repeatedly He had claimed, 
 and His whole life proves the claim, that He 
 was, in the true sense of the word, Divine. 
 Now with greater emphasis than ever before, He 
 asserts His Divinity and with a full realization 
 that the worldly minded men before whom He 
 stands cannot brook the idea of the claim, He 
 adds to the assertion the great prerogative of 
 the Godhead, the judgment of the living and 
 the dead: "Hereafter you shall see the Son of 
 man sitting on the right hand of the power of 
 God and coming in the clouds of heaven." 
 
 Such is the substance of the first trial. He 
 is found guilty, nay He pleads guilty of the 
 "crime" which the WORLD will not pardon, 
 "that He is in truth the Son of God." We 
 shall now study Him in His trial by the second 
 great Enemy of the Supernatural, the FLESH. 
 
 Herod was an adulterer and a murderer. He 
 was a murderer because he was an adulterer. 
 The two great crimes go hand in hand even 
 now. Adultery and all the allied sins of im- 
 purity so warp the soul, so darken the mind 
 that even the foulest of all foul crimes, murder, 
 
26 Golgotha 
 
 becomes a thing of no special heinousness to 
 the impure mind. The reference is not only to 
 that kind of murder which stained Herod's soul 
 with the blood of the Baptist, but to that more 
 despicable kind that made Herod's father guilty 
 of the blood of Innocents. Murder lurks in the 
 wake of impurity. 
 
 In the appearance of Christ before Herod we 
 may learn, and this is the lesson of importance 
 now, what the Flesh and the votaries of carnal 
 pleasure think of Christ and what Christ thinks 
 of them. There is only one thing worthy of 
 our notice in the trial of the Savior by Herod, 
 it is the terrible silence of Jesus Christ. He 
 spoke to Judas, He spoke to the High Priests. 
 He spoke, as we shall see, to Pilate ; but before 
 Herod He hung His head and would not open 
 His lips! 
 
 Herod mocked Him and sent Him back to 
 Pilate. It is not without reason that we con- 
 sider the trial before Pilate as one in which 
 the Savior of the world encounters our third 
 great Enemy, the DEVIL. 
 
 Such a direct attack seems to be the only 
 explanation of the wickedness that reached its 
 highest pitch before the Roman Governor. A 
 storm of frenzied passions raged with ever in- 
 creasing violence until it swallowed up the Just 
 
Golgotha 27 
 
 One. It was set in motion, to all outward ap- 
 pearances, by the Pharisees, who moved about 
 inspiring the rabble with new ideas and giving 
 keenness to their thirst for blood. 
 
 Their efforts were met with ready response 
 by the brutal mob and the shouts were hurled 
 with overwhelming vehemence against the weak- 
 ness of Pilate until, yielding to their demands, 
 he passed the death sentence on the Savior of 
 the World! 
 
 That is all the historian can find in the rec- 
 ords of the trial, that is all that appears on the 
 surface; but a closer analysis will discover an 
 influence that knows no explanation in human 
 psychology. 
 
 "Behold," said Pilate, "I bring Him forth to 
 you, that you may know that I find no cause 
 in Him." And they cried out saying, "Crucify 
 Him! Crucify Him!" 
 
 That is the substance of the trial. No crime 
 is found in Him, but still He must be put to 
 death. Even to the end Pilate protested his 
 innocence of the blood of this "Just Man." It 
 is impossible to understand the situation, unless 
 we go below the surface and attribute it to the 
 influence of Satan. 
 
 That there are Satanic influences at work to- 
 day is not a difficult thing to prove. You need 
 
28 Golgotha 
 
 not think of the occultism of the psychical 
 research societies, nor of the ravings of those 
 who worship at the shrine of Isis Unveiled. 
 You need not restrict your thoughts to the 
 maniac madness of the bomb-thrower nor to 
 the still more culpable madness of the intelli- 
 gence that inspires the dreadful deed. These 
 are the culminating points of Satanic wicked- 
 ness ; less pronounced and, in consequence, more 
 dangerous are the workings of Satan in Society. 
 There are homes where the name of God is 
 never mentioned, there are theaters that flaunt 
 before the eyes of innocence all that is low and 
 lowering in human wickedness, there are dis- 
 plays of art that would make the pagans blush, 
 and newspapers that revel in immoral and im- 
 modest delineations. All these and countless 
 other forces of wickedness are marshaled to- 
 gether into a great army and move along under 
 the direction of the Powers of darkness. 
 
 But let us return and see how it fares with 
 Jesus Christ under Satanic influence. 
 
 First He was scourged and crowned with 
 thorns. It is a frightful thought and full of 
 horrors. The soldiers conduct the Savior of 
 the world into an underground dungeon to be- 
 gin their bloody work. The Roman scourging 
 was at best so terrible that the victim rarely 
 
Golgotha 29 
 
 survived and on the present occasion the sol- 
 diers who hated the Jews and especially those 
 who ambitioned power, signalized themselves 
 with unusual brutality. The blows descended 
 and the Sacred Blood poured out in torrents 
 and yet the strange Sufferer uttered not a word 
 of complaint, not a sigh of pain, not a murmur 
 of intensified agony. The soldiers grew ex- 
 hausted, they cut the cords that bound their 
 Victim and He fell in a pool of Blood. It is 
 a terrible sight, the naked, mangled body of the 
 Son of God! It was perhaps the very scene 
 that the prophet had before his eyes when he 
 described our Blessed Lord as "a worm and 
 no man, the reproach of men and the outcast 
 of the people." 
 
 Take one glance at the awful picture and run 
 away. Where shall we go? Shall we join 
 Judas? We sinned as he sinned. He cannot 
 bear to think of the sufferings of Jesus Christ. 
 Shall we, with him, try to stifle the thought? 
 No! Let us not join Judas; he is in despair, 
 in black, blind, demon-like despair ! Look, he 
 rushes to the High Priests, throws their sordid 
 money down before them, secures a halter and 
 hangs himself! Shall we go to Herod's Court? 
 He does not think of the worm and no man! 
 His court rings with the music of sensuousness, 
 
30 Golgotha 
 
 his sycophantic admirers flatter him and' pander 
 to his sinful desires. Shall we join him? No! 
 No! Our blessed Savior would not speak to 
 him, would not so much as look at him ! Shall 
 we with Pilate wash our hands and say: "I 
 am innocent of the blood of this Just Man?" 
 No ! because it were a lie ! He was bruised for 
 our iniquities, He was wounded for our sins. 
 
 I know where we shall go! Out in the quiet 
 of the city there is a Woman. She is called 
 the Refuge of Sinners. She is the Mother of 
 Him Who was scourged. She is in deep grief, 
 a sword of sorrow is piercing her soul, but she 
 will be glad to welcome us, to console us and 
 to tell us what to do. "Yes, my child," she 
 will say to us, "your sins have caused that 
 Sacred Blood to flow, your sins put bitterness 
 into the lash, but fear not, it is for you He 
 suffers. He is the Lamb of God, that taketh 
 away the sins of the world. He will take away 
 your sins if you go to Him and stay with Him 
 to the end." 
 
 We may then return with security. The 
 scene is changed. The worm is now a King, 
 but O God, a mock King only! He has upon 
 His head a crown, a crown of thorns, in His 
 hand a mock sceptre, one of the reeds used in 
 the scourging, and about His mangled body a 
 
Golgotha 3 1 
 
 purple robe, a disreputable looking rag that 
 clings to His flesh and is rendered more purple 
 by His Sacred Blood. 
 
 He stands upon the porch of Pilate and faces 
 the frenzied mob. At His side the Roman Gov- 
 ernor motions for silence and leaning out over 
 the balcony he cries aloud : "Behold the Man !" 
 Suddenly, and with the roar of a storm-tossed 
 sea beating against the rocky barriers of earth, 
 there comes the echo: "Away with Him, Cru- 
 cify Him!" "But He hath done no evil!" 
 "Away with Him, Crucify Him!" 
 
 O what a strange mad thing a mob may be! 
 But yesterday they shouted: "Hosanna to the 
 Son of David !" to-day they cry : "Give unto 
 us Barabbas!" And your King? "Crucify Him! 
 Crucify Him!" But His Blood? "His Blood be 
 upon us and our children!" 
 
 And Pilate released unto them Barabbas and 
 delivered Jesus to be crucified. 
 
THE MOB 
 
 It happens on a little hill called Golgotha, 
 outside the city of Jerusalem, at about the sixth 
 hour, noonday according to our reckoning. It 
 is the occasion of a great gathering in the city. 
 Thousands have come from far and near to 
 celebrate the Passover and unconsciously to 
 play a strikingly important part in an event 
 greater than the historic deliverance of the 
 Israelites from the bondage of Egypt. They 
 are to take part, a very undesirable part, in the 
 deliverance of the world from the bondage of 
 Satan, Sin and Death. It is noon and were.it 
 not for the unexpected development of events, 
 the trumpet-call would be announcing the hour 
 for the sacrifice of the paschal lambs. Now 
 there is no trumpet sound, no sacred functions 
 are in progress, but an universal shout and the 
 frantic excitement of the rabble proclaims the 
 hour for the Sacrifice of the Lamb of God! 
 
 The meridian sun is beating down upon the 
 assembled multitude, most of whom are ex- 
 hausted by the toil and excitement of the morn- 
 ing. They had followed the Prisoner from the 
 palace of Caiphas to the Praetorium, thence to 
 Herod's Court and back again to the Praetor- 
 
Golgotha 33 
 
 ium, where for hours they have shouted for His 
 death. There is no record of a pause during 
 that entire fateful morning. From the early 
 hours for most of them, from the previous 
 afternoon for some, there was no respite, no 
 rest, not even time given for food or drink. 
 And yet in spite of the sun's heat, in spite of 
 the fatigue, in spite of their hunger and conse- 
 quent exhaustion, they have gathered on the 
 hillside, and are struggling for a place of van- 
 tage. They have prevailed upon the weakness 
 of Pilate, and they are not going to miss the 
 great spectacle. 
 
 What a strange, weird thing human nature 
 is ! If we should but serve God and exert 
 ourselves for the benefit of our fellow men 
 with even a slight degree of the energy that 
 an unusual excitement can provoke, how vastly 
 different, how consolingly better the world 
 would be! What an unreflecting thing human 
 nature is! But yesterday this same mob 
 shouted their thundering Hosannas and to-day 
 they have clamored for His blood. Public 
 opinion is very plastic! It may be easily 
 molded, it may be more easily changed. 
 " 'Hosanna' 1 to-day ; 'Crucify Him !' to-mor- 
 row," summarizes the history of mob-psy- 
 chology. It is the same now as it was at the 
 
34 Golgotha 
 
 time which we are studying. It will be the 
 same until the end. 
 
 We shall the better understand what the Son 
 of God had to endure, if we will mingle with 
 the rabble that has gathered on Golgotha. It 
 is a strange mixture of every class and condi- 
 tion of men. Priests are there with their 
 drawn faces and hypocritical pretence, young 
 levites not fully, perhaps, but sufficiently 
 steeped in hypocrisy to cause them to make 
 some religious remarks upon the terrible event 
 that we are about to witness. There are Phari- 
 sees and Sadducees, and minions of the adul- 
 terous Herod; Roman soldiers and the Temple 
 Guard vying with one another in brutality and 
 in Satanic wickedness; strangers who have 
 come up to Jerusalem for the Passover and 
 natives of the Holy City; men and women and 
 children, all come out to see the end, to see 
 the Lamb of God slaughtered on the top of 
 Golgotha. They form a vast sea of humanity, 
 a storm-tossed sea, whipped to fury by the 
 frenzied passions that are fanned to ever in- 
 creasing intensity by the promptings of the 
 High Priests. 
 
 "This Man or Barabbas?" asks one, repeating, 
 in blasphemous jest, the appeal of Pilate. 
 
Golgotha 35 
 
 "Barabbas! Barabbas!" comes back in sicken- 
 ing vehemence the Deicidal cry of the madmen. 
 
 "But your King?" continues the jest. 
 
 "Crucify Him! Crucify Him!" roars the 
 fearful echo. 
 
 "His Blood?" Some one ventures. 
 
 And with the persistency of evil doers they 
 shout: "His Blood be upon us and our chil- 
 dren!" 
 
 There is, in the Church's ritual, a most plain- 
 tive appeal directed to this misguided rabble 
 and to all men and women, who by their sins 
 unite with them in heaping insult and injury 
 upon the Son of God. 
 
 "O My people! what have I done to thee?" 
 asks the Savior, "Or in what have I saddened 
 thee, reply to Me. 
 
 "For I led thee out of the land of Egypt 
 and thou hast prepared a cross for thy Savior. 
 
 "I led thee through the desert for forty 
 years and I fed thee with manna, and I led 
 thee into a really good land and thou hast 
 prepared a cross for thy Savior!" 
 
 The heart-rending appeal continues, at some 
 length. All the favors conferred on His chosen 
 people are enumerated and similar favors con- 
 ferred upon us are implied, and after each verse 
 the Church cries out for mercy and for pardon. 
 
36 Golgotha 
 
 "O Holy God, O Holy Power, O Holy Eter- 
 nal God, have mercy on us!" 
 
 Have mercy on us ! This prayer must not be 
 forgotten. In studying the frenzy of the mob 
 on Golgotha, we must not, for a moment, lose 
 sight of the fact, that we were there, that our 
 sins and ingratitude and indifference clamored 
 for the Savior's death. When in our endeavor 
 to please men, we sacrifice the service of God, 
 when with the known law of God on the one 
 hand, and on the other some human motive, 
 some transitory gain, we choose the latter at 
 the expense of the former, we join in the cry: 
 "Give unto us Barabbas !" 
 
 When unmindful of the loyalty we owe to 
 the Church of Jesus Christ we allow her fair 
 name to be reviled, or through culpable igno- 
 rance know not how to defend her honor, when 
 we even allow that there is some reason and 
 justification in the treatment which she receives 
 at the hands of the infidels of France or Por- 
 tugal, or of the bandits of Mexico, we say 
 equivalently : Let her be crucified. 
 
 O Holy God, O Holy Power, O Holy Im- 
 mortal God, have mercy on us! 
 
 The excited mob was impervious to the ap- 
 peals which God would have made to their 
 hearts. They had ears and they heard not. 
 
Golgotha 37 
 
 They had eyes and they saw not that their 
 Victim was indeed the Son of God, was in 
 truth the King of the Jews. He was not the 
 kind of a king they wanted. He was not a 
 Messias after their hearts' desire. They wanted 
 a leader in arms, they wanted a man who 
 would enable them to cast off the yoke of the 
 Roman, they cared nothing and knew nothing 
 of the more disgraceful yoke of Satan. 
 
 Perhaps there were some in that frenzied 
 throng who felt in their hearts, what they dared 
 not openly express, a little spark of sympathy 
 for the Condemned. The accusations made 
 against Him were known; He disturbed the 
 peace and tried to make Himself King. 
 
 "He restored my little crippled child to me!" 
 thinks a grateful mother. "When all human 
 means had failed and all human hope was dead, 
 He with a single word made her whole and, 
 with a look of love that pierced my heart, He 
 gave her back to me. That was not disturbing 
 the people." 
 
 "He fled into the desert when we wished to 
 honor Him," thinks another. "He spurned our 
 applause and, during His whole life, had no 
 place whereon to rest His head. He loved the 
 poor, the outcast and the sinner, He lived with 
 them and toiled for them and taught them to 
 
38 Golgotha 
 
 look upward, to hope and sin no more! That 
 was not the usual way of seeking kingly 
 honors !" 
 
 What those, who had retained a little speck 
 of human sympathy, might have said, was in 
 part expressed by a few sorrowing women who 
 caught a glimpse of the Condemned One and 
 wept for Him. "But how strange a Sufferer 
 He is!" these good women are forced to ex- 
 claim, "He told us to weep, not for Him, but for 
 ourselves and children." 
 
 While the mob is struggling for a favorable 
 place whence to view the last scene in the life 
 of Jesus Christ, the Roman soldiers, assisted 
 by the Temple guard, are preparing the details 
 of the bloody tragedy. They have cleared the 
 top of Golgotha of the over-anxious rabble, 
 and while some are detailed to hold back the 
 excited spectators who are elbowing one an- 
 other in their determination to keep in sight of 
 the Victim, others are busy in the work of cru- 
 cifixion. What do the anxious spectators see? 
 and O good God, what do they hear? They 
 hear the oaths, the curses, the obscene jests of 
 the soul-quenched Roman soldiers. They hear 
 the repeated blows of the hammer, the rattle 
 of the nails, the dull thud of excruciating agony 
 caused by a misdirected blow. 
 
Golgotha 39 
 
 And what do they see? It is too terrible to 
 narrate. Close your eyes to it. Draw the cur- 
 tain over it and pray to God for mercy. They 
 see Him who was the most beautiful among the 
 sons of men, Him Whom the prophets and the 
 Patriarchs of old longed to see and did not see, 
 Him whom the Prophet Simeon saw and ex- 
 claimed: "Now Thou dost dismiss Thy servant, 
 O Lord, according to Thy word in peace, be- 
 cause my eyes have beheld Thy salvation." 
 They see Him, the beauty of Whose face, the 
 grandeur of Whose presence make Heaven 
 what it is, while His absence makes hell a 
 place of horror. They see Christ our Lord, 
 but O how different from what might be ex- 
 pected, a worm and no man, the reproach 
 of men and the outcast of the people, a leper 
 and as one struck by God! They see His gar- 
 ments torn from Him and His wounds re- 
 opened. They see His hands and feet nailed 
 to the Cross and the Cross raised on high and 
 allowed to drop with a sickening thud into the 
 hole prepared for it. 
 
 There is one thing they do not like. In their 
 blind rage they had thought only of the cruci- 
 fixion, and of the degrading insult that would, 
 by this manner of death, be branded into the 
 very name of Jesus; but now, as they gaze 
 
40 Golgotha 
 
 upon the Cross and see the mangled Body be- 
 tween two robbers, they are suddenly made 
 conscious of an insult that has been directed 
 against themselves by the astute Pilate. Con- 
 spicuous over the head of Jesus hangs a tablet 
 bearing an inscription in Hebrew, Greek and 
 Latin, that can be read by every passer-by. It 
 informs them that this Man, nailed to the 
 Cross, between two robbers, is "The King of 
 the Jews." Even from the Cross the King of 
 kings reigns. The Jews saw the insult and 
 asked Pilate to change the wording, to write 
 not "King of the Jews," but that "He said, 
 I am King of the Jews." Their petition was 
 unheeded. "What I have written, I have writ- 
 ten," said Pilate, and so the obnoxious inscrip- 
 tion remained to the end. "Jesus of Nazareth, 
 King of the Jews." 
 
 To us the picture is familiar and full of 
 unspeakable comfort. Jesus, our Love, is cruci- 
 fied! Literally they have dug His hands and 
 feet. They have numbered all His bones. Our 
 sympathy for Him in His sorrow is mingled 
 with deepest faith and hope of obtaining 
 through Him pardon for the sinful past, and 
 strength against the temptations of the future. 
 With love we draw near to the Cross and look 
 without fear upon His blood-stained face and 
 
Golgotha 41 
 
 lacerated body, or we remain at a distance and 
 prostrate in sorrowing sympathy we beg of 
 Him to give to our eyes a fountain of tears 
 that we may weep for our sins. 
 
 There is only one thing that can and ought 
 to cause alarm; it is the temptation to regard 
 the crucifixion as something that does not con- 
 cern us personally. "Behold," cries the prophet, 
 "there is blood upon thy hands." Yes, there 
 is indeed blood upon our hands and there is 
 blood upon our souls, but we need not fear. 
 He will wash away every stain from our souls, 
 if we but linger a little while in the shadow 
 of the Cross to acknowledge our sins and 
 to beg pardon for them. Have mercy on us, 
 O crucified Savior, have mercy on us. Wash 
 us from our iniquity, so that "no trace, no mark, 
 no scar, no stain, no slightest sign be left to 
 show where sin has been!" Let Thy bright 
 clear grace flood our souls and bathe our in- 
 most being till it reflect, "like purest crystal, 
 Thy loveliness." Let a drop of Thy Sacred 
 Blood touch our sin-stained souls and they 
 will become white with whiteness of Angelic 
 innocence ! 
 
FATHER FORGIVE THEM! 
 
 Through tear-dimmed eyes, the Savior looks 
 down from His Cross upon the maddened mul- 
 titude. Like dogs they surround Him, gnash- 
 ing their teeth, like hungry wolves, the coarse, 
 brutal rabble feed their souls on His excruciat- 
 ing agony of pain. He sees grim hatred 
 stamped upon their upturned, pallid faces, He 
 penetrates beyond the surface and views their 
 souls defiled by the heinousness of sin. One 
 look is all He can bear; He turns away from 
 the horrible scene and directs His gaze and His 
 thoughts towards heaven. 
 
 During His passion, He rarely spoke. Like 
 a lamb, He was dumb before His shearers; but 
 when, on several occasions, He did speak, it 
 was to give utterance to some momentous 
 truth or to some solemn and love-inspired 
 warning. Now with His eyes fixed on heaven, 
 He is about to speak. Surely His utterance 
 will be of infinite importance, we must not miss 
 a syllable of it, we must listen not with the 
 ears alone, but with an attentive mind and a 
 heart aglow with love. 
 
 "Father," He cries. The word is not ad- 
 dressed to us; He speaks to His Father in 
 
Golgotha 43 
 
 Heaven. He is beginning a prayer. When 
 in the ever memorable Sermon on the Mount 
 He taught the multitude how to pray, He began 
 with this same sweet name, "Father." "Our 
 Father, Who art in Heaven," He said, teaching 
 us the great central truth, the great consoling 
 truth around which all His other doctrine re- 
 volves, that God is our Father, not my Father, 
 nor your Father, but the Father of us all, char- 
 acterized by the love and tenderness and care 
 which constitute what we call Providence, and 
 demanding from us a responsive obedience to 
 His law and a filial devotion to His interests. 
 When we learn this exalted lesson and love 
 God as our Father, there will be little difficulty 
 in loving our fellow men as brothers, and until 
 we learn the lesson, our boasts of brotherhood 
 will remain empty and void of enduring results. 
 All very well, you may say, but it is so hard 
 to recognize the Fatherhood of God, amid the 
 trials of life that seem to grow in intensity and 
 bitterness, with the years. So many are hun- 
 gry to-day or in fear of hunger to-morrow! 
 So many are sick and weary of life's heavy bur- 
 den, so many in pain and in the ever tightening 
 clutches of sorrow and sadness ! Where is the 
 Providence of Our Father? Look once more 
 at the Cross. Look and listen. The Victim 
 
44 Golgotha 
 
 hanging between heaven and earth, is suffer- 
 ing all that is heart-rending and ghastly diz- 
 ziness, pain, thirst, hunger, shame, insults, all 
 intensified by His extreme delicate sensitiveness 
 of Body and of Soul. His veins are lacerated, 
 His flesh crushed, His wounds inflamed by 
 exposure, His Blood gushing forth from every 
 part of His mangled Body. From the sole of 
 His foot to the crown of His head, there is 
 no soundness in Him. So intense, so over- 
 whelming is it all, that in the language of the 
 prophet, He may well cry out: "O all ye that 
 pass by attend and see, if there be any sorrow 
 like unto My sorrow." And yet from that 
 ocean of grief, He calls upon His "Father!" 
 He wishes to teach us, in our lesser griefs and 
 in our smaller sorrows, to utter the same tender 
 word "Our Father." It is chiefly in misfor- 
 tune, when evils press heavily upon us, that we 
 must look from earth to heaven and lean 
 upon the Providence of God. He knows what 
 is profitable for us and if He sends sorrows, 
 blessed be His holy Name! 
 
 What does our Lord ask of His Father? Is 
 it a repetition of His plaintive appeal in the 
 Garden, "Father, if it be possible, let this 
 chalice pass?" Such a prayer would, to our 
 human sense of the proper, seem more natural 
 
Golgotha 45 
 
 now ; but such is not the burden of His prayer. 
 Is it an appeal full of holy indignation? Does 
 He call upon God to send His ministering angels 
 to silence once and for all the hissing serpents 
 that surround Him? That, too, seems possible 
 to our human way of viewing things. He 
 drove the merchants before Him in holy anger, 
 when they but desecrated the Temple made by 
 hands, while, at present, the coarse, vulgar 
 multitude is defiling, with insults and shameful 
 jests, the Temple not made by hands! 
 
 No, He does not pray for their destruction; 
 He utters a prayer such as the world had never 
 heard, a Divine prayer, sufficient of itself to 
 make one exclaim: Truly this is the Son of 
 God. "Father, forgive them, for they know not 
 what they do!" Send forth a legion of angels, 
 not with swords to destroy, but with the gentle 
 whisperings of grace, to soften their stony 
 hearts and to purify their sordid souls! They 
 have outraged Me, they have dug My hands 
 and feet, they have passed by and clapped their 
 hands and wagged their heads, and opened their 
 vile mouths against Me; nevertheless, O My 
 Father, pardon them, blot out their iniquity, 
 remember not their sins; Father, forgive them, 
 for they know not what they do! 
 
 Truly is the mercy of our blessed Lord 
 
46 Golgotha 
 
 boundless! All His other deeds of mercy, all 
 His parables of mercy, infinite though they be 
 in tenderness, seem to pale before this prayer 
 for mercy. He pardoned Magdalene, but it 
 was because "she loved much"; He pardoned 
 the woman taken in adultery, but it was after 
 the sin had been committed and with the pro- 
 vision that "she sin no more." He told the 
 story of the Prodigal's Father that mirrored 
 the mercy of our Heavenly Father, but the 
 tenderness was shown only after the wayward 
 boy returned from his riotous living. The near- 
 est approach, speaking humanly, to this prayer 
 on the Cross is the parable of the shepherd, 
 who goes in search of the wandering sheep and 
 endures untold hardships to win its confidence 
 and bring it back to the fold; but, it must be 
 noted, the parable does not even suggest the 
 extreme character of the sufferings undergone 
 by the Good Shepherd. Over and above all 
 that is sublime in the teachings of Christ and 
 in His actual life, there is, in the present in- 
 stance, that incomprehensible degree of mercy 
 which prompts Him to beg for forgiveness, 
 even while the blinded rabble is reveling in 
 their sin, even while they are heaping insults 
 upon Him, and destruction upon themselves. 
 This prayer forms the climax of Christ's love 
 
Golgotha 47 
 
 for us. For us? Yes, He saw through tear- 
 dimmed, blood-clotted eyes beyond the mob that 
 surrounded the Cross; He saw that other mob, 
 which we call the human race; He saw every- 
 one of us, with all our sins and vicious habits 
 and for all He prayed: Father, Forgive them! 
 Extend an universal pardon, draw them back 
 from the precipice and from the jaws of hell, 
 back from misery to happiness, back from utter 
 destruction to eternal glory. 
 
 Forgive them, Father, for they know not 
 what they do. If they know not what they 
 do, there is, it may occur to some, no need of 
 forgiveness, for ignorance destroys guilt. It 
 is true, but it must also be remembered that 
 there are two kinds of ignorance, one which 
 is unavoidable and another which, with a little 
 care, may be removed. The former excuses 
 from sin, but not the latter. Ignorance that is 
 courted, ignorance that is affected is, in itself, 
 a sin, and when it leads, as it did, in the case 
 of the Jews, to some terrible crime, it is a 
 terrible sin. They knew not what they were 
 doing, is quite true, because our Lord has thus 
 spoken; but they should have known, they had 
 ample opportunity to know that He was Christ, 
 the Son of the living God, and that they had 
 crucified their Savior. 
 
48 Golgotha 
 
 In another sense it may be said with truth 
 of every sinner, who rebels against Almighty 
 God, that he knows not what he does, he knows 
 not the malice of sin, he knows not that sin 
 blows out the light in his soul, he knows not 
 how hateful sin is in the eyes of God, and how 
 the justice of God will punish it in the next 
 life unless it be forgiven in this. But the 
 sinner ought to know, ample opportunity is 
 given to learn the nature and the malice and 
 the punishment of sin and it is sinful not to 
 profit by the opportunities offered. 
 
 According to some commentators it is this 
 very sin of guilty ignorance for which the 
 dying Savior prays for pardon. Father, forgive 
 their criminal blindness. Take away from them 
 the curse of guilty ignorance, otherwise they 
 will never know what they do, and they will 
 go on sinning against Thee, their Father, and 
 against Me, their Redeemer, and all the foul- 
 ness and horror of sin will be hidden from 
 them. It was to this terrible curse of blind- 
 ness, this withdrawal of the light of grace, with 
 which the obdurate sinner is sometimes pun- 
 ished, that our Savior referred when, on an- 
 other occasion, He exclaimed with tears in His 
 eyes. "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, if thou didst 
 
Golgotha 49 
 
 but know the time of thy visitation, but now it 
 is hidden from thee!" 
 
 In the world to-day there are many who do 
 not know the things of God, they do not rec- 
 ognize the Church of Christ, the need of the 
 Sacraments that have power to weaken their 
 sinful inclinations and that give strength 
 against every temptation. They do not know 
 the necessity incumbent on all men of studying 
 the life and the doctrine of Jesus Christ and 
 studying it under the guidance of the Holy 
 Spirit Who remains, not with the individual 
 but with the Church of Christ's institution and 
 shall remain with her forever. They know or 
 imagine they know many things, but the one 
 thing necessary they do not know. Forgive 
 them, Father, forgive them this criminal igno- 
 rance. 
 
 Forgive them ! Our Lord has on many occa- 
 sions taught us to forgive our neighbor, to 
 forgive even our enemies. The lord of the 
 parable, being angry, delivered the unforgiving 
 servant to the torturers until he paid all his 
 debts. "So also," adds the Savior, "shall My 
 Heavenly Father do to you, if you forgive not 
 every one his brother from your hearts." 
 
 Forgiveness of injuries! It is the perfection 
 of Christian charity. Others have taught the 
 
50 Golgotha 
 
 sublimity of love, they have even taught the de- 
 sirability of a certain stoicism in the presence 
 of insults ; but no man ever reached the heights 
 of Christian forgiveness. The note sounded by 
 Christ in the Sermon on the Mount, "Love 
 your enemies, do good to them that persecute 
 you," is unique in its solemn grandeur and 
 its unapproachable magnificence. It is this that 
 men, of every creed or of no creed, admire so 
 much in the teachings of Christianity. 
 
 But how sadly deficient is the world to-day 
 in the practice of such love! "Who would 
 think," asks the Sovereign Pontiff, Benedict 
 XV, as he reviews the painful spectacle pre- 
 sented by Europe to-day the ruin and the car- 
 nage, the deserted fields, the languishing in- 
 dustries, the neglected arts, the orphans, the 
 widows, and the sorrowing families, "who 
 would think that the combatants are brothers, 
 the children of one Father in Heaven?" 
 
 Something must be wanting! Everybody ad- 
 mires the dignity of love and the heroism of 
 forgiveness, but nobody seems to care to prac- 
 tice it. Something is indeed wanting. Chris- 
 tian love, with all the sacrifices demanded and 
 all the consequent stifling of self-interest, is 
 beyond the reach of human nature, unless that 
 nature is elevated above itself by supernatural 
 
Golgotha 
 
 principles, and impelled by supernatural mo- 
 tives to do, what of itself, it cannot do. This 
 then is what is wanting, supernatural assistance ! 
 Humanity has endeavored to get along without 
 God, and the result is plainly written in char- 
 acters of blood upon the now crumbling arches 
 of human society. 
 
 It is all very well to lament, as we are la- 
 menting to-day, the destruction of mediaeval 
 art, which, as we say, is the inheritance of the 
 race, it is all very well to speak strongly 
 against the desecration of Temples, which have 
 come down unscathed through the centuries, it 
 is easy to condemn the spirit of the age that 
 has transformed the greatest inventions of hu- 
 man intelligence into instruments of devasta- 
 tion and of human butchery; but sad as the 
 thought is, heart-rending as are the details of 
 the universal slaughter, is it not true that the 
 human race having sown the whirlwind is but 
 reaping the storm! Yes, there are Temples 
 desecrated by the engines of war, but in time 
 of peace they were desecrated by impious de- 
 crees that banished the minister of God and 
 destroyed freedom of worship! The accumu- 
 lated art of the centuries has not escaped from 
 the destroying shrapnel, but in time of peace, 
 that same art was despised and the religion 
 
Golgotha 
 
 that inspired the artists was kept in bondage. 
 The inventions of human intelligence, the great- 
 est boasts of science, are used for the purposes 
 of destruction, but had not many boasted, in 
 time of peace, that science had given a death- 
 blow to religion? It was a boast unfounded 
 on fact, but it deceived many and led others 
 away from God, and they who depart from God 
 shall utterly perish. Irreligion knows no 
 weapon but the sword, and builds its hopes on 
 dynamite. 
 
 It is easy for man to admire the exalted love 
 taught by Christ throughout His life and ex- 
 emplified, with such telling effect, in His prayer 
 upon the Cross, it is easy to desire to see such 
 love spread among men; but it is all useless 
 unless the world returns to God through Christ 
 and to Christ through His Divinely authorized 
 Church! The world may return to God when 
 it has learned, from the present conflict, the 
 costly lesson of man's helplessness apart from 
 supernatural principles; but in the meantime 
 there is an estrangement, and, as a consequence, 
 there are enmities and hatreds not only among 
 the warring nations, but even among religious 
 sects. There are periodicals published for the 
 sole purpose of inflaming popular hatred and 
 of sowing the seed of enmities. There are so- 
 
Golgotha 53 
 
 cieties formed, even in our beloved country, 
 whose avowed purpose is to hurl against the 
 Church of Christ the same charges that were 
 hurled against Christ Himself. What can we 
 do to counteract the evil? What can we do to 
 destroy the growing hatred at home as well as 
 abroad? We can do nothing better, nothing 
 more capable of re-awakening the spirit of love 
 than to unite our voices with the prayer of 
 Jesus Christ Crucified: "Father, forgive them, 
 for they know not what they do!" 
 
THE DIVINE HEALER 
 
 We are not altogether certain of the effect 
 produced on the multitude by the Savior's 
 prayer for mercy; but when we recall the words 
 of our Blessed Lord, "If I am lifted up from 
 the earth, I will draw all things to Myself," 
 we may, with probability, conclude that there 
 were some beginnings of repentance, and some 
 manifestations of a change in sentiment. A 
 modern scoffer, whose guilt was the outgrowth 
 of deliberate apostacy and therefore deeper 
 than that of the Jews, which was the result of 
 blind passion and excitement, has not hesi- 
 tated to say: "If the death of Socrates was 
 that of a sage, the death of Jesus Christ was 
 that of a God !" Can we not, therefore, suppose 
 that when His sweet plaintive voice was heard, 
 there was a reaction ? The passions of a mob 
 acquire a momentum which nothing short of a 
 shock can withstand. If a sight of the mangled 
 body on the Cross was powerless to change 
 their hatred into pity, surely that Divine prayer 
 must have had some effect, it must have served 
 as a temporary shock. 
 
 Apart from conjecture we are certain that 
 the Pharisees and their minions had to resort to 
 
Golgotha 55 
 
 a new device to keep at a white heat the hatred 
 of the populace and to prevent them from cry- 
 ing out in favor of their Crucified King. The 
 diabolical nature of the new device seems to 
 point to a turn in the tide of sentiment. Some 
 there were no doubt who recalled the deeds of 
 mercy wrought by the Savior during His life- 
 time. Had He not gone about doing good? 
 At His word the blind received the gift of 
 sight, the deaf their hearing and the dumb the 
 power of speech. At His command the lan- 
 guid blood received new life and flowed with 
 invigorating freshness through the veins. Nay 
 more, He summoned the dead back from the 
 tombs and manifested a power even over the 
 inanimate winds and waves. Goodness and 
 power, goodness infinite and power Divine ac- 
 companied Him through life. 
 
 That such thoughts were in reality circulat- 
 ing through the now exhausted crowd, through 
 the multitude drunk with blood, seems the only 
 explanation of the new attack directed against 
 the Savior, and adopted by all who stood about 
 the Cross. 
 
 "He saved others; Himself He cannot save!" 
 suggested the priests as they moved about 
 among the bystanders or looking towards the 
 Cross wagged their heads in scornful triumph. 
 
56 Golgotha 
 
 "If He be the King of Israel, let Him come 
 down from the Cross!" the multitude shouted, 
 and again the vast sea of humanity roared and 
 rolled on the hillside. 
 
 "Save Thyself!" suggested the Roman sol- 
 diers, perhaps even with a half hope that He 
 would come down from the Cross and cause 
 consternation amongst the criminal mob. 
 
 "Yah, Thou that destroyest the Temple and 
 in three days rebuildest it, save Thyself!" was 
 repeated by those that passed by the way and, 
 as St, Mark tells us, they that were crucified 
 with Him reviled Him. 
 
 "Save Thyself and us!" they said, tauntingly, 
 though, in the heart of the Good Thief, that 
 very taunt must have assumed the nature of a 
 prayer, at least, in the making. 
 
 There can be no doubt of the effect produced 
 on the multitude by this new reproach. He was 
 challenged to declare Himself and He remained 
 in agony on the Cross. How weak the boasted 
 Son of God really was? Why did not God 
 deliver Him? Where was His vaunted power 
 now? Such thoughts ran riot through the as- 
 sembled scoffers and they had sufficient proof 
 in His weakness that He was but an imposter 
 and a false prophet, and the shouts of "Save 
 Thyself, if Thou be the Son of God!" grew 
 
Golgotha 57 
 
 in volume, even as the malice of their infidelity 
 gjew in intensity. 
 
 There are some very important lessons in 
 this incident. We might have imagined that 
 our Lord would be spared this new insult. The 
 memory of His works of love, it might be sup- 
 posed, could inspire thoughts of pity only. "If 
 I have done evil," every single wound of the 
 Savior seems to cry out, "give testimony of the 
 evil, but if I have done well, if I have saved 
 others, saved them from sickness and death 
 and from the miseries that go to make up life, 
 why do you insult Me for it?" Such, in human 
 calculation, should have been the silent, mighty 
 eloquence of the wounded Body, hanging on the 
 Cross; but the mob, lost in the labyrinth of 
 maddening passions, was impervious to any such 
 appeal. What impresses them is the novelty of 
 the insult and so they repeat their "Vah!" and 
 wag their heads in derision. 
 
 The blasphemous challenge is still in vogue 
 amongst certain classes of men. If God wishes 
 us to believe, why does He not manifest Him- 
 self in some miraculous way? Why does He 
 not perform some stupendous miracle so that 
 doubt will be impossible? To many the ques- 
 tion seems reasonable, and even new, but it is 
 both blasphemous and old. It was asked on 
 
58 Golgotha 
 
 Golgotha, as we have just seen, it was asked on 
 a previous occasion by the Pharisees who 
 wanted "a sign in the heavens," in proof of the 
 claims of Jesus Christ. It was asked by the 
 rich man who died and was buried in hell. He 
 thought that if some one would return from 
 the dead to warn his brothers, it would help 
 very much to induce them to change their sinful 
 manner of life and to avoid a fate similar to 
 his own. 
 
 Why does not God satisfy these demands? 
 God, it must be borne in mind, is all holy, and 
 these demands, made in spite of all that He has 
 done for us, are the blasphemous utterances of 
 blind incredulity. God cannot approve of what 
 is wrong and incredulity is terribly wrong. 
 "O My people, what could I have done for you 
 and have not done?" He asks of all the gen- 
 erations of men. To the scoffers who surround 
 the Cross he pleads, with silent eloquence, "By 
 your own admission, I have saved others, in 
 your presence I called Lazarus back from the 
 tomb, I restored sight to the blind and hearing 
 to the deaf and have given ample proof of My 
 Divinity, throughout My sojourn on earth, as 
 I am giving proof now in My death ! What 
 more could I have done and have not done?" 
 To us and to all the world, there comes a 
 
Golgotha 59 
 
 similar appeal. Christ manifested His Divinity 
 during life by countless miracles, His death 
 upon the Cross was a proof of His Divinity, 
 His resurrection from the dead, the accurate 
 fulfillment of prophecies that had been spoken 
 about Him, of prophecies that had been uttered 
 by Him, all unite to drive home the truth of 
 His Divine character with irresistible force. 
 Add to these Scriptural proofs, the testimony 
 of unnumbered martyrs of all ages and of all 
 classes of people, the zeal of an ever-increasing 
 army of apostles, the spread of His church in 
 spite of unimaginable odds, and her triumph 
 over enemies from without and from within, 
 and you will have no difficulty in subscribing to 
 the beautiful sentiments of Chateaubriand: "He 
 Who could cause a Cross to be adored must 
 have been, we may swear to it, nothing less 
 than God." What more could He have done 
 for us and has not done? 
 
 Infidelity or the refusal to believe in the Di- 
 vinity of Jesus Christ and to practice all that 
 such belief implies, cannot be explained by the 
 absence of sufficient evidence, "Let Him come 
 down from the Cross and we shall believe!" is 
 the expression of obdurate and obstinate scep- 
 ticism and has its origin in something deeper 
 than the so-called difficulties of the intellect. 
 
60 Golgotha 
 
 Pull up a religious doubt and you will find a sin 
 at its root. Study the cause of unbelief and 
 you will find that it is monstrous pride and 
 wilful blindness. "What more could I have 
 done and have not done?" is written large upon 
 the walls of the world. 
 
 "He saved others, Himself He cannot save!" 
 There is another lesson of great importance in 
 this blasphemous scoff. The assembled populace 
 publicly acknowledge His power. They pro- 
 claim to the world that Christ was a Healer; 
 but observe how their mad cry manifests a 
 carnal selfish mind which failed to see the rea- 
 son which prompted Christ in the performance 
 of miraculous cures. Repeatedly He had told 
 them that He cured the body to prove that He 
 was sent on earth to cure souls. "In order that 
 you see," He said, "that the Son of Man hath 
 power to forgive sins I say to this man (sick 
 of the palsy), arise and walk." Repeatedly, He 
 had taught that solicitude for the body was 
 indicative of a lack of confidence in the Provi- 
 dence of God, and when He left to them and 
 through them to us, a method of prayer, He 
 taught us to ask for spiritual favors chiefly. 
 Constantly and with unmistakable directness He 
 had taught the priceless value of the soul and 
 the comparative insignificance of the body. 
 
Golgotha 6 1 
 
 "Fear ye not them that kill the body, and are 
 not able to kill the soul, but fear ye Him who 
 can destroy both soul and body in hell." 
 
 All this deeper meaning of spiritual values 
 was hidden from the blind carnality of the Jews. 
 They proclaimed his healing power but only to 
 scoff at its limitations. If Christ were a Healer 
 of physical ills and nothing but a Healer, if 
 He were, ever primarily, a Healer in the physi- 
 cal sense, there was real pointedness in their 
 challenge. If He had come to establish a 
 "sickless humanity," He should have begun with 
 Himself. And in the same manner, if Christ 
 were a Healer of the body, we, who from the 
 vantage point of the twentieth century look 
 back over the records of human history, must 
 admit that He was an absolute and terrible 
 failure. Every individual born into the world 
 has invariably and unmistakably gone out of 
 it through the portals of sickness, or its equiv- 
 alent, and death! Where is the work of the 
 Divine Healer? Let those answer who blas- 
 phemously and without reason still maintain 
 that Christ came on earth to do away with 
 sickness and physical pain! Let those answer 
 who have founded the new religion, the chief 
 promise of which is the cure of sickness and 
 the conquest of pain! But before they answer, 
 
62 Golgotha 
 
 let them, in the sacred name of Jesus Crucified, 
 study the spirit which gives rise to that fearful 
 insult. "He saved others; Himself He cannot 
 save!" "Christian Science," so-called, was born 
 on Golgotha and, I speak in the spirit of love, 
 its first believers stood around the Cross and 
 heaped ignominy on the Healer of souls! 
 
 The Healer of souls! Let us see. Christ 
 answers the challenge by showing in what sense 
 He has come to save. One of the thieves 
 moved by Divine Grace offers an excellent op- 
 portunity for the great lesson. A poor sinner, 
 fortunate enough to acknowledge his sinfulness, 
 utters the first kind word yet heard on Gol- 
 gotha. It is a note of sweet music amid uni- 
 versal discord, it is a prayer amid the darkest 
 blasphemies that ever issued from the souls of 
 men, it is an act of love amid the demoniacal 
 flood of hatred that encompasses the loving 
 Savior. It can only be explained by the quick- 
 ening influence of Grace, by the whispering of 
 an Angel to a heart not so hardened as to 
 refuse responsive gratitude. "Lord," cries the 
 thief, "remember me, when Thou comest into 
 Thy Kingdom!" 
 
 It is more, much more than a mere plea for 
 remembrance. It is a profession of faith in the 
 other-world character of Christ's Kingdom. It 
 
Golgotha 63 
 
 is a public act of submission to the teaching of 
 Christ so strikingly emphasized on the Cross 
 that His Kingdom is not of this world. It is 
 an act of hope; the prayer breathes unlimited 
 confidence in the goodness of Christ even to- 
 wards a poor sinner. It is an act of love, all 
 the more admirable in the hate-laden atmos- 
 phere of Golgotha. "Lord, remember me, when 
 thou comest into Thy Kingdom/' 
 
 It is not an elaborate prayer, neither was 
 the prayer of the poor Publican who did not 
 so much as raise his eyes to heaven, but struck 
 his breast saying: "O God, have mercy on me 
 a sinner." But though simple and brief it is in 
 this case as it was in that, powerfully efficacious. 
 "This day thou shalt be with Me in paradise!" 
 is the answer of Jesus Crucified. What does 
 this answer mean? It means that all the sins of 
 a lifetime, all the accumulated disorders of a 
 career that deserved the death-penalty, are in 
 a moment blotted out, that the soul is washed 
 white and clothed with a robe of innocence so 
 pure, so stainless, so free from even the dust 
 of sin that this very day the soul of the penitent 
 thief will enter Paradise, the eternal mansion 
 of God and be associated with the angels and 
 saints forever. Nothing defiled can enter Para- 
 dise and hence the soul of the penitent of Gol- 
 
64 Golgotha 
 
 gotha has in a moment been freed from all 
 defilement. 
 
 This boundlessness of mercy need not sur- 
 prise us. "In whatsoever day," says God, "the 
 sinner turns to Me, I shall turn to him and all 
 his sins will be forgotten!" All his sins, even 
 though they are as numerous as the sands on 
 the sea shore? Yes, all!, for God's mercy is 
 infinite and infinite mercy knows no bounds. 
 The one thing necessary, is that the sinner for- 
 sake the hard task-master and the swine and 
 return to his Father! 
 
 Now we understand what kind of a Savior 
 Jesus Christ really is, He is a Savior of souls; 
 and we understand too, why He did not come 
 down from the Cross. He did not come down 
 because it is by His Sacred Blood that our 
 souls are restored to their primitive whiteness 
 and He wished to shed the last drop of His 
 Blood so that there would be for us and for all 
 the world what, in Holy Scripture, is called 
 "plentiful Redemption." What He did for the 
 body was but transitory, all who profited by 
 His miraculous cures grew sick again and died. 
 He made use of His power to win our faith in 
 Him in order to tell us how much our immortal 
 souls were valued in Heaven. Nothing else 
 counts with God, neither health, nor wealth, 
 
Golgotha 65 
 
 nor fame, nor influence among men; nothing 
 else ought to count with us. "What does it 
 profit a man to gain the whole world if He 
 suffer the loss of His soul?" is the substance 
 of Christ's teaching in this matter and in keep- 
 ing with this teaching His Divinely authorized 
 Church instructs the sick and those in danger 
 of death to say with holy resignation : 
 
 "O my God I willingly accept and bear all 
 pains and sufferings and even death itself with 
 resignation to Thy Divine will and in punish- 
 ment for my sins. O my Jesus, I unite my- 
 sufferings to Thy most bitter torments. O 
 Lord, here burn, here cut; but spare me for 
 eternity !" 
 
 It was this proper appreciation of the rela- 
 tive value of soul and body that inspired those 
 saints of God who looked upon a day as lost 
 when it was unaccompanied by pain, or some 
 equivalent misfortune. They wished, in all sin- 
 cerity, to "take up their cross daily" and fol- 
 low Jesus. Return again to the scene on Gol- 
 gotha and listen to the loving Savior's words: 
 "This day, thou shalt be with Me in Paradise." 
 Our Lord intends to say these same words to 
 us, yes He really intends to address us as He 
 addressed the penitent. So serious is His in- 
 tention, so earnest His desire, that in order to 
 
66 Golgotha 
 
 be sure of thus addressing us He died upon 
 the Cross. Nothing on earth can deprive us of 
 that happiness, nobody on earth can stand be- 
 tween us and Paradise, except unrepented sin 
 and ourselves ! But there is one thing on earth 
 that can draw us nearer to Christ; it is suffer- 
 ing, borne with resignation to the holy will of 
 God. 
 
 With Christ in Paradise! What does it mean? 
 We cannot say all that it means, we cannot 
 even in fancy picture what God has prepared 
 for those who serve Him; but we know that 
 Paradise is the accumulation of all good things, 
 and the termination of all evil things. What- 
 ever the human soul is capable of enjoying, 
 whatever its angelic powers of intellect and will 
 and memory are capable of attaining will be 
 attained in ever increasing fullness forever! In 
 Paradise we shall revel in torrents of delight 
 for all eternity. In Paradise we shall know 
 our own, and we shall know all the saints and 
 servants of God of all nations and of all time, 
 we shall know God in all His grandeur and 
 incomprehensible magnificence. 
 
 Do not be deceived by those who speak of a 
 paradise on earth, a man-made paradise. It is 
 the dream of madmen and a fearfully empty 
 dream. Paradise on earth ! Look around you 
 
Golgotha 67 
 
 and you will find that when it is built by man 
 on man-made foundations, it inevitably crumbles 
 into dust with a mighty crash and with un- 
 speakable ruin. No, we have not here a lasting 
 city, but look for one that is to come. We 
 trust no dreams of selfish humanity but look to 
 Him Who can say, and Who, if we remain 
 faithful to Him, will say to each of us, when 
 life fails, as fail it must, what He said to Dismas 
 on Golgotha: "This day, thou shalt be with me 
 in Paradise." 
 
MARY, HIS MOTHER 
 
 "Now there stood by the Cross of Jesus, 
 Mary, His Mother." These words of the be- 
 loved Disciple need not turn our thoughts away 
 from the central Figure of the great tragedy. 
 Familiar as they are to us, and full of power 
 to arouse our sympathy for the Virgin Mother, 
 whose presence beneath the Cross was a martyr- 
 dom of untold bitterness, they express, at the 
 same time, another and an unintelligibly deep 
 sorrow and mental anguish of Him Who was 
 on the Cross. 
 
 To suffer in the presence of those we love, to 
 suffer and to see the anguish caused in others 
 by our pain is, for the noble-minded, worse 
 than the pain itself. Such at least was the case 
 with our Blessed Lord. He saw beneath the 
 Cross her whom he loved most tenderly, He 
 knew what an ocean of sorrow encompassed her 
 loving soul and He felt additional agony in the 
 thought. But you may say it was but proper 
 that she should be there, the Mother belongs 
 at the death-bed of the Son and her presence 
 seems to remove one terrible feature in the Pas- 
 sion, the utter lonesomeness of our dear Lord. 
 In the Garden, when perspiration ran red with 
 
Golgotha 69 
 
 drops of Blood, He was alone. He was con- 
 ducted to the tribunal of the High Priest alone. 
 Alone he stood before Herod and on the porch 
 of Pilate. He was alone during the awful scourg- 
 ing and the crowning with thorns, and when He 
 struggled up to the top of Gologtha. From the 
 Cross He looked out over a vast sea of faces 
 and yet He was alone, except for the presence 
 of Mary and John and the few faithful women 
 who accompanied them. Except for this small 
 company of sympathizers, He could say even 
 from the Cross what, without any exception, He 
 could truly say in the Garden : "I looked for 
 one to grieve with Me and there was none, for 
 one to comfort Me and I found none. I have 
 trodden Gethsemane alone !" 
 
 Yet the presence of His Mother, heroic though 
 it is and comforting to Him Who loves heroism 
 and sacrifice, adds to His other sufferings a 
 most bitter pang. It may even be said without 
 exaggeration that the sight of His sorrowing 
 Mother was more painful to the Savior than 
 the very nails that pierced His sacred hands 
 and feet. This is explicitly stated in the revela- 
 tion of St. Bridget. "Whenever my Son looked 
 down on me from the Cross," the Blessed Vir- 
 gin is reported to have said to the saint, "He 
 was filled with such bitter grief on account of 
 
70 Golgotha 
 
 my sorrow that all the pain, caused by His 
 wounds, was, as it were, lulled to rest, by the 
 thought of my sorrow which He was witness- 
 ing." 
 
 The presence of Mary then is not the least 
 of Christ's sufferings and it must be studied in 
 all the sorrows it caused, if we wish to get a 
 full knowledge, as far as full knowledge is pos- 
 sible, of what the Victim of Love suffered for 
 us. But there is still another way of viewing 
 the scene. It is the Catholic way, and consists 
 in turning our thoughts directly to the Sorrows 
 of Mary's Immaculate heart. Most of the great 
 saints have written eloquently of the Sorrows 
 of the Blessed Mother of God. They have drawn 
 salutary lessons from the thought that she whom 
 Christ loved, as only a Divine Son could love, 
 was permitted to pass through this bitter agony. 
 St. Bernard applies to her the words of Jere- 
 mias, "Great as the sea is thy contrition," and 
 tells us that on Golgotha there were "two seas 
 of sorrow, the sea of sorrow that encompassed 
 the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which was full to 
 overflowing, and the sea of sorrow that was 
 caused by the overflow in the Immaculate heart 
 of Mary." "Each wound inflicted on our Lord 
 produces in her uncounted wounds," says St. 
 Gregory, and according to St. Cyprian, "All 
 
Golgotha 71 
 
 that marvelous martyrdom which the Passion 
 effected in Jesus Christ was reproduced in her 
 by her active watching." 
 
 Thus the saints in viewing the Cross, see 
 always, in its shadow, the Sorrowful Mother 
 and seeing her there, they pause to give ex- 
 pression to their admiration of her self-sacrific- 
 ing fidelity to her Divine Son and to study the 
 reasons which prompted the loving Savior to 
 allow His Mother to stay with Him in His 
 agony. 
 
 Here on Golgotha is being enacted the last 
 sad scene in the world's greatest tragedy, here 
 is the Cross around which the history of the 
 world revolves. All previous ages looked for- 
 ward to it, and from it comes a light that dis- 
 pels the darkness of all subsequent centuries. 
 The Cross has had its battles, bloodless and 
 bloody, and has come forth from each more 
 glorious than before. It was driven from the 
 face of earth by the Roman Emperors, while its 
 children were, day by day, slaughtered in the 
 amphitheaters of Rome, and yet when the con- 
 flict was over the humble followers of Jesus 
 Crucified came forth from their hiding places 
 and ascending the Capitol of the Eternal City 
 planted there, amid songs of thanksgiving and 
 hymns of triumph, their Cross-emblazoned stand- 
 
72 Golgotha 
 
 ard of victory. It was the Cross that St. Paul, 
 the Great Apostle of the Gentiles, announced with 
 so much vehemence and eloquence to the pagan 
 world. "I preach Jesus Christ Crucified" was 
 ever on his lips as the love of Christ was in his 
 Apostolic heart. When in the course of time, 
 the Western World was found, the first act of 
 the discoverer was to erect the Cross on the 
 Island of San Salvador, the Island of our 
 Savior, while here in California, scattered like 
 mile stones along the Camino Real the Mission 
 Crosses were erected by the devoted followers 
 of St. Francis and inaugurated the conquest of 
 the West. 
 
 Christ is admirable in His power, in His wis- 
 dom, in His goodness ; in the Cross He is 
 adorable, because in the Cross He is God. In 
 the Cross is our salvation, in the Cross is 
 our comfort, in the Cross is forgiveness of sins, 
 hope of Heaven, motives that influence love 
 and arguments that strengthen faith ; everything 
 worth while is in the Cross! It will be seen in 
 the heavens when Christ comes to judge the 
 living and the dead, and blessed will be the 
 servants of the Cross on that tremendous day. 
 
 With this truth so plainly Christian before 
 your mind, listen again to what St. John tells 
 us: "There stood by the Cross of Jesus, Mary 
 
Golgotha 73 
 
 His Mother." How incomplete is the picture of 
 Golgotha without that Mother ! How naked our 
 Christianity without that Mother ! She was with 
 Christ in Bethlehem, when the Angels sang His 
 birth, she was with Him at Cana when He be- 
 gan His public career, she brought Him into 
 the world, she introduced Him to the world, 
 and now, that He is about to leave the world, 
 she stands beneath His Cross. So striking is 
 her presence with Christ in every great epoch 
 of His life that it has been truly said: "Who 
 shun her seek Him not." 
 
 The presence of Mary, His Mother, beneath 
 the Cross was the occasion of the next word 
 spoken by the dying Savior. "Woman," He 
 said, "behold thy son," and turning to John 
 who also remained faithful to His Master, He 
 said, "Behold thy Mother." Can it be that 
 the Savior Who is about to die is leaving His 
 Mother to the care of His beloved Disciple? 
 It may readily be supposed that He had some 
 such purpose in view. He was to be separated 
 from Mary by death, He knew what anguish 
 that separation would cause, He knew the deso- 
 lation and the grief that would be hers, until, 
 at least, the triumphant morning of Easter, and 
 loving her so tenderly it is altogether in keep- 
 ing with His compassionate nature that He 
 
74 Golgotha 
 
 thinks of her in this manner. "Mother," He 
 says equivalently, "be not desolate, My beloved 
 Disciple will stay with thee in thy sorrow, he 
 will be to thee a substitute for Me, He will 
 speak words of comfort and of hope. Behold 
 thy Son!" "John, behold thy Mother, be de- 
 voted to her, as I have ever been, take My 
 place as far as it is possible, not only until I 
 return on Easter morning, but until the time 
 arrives for her to enter Heaven." 
 
 Such an interpretation is not only possible ; 
 it is both literal and true and manifests the in- 
 tensity of Christ's love for Mary, but according 
 to the Fathers of the Church, there is another 
 and a deeper meaning in the words. The dying 
 Savior is thinking of us! On the preceding 
 night when He had gathered His Apostles 
 around Him for the Last Supper, He left to 
 the world a legacy, so rich and of such inesti- 
 mable grandeur that no thought of ours can 
 fathom its soundless depths. He Who, during 
 the three years of public ministry, had given 
 so many priceless lessons and such an admir- 
 able example of all that is beautiful and noble 
 in human conduct, wished, before His death, 
 to give us something more, and He gave us 
 Himself under the appearance of bread and 
 wine, Himself whole and entire, Body, Soul 
 
Golgotha 75 
 
 and Divinity to be the sustaining food and the 
 life of our souls. 
 
 Surely He has given us enough, the human 
 heart ought to be satisfied, but His Divine 
 Heart is not yet satisfied. From the Cross, at 
 the very hour of death, as if to impress the 
 importance and the value of the gift upon us, 
 He gives to us the treasure He loved most ten- 
 derly, the object nearest and dearest to Him, 
 He gives us His Mother! 
 
 Such is the meaning attached to these words 
 by the Fathers of the Church, nor is it without 
 reason. St. John, at the foot of the Cross, is 
 the representative of all those who wish to profit 
 by the death of the Son of God. "Behold thy 
 Mother," is addressed through our representa- 
 tive to us, and to Mary, the holiest of the holy, 
 the purest of the pure, have been assigned by 
 the dying Savior the office and the duties of 
 our Mother. 
 
 Nor is it only a metaphorical way of speak- 
 ing. Christ does not merely request Mary to 
 act as if she were our Mother, but He solemnly 
 declares that she is our Mother. A mother is 
 one to whom we owe our life. We have a three- 
 fold life, the life of the body, the life of the 
 mind and the life of the soul. There need be 
 no question of the first two forms of life, be- 
 
76 Golgotha 
 
 cause apart from the soul, they are altogether 
 despicable. We share the life of the body with 
 the meanest shrub that encumbers the ground 
 and with the vilest reptile that lurks in slimy 
 places ; we share mental life or intelligence with 
 the demons and with all the great bad men of 
 history, every criminal is intelligent, many are 
 criminals because they possess an unusually high 
 degree of intelligence. 
 
 The life of the soul is not to be despised, it 
 even adds keenness to intelligence, and grace 
 and beauty to mere physical life. It is only 
 another word for Divine Grace and do we not 
 say that Mary is the Mother of Divine Grace 
 and that from her we received the Life of our 
 souls? Christ is the source and founder of 
 Grace and Mary is the Mother of Christ. This 
 is what John tells us in the words which we 
 are studying: There stood by the Cross of 
 Jesus Mary, His Mother! 
 
 Oh, no! it does not in any way diminish our 
 appreciation of His Divinity and our gratitude 
 for all that He has done for us. Whatever we 
 have of grace has come to us through Him, but 
 is He not Mary's Son? All increase of grace 
 is His gift, and, in an especial manner, the great 
 Sacrament of the Eucharist, that nourishes the 
 life of our souls, is His gift; but is it not true 
 
Golgotha 77 
 
 that the Body and Blood received in Holy Com- 
 munion were formed of her body and blood? 
 In the sacrifice on Golgotha, He it was that 
 died that we might live, but it was the death 
 of the human Christ; He felt no pain, no sor- 
 row in His Divine nature; it was His Body that 
 was lacerated and it is His Sacred Blood that 
 purifies the soul and did He not receive His 
 Body and Blood from Mary His Mother? 
 
 We do not forget that it was the Divinity 
 of Christ that gave efficacy to His suffering and 
 death, and made it possible for Him to atone 
 for the sins of the world, but His humanity was 
 the instrument of His suffering and His human- 
 ity was as closely related to Mary as ever son 
 was to mother! It is for this reason that the 
 great saints of the Church do not hesitate to 
 call the Holy Virgin, the co-Redemptrix of the 
 world. She is the Mother of Grace, the Mother 
 of life, for Christ is life. 
 
 "Yes, Mother, we were truly born of thee, 
 In Calvary's second Eden thou its Eve 
 
 Thy Dolors were our birth-pangs, by the Tree, 
 Whereon thy dear Son died that we might live." 
 
 Behold then, thy Mother, standing in the 
 shadow of the Cross! or, if you choose, behold 
 His Mother! His Mother or our Mother, it is 
 all the same, for He is our Brother, He is the 
 first born of many brethren, our Brother, in like- 
 
78 Golgotha 
 
 ness of nature, in tenderness of mercy, in one- 
 ness of life made possible through the Holy 
 Eucharist. His Mother! what is there that she 
 cannot obtain for us? She need not beg for 
 favors; it would not be the proper thing for 
 a mother to do, she can command as she did 
 command when on earth and if a dutiful son 
 will do what his mother wishes, how blind must 
 they be who imagine that the Divine Son of 
 Mary will refuse anything to His Mother. Our 
 mother. What is there that she will not obtain 
 for us? No earthly mother is capable of as 
 much tenderness of love as is the great Queen 
 of Heaven, and yet an earthly mother will go 
 through fire and water to help even her way- 
 ward child. 
 
 We have, it is true, but one advocate with the 
 Father. He was our advocate when from His 
 little bed of straw He stretched forth His in- 
 fant arms to pray for us. He was our advocate 
 when in the solitude of Nazareth He calmly 
 awaited the day appointed by His Father to 
 begin the work of Redemption. He was our 
 advocate when He hung upon the Cross and 
 prayed for us. He is our advocate now, though 
 He sits at the right hand of God. But He is 
 Mary's Son, and, in another sense, she too is 
 our advocate. He is our advocate with the 
 
Golgotha 79 
 
 Father; she is our advocate with Him. Mother 
 and Son, who will dare to separate them and 
 who will dare to deny that Mary can pray for 
 us? We may pray for one another. Christ 
 taught us thus to pray, to ask not for ourselves 
 alone, but for our brethren: "Give us our daily 
 bread," "forgive us our sins," "deliver us from 
 evil." We, poor sinners, may pray one for an- 
 other. Cannot the Mother of God do likewise? 
 It is not taking any glory from the Son if we 
 give the Mother her due. She is not the advo- 
 cate with the Father in the same sense as her 
 Divine Son, Who by His own power, by His 
 own merits stands between us and God. Mary, 
 through the merits of her Son, and by reason 
 of her dignity as Mother, can pray that we 
 may be made partakers in the fruits of the Re- 
 demption. As Mother of God she can pray, as 
 our Mother she does pray, and for this reason 
 she is called by the Church, our gracious advo- 
 cate, advocate with the Father, for she is His 
 daughter ; advocate with the Holy Spirit, for she 
 is His spouse; advocate with the Son, for she 
 is His Mother. 
 
 Filled with confidence in the power of her 
 intercession there is one thing that we must ask 
 of her to-day, it is the one important thing for 
 which Christ dies, the grace of saving our im- 
 
8o Golgotha 
 
 mortal souls. We have already studied what 
 salvation means, how its very thought over- 
 shadows all the trials and disappointments of 
 life and we may now recall what the saints 
 have said of Mary's power in helping us to at- 
 tain this great eternal boon. All that they have 
 said about devotion to the Blessed Mother of 
 God being a "pledge of salvation" a "mark of 
 predestination" and "a guaranty of persever- 
 ance in grace" has been very beautifully ex- 
 pressed in the following lines : 
 
 "Whene'er I doubt if one so base as_ I ^ 
 Shall share with heavenly choirs their joys serene, 
 This thought brings sweetest solace to my soul, 
 That Thou, my Lady, art the Angels' Queen. 
 Shall I, then, fear to face the glittering ranks 
 That guard from step profane, Heaven's dazzling 
 
 scene? 
 
 Their flame-tipped swords will lower at the cry: 
 'Angels of God, my Mother is your Queen!'" 
 
 The one thing to be noted is that if we 
 claim Mary as our Mother, we must endeavor 
 to prove, by virtuous living, that we are in 
 very truth her children! The child resembles 
 his mother ; we must imitate her virtues. The 
 child loves his mother; we must love Mary! 
 The child has confidence in his mother, feels 
 secure in her care; we must have confidence 
 and feel secure in the care of our Heavenly 
 Mother. 
 
FORSAKEN! 
 
 The words which we have thus far consid- 
 ered, were spoken, according to commentators, 
 at the commencement of Christ's agony on the 
 Cross. There followed a protracted period of 
 awe-inspiring silence. The jeers of the rabble 
 had ceased and most of the spectators turned 
 back to the city and sought the shelter of their 
 homes. The few that remained stood afar off in 
 groups of twos and threes and felt the terrible 
 agony of fear. There are moments in the lives 
 of all of us when we experience what a strange 
 thing fear is and how utterly weak and power- 
 less beings we are when its cold grasp clutches 
 at our hearts. We sometimes try to conceal it, 
 but the pallid face and trembling hands be- 
 tray us. 
 
 The rabble feared, the murderous priests 
 feared, the soldiers feared and the dispersed 
 Apostles feared. There were, no doubt, various 
 gatherings throughout the city, where the deed 
 already accomplished was discussed, and plans 
 were made for future conduct. In the house of 
 Caiphas, some one suggests, we may imagine, 
 that a record of the day's doings be spread upon 
 the Temple register. 
 
82 Golgotha 
 
 "What shall we write?" asks one. 
 
 "This day we have crucified Jesus of Naza- 
 reth !" is proposed. 
 
 "No! No!" it is objected, "Say rather that 
 the Roman Governor ordered the execution of 
 an enemy of Caesar!" 
 
 "Are we then to be deprived of the glory of 
 our deed?" asks some more obstinate than the 
 rest; but there is no inclination among them to 
 claim any glory. Fear has seized upon them. 
 They look out towards Golgotha or hear the 
 dull thud of hastening footsteps along the city 
 streets or the low murmur of the returning rab- 
 ble and their fear increases. 
 
 Amongst the dispersed Apostles there is, for 
 the most part, a sorrowful silence. Some of 
 the disciples may have already yielded to the 
 despair of incredulity. "We thought that He 
 was to restore Israel, but now our hopes are 
 nailed to a Cross," they reflect and plunge 
 deeper and deeper into despair. Such uncer- 
 tainty could hardly have place among the scat- 
 tered remnants of the Twelve. They understood 
 now, as they did not understand before, some 
 of their Master's sayings. "Behold we go up 
 to Jerusalem/' He told them but a short time 
 ago, "and all things shall be accomplished which 
 were written by the prophets concerning the 
 
Golgotha 83 
 
 Son of man. For He shall be delivered to the 
 Gentiles and shall be mocked and scourged and 
 spit upon and after they have scourged Him 
 they will put Him to death, and the third day 
 He shall rise again." 
 
 These and similar words occur to them, and 
 there is the dawn of understanding. The first 
 part they understand fully, but they seem in 
 woeful ignorance of the promise to rise again, 
 for, if they had grasped the meaning of this 
 clearly expressed promise, they would now, it 
 seems to us, rush out to the Cross and swear 
 allegiance to their Crucified Master. As it is 
 they give way to grief, and to fear, or, if they 
 hope, it is a hope unaccompanied by firm belief 
 that He who has been Crucified is their God. 
 Shame too must be in their hearts, when from 
 afar they gaze upon the Cross standing out omi- 
 nously against the sky and think how Mary 
 and John and even Magdalene are standing by 
 the side of the Master, faithful to Him even in 
 His agony and disgrace. 
 
 Nearer the scene of the crucifixion the voices 
 of men are hushed. Christ does not speak to 
 man; He is speaking from the depths of His 
 Soul to His Father. Mary and John cannot 
 speak; grief has sealed their lips. The soldiers 
 who are forced to stay on guard are ill dis- 
 
84 Golgotha 
 
 posed to break the dead silence; their fear has 
 made them speechless. 
 
 What has come over the scene? How can 
 we account for this sudden and terrible change? 
 A few moments ago the walls of the city echoed 
 to the shouts of nearly a million madmen; now 
 all is silent, except for the occasional screams 
 of frightened birds of prey that flit across the 
 sky and dash wildly they know not whither, 
 and the lowing of terrified cattle in the neigh- 
 boring fields that hasten in mad disorder in 
 search of cover. What is it that has happened? 
 The change from echoing shouts to sepulchral 
 silence must have some proportionate cause. 
 
 It has a proportionate cause. Far away from 
 Golgotha, far away from the Holy City, even 
 in distant Athens, there were some Grecian 
 philosophers assembled. They knew nothing of 
 the Deicidal crime that was in progress, they 
 knew nothing of Jesus of Nazareth, nothing of 
 His doctrine, nothing of His most remarkable 
 career ; but they knew something about the laws 
 of Nature, and when they observed what was 
 taking place, they were struck dumb by the 
 unusualness of it all. One of them, it is re- 
 ported, arose before the assembly and exclaimed : 
 "Either the God of nature suffers or the world 
 is in the throes of dissolution!" 
 
Golgotha 85 
 
 Darkness had overshadowed the earth! "It 
 was the sixth hour," says St. Luke, "and there 
 was darkness over all the earth until the ninth 
 hour." It was in striking fulfillment of the 
 prophetic utterance: "Behold darkness shall 
 cover the earth and a mist the people." Once 
 during our Lord's life-time He ascended to 
 Mount Thabor and, while engaged in prayer, 
 His garments shone like snow and His face be- 
 came like the sun. His majesty changed the 
 darkness of night into the splendor of noonday. 
 Now in His anguish He changes the brilliancy 
 of noonday into the gloom and silence of night. 
 
 No wonder the scoffers dispersed, no wonder 
 they rushed back to the city, and sought their 
 homes. The mangled Body of Jesus Christ on 
 the Cross was incapable of arousing fear in 
 their hearts, but seen against a black noonday 
 sky it became terrible! The consequent gloom 
 became unbearable and it generated an interior 
 gloom that forced them to feel the utter help- 
 lessness and insignificance of man. 
 
 There is a darkness that is natural, the dark- 
 ness of night. It does not beget fear, because it 
 is sent by the goodness of God as a time of 
 rest to the weary world. It is during the dark- 
 ness of night, when men are at rest, that the 
 beasts of the wilderness become active. During 
 
86 Golgotha 
 
 the silent hours of the night, the prince of dark- 
 ness prowls about like a roaring lion, seeking 
 whom he may devour. During the night, his 
 slaves, those who do evil and hate the light, the 
 human beasts, go about their deeds of dark- 
 ness. They have converted night into day! 
 
 There is an intellectual darkness, the dark- 
 ness of ignorance of the things of God. It is 
 sometimes unavoidable, but it is often voluntary. 
 Blind lead the blind and both fall into the yawn- 
 ing abyss. Man is blind by reason of the fall. 
 He needs guidance. He needs supernatural 
 guidance. He loses himself when he struggles 
 on through life alone. That is why Christ has 
 left on earth His Church to guide us on the 
 right way in matters of faith and morals. 
 
 We always need our Lord, but in darkness 
 we need Him in a special manner. This is true 
 of the natural darkness of night. It is true of 
 the darkness of intellect. It is true of the 
 darkness that will fall upon us in the "last 
 evening" of life. It will be very still then about 
 the house. Our friends will move to and fro 
 on tiptoe, and whisper to one another in a sad, 
 soft tone. Our eyes will grow dim and objects 
 will appear in strange, unusual shapes. Those 
 that stand near will seem far off. Our breath- 
 ing will become shorter and quicker and at in- 
 
Golgotha 87 
 
 tervals it will stop and then begin again. Our 
 eyes will roll and our brows will be wet with 
 perspiration. The end will be near. It will be 
 the evening of life. Then we shall need our 
 Savior, because nothing else, nobody else, can 
 comfort us. If He does not come in to abide 
 with us, it will be unutterably dark on that last 
 evening and unutterably sad, too. We shall 
 need Him to light us through the valley of 
 shadows. Our prayer should be: "Abide with 
 us, for it is toward evening." Then His com- 
 ing will bring light and joy. Then the last eve- 
 ning of life will be calm and peaceful, it will 
 be a going home, it will be a sleep from which 
 we shall waken in the presence of the Savior 
 Who loves us now and will love us then, as He 
 loved us when He was on the Cross. It was 
 His love for us that caused the exterior dark- 
 ness which we have seen and the interior dark- 
 ness which we are now to study. 
 
 Christ is in His agony. He wishes to ex- 
 perience everything that is to come within the 
 experience of man, so that He may leave us an 
 example to follow. The darkness without is but 
 a suggestion of the darkness that has settled 
 on His human soul. Some have suggested that 
 the exterior darkness is best explained by say- 
 ing that nature mourned for nature's God. 
 
Golgotha 
 
 This was indeed the meaning attached to it by 
 the Grecian philosopher, Dionysius, when before 
 his assembled comrades he declared that either 
 the God of nature was suffering or that nature 
 herself was in the throes of dissolution. Nor 
 is there any reason to suppose that such a phe- 
 nomenon would not be in keeping with the 
 economy of God. When the Pharisees objected 
 to our Lord's triumphant entry into Jerusalem 
 and to the shouts of welcome with which He 
 was greeted by the enthusiastic populace, He 
 told them that the very stones would cry out, 
 were the people to hold their tongues. Now, 
 with the circumstances changed, when the people 
 refuse to be moved to pity at the sight of the 
 God-man hanging on a Cross, it is quite pos- 
 sible that God permitted even inanimate nature 
 to grieve for the death of His Eternal Son. 
 There is darkness over all the earth, the sun 
 refuses to shine upon the work of blood, the 
 very rocks, more tender than passion-gripped 
 hearts, are torn asunder and the earth seems 
 ready to open and swallow up the blasphemous 
 Deicides. 
 
 During the terrible silence, and this awe-in- 
 spiring darkness, the Savior speaks again. He 
 speaks briefly, but terribly. "Eloi! Eloi! Lamma 
 Sabacthani!" My God, my God, why hast 
 
Golgotha 
 
 Thou forsaken Me? How painfully in keeping 
 with the lowering darkness is that piteous cry! 
 
 Forsaken! Most of us know the meaning of 
 the word. Sometimes devoted mothers are for- 
 saken by the children whom they nourished 
 and for whom they toiled and sacrificed them- 
 selves. They are compelled to struggle hard 
 and long to keep body and soul together, even 
 while, in some instances, their ungrateful sons 
 and daughters live in luxury and ease. "Mother, 
 you have been very good to me!" said a young 
 man as he stood at the death bed of her who 
 raised him, gave him an education, and, by per- 
 sonal sacrifice which shortened her life, sent him 
 well-equipped into the world. "Mother, you 
 have been very good to me." The dying woman 
 looked at him with tears in her eyes and spoke 
 her last words on earth: "John," she said, "this 
 is the first time you ever said so!" She had 
 been forsaken by her son. 
 
 On the other hand, children are sometimes 
 forsaken by their parents. I refer not alone to 
 those who in tender infancy are left on the door- 
 step of a stranger; I refer, and with emphasis, 
 to those who later on in life abandon their chil- 
 dren to the blind guidance of the blind, to the 
 Godless education of the world where they are 
 
90 Golgotha 
 
 taught many things that either directly or indi- 
 rectly blow out the light within their souls. 
 
 Forsaken! You may have been forsaken by 
 those you love. The young man trifles with the 
 affections of a girl and leaves her in a world of 
 gloom. You assist a friend to rise to power 
 or to wealth and when the coveted boon is pos- 
 sessed he forgets your efforts and your friend- 
 ship and you feel what a volume is contained 
 in that one word, forsaken. 
 
 It is a fearful thing to be forsaken by man, 
 but to be forsaken by God ! it is beyond expres- 
 sion terrible. Greater than the company of 
 demons, greater than the very torments with 
 which sin is punished, greater than eternity it- 
 self, to be forsaken by God, to hear those awful 
 words, "Depart from Me," is the very thing 
 that makes hell what it is; just as, on the other 
 hand, the friendship and love of God make 
 Heaven a place of indescribable happiness. 
 
 Now listen to what the dying Savior says: 
 "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken 
 Me? My people whom I loved and for whom 
 I toiled, have forsaken Me and have nailed Me 
 to this Cross ; the priests, who inspired the mul- 
 titude with cries of bitter hatred, have forsaken 
 Me; even My beloved disciples have fled from 
 
Golgotha 91 
 
 Me, but, O My God, why hast Thou forsaken 
 Me?" 
 
 What can He mean? Is it not He of Whom 
 it was written: "Ask of Me and I shall give 
 Thee the Gentiles for Thine inheritance and the 
 uttermost parts of the earth for Thy posses- 
 sion?" At His birth the Angels sang and made 
 the hills of Bethlehem vocal with their songs 
 of triumph. At His entrance into public life 
 a voice was heard from Heaven saying: "This 
 is My beloved Son in Whom I am well pleased." 
 Can it be that God is displeased now? Listen, 
 from His own lips there comes the cry: "My 
 God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?" 
 
 What can it mean? There are many explana- 
 tions given by the Holy Fathers of the Church. 
 "I know not," writes one, "if any mortal man 
 can understand how much mystery lies hidden 
 beneath these words of expostulation." "Be- 
 ware," says St. Bernard, as if objecting to the 
 word 'expostulation,' "of thinking that our Lord 
 Jesus has been betrayed into impatience, for all 
 the while that He was enduring the extreme 
 bitterness of the Cross, nothing but sweetness 
 issued from His Heart." And St. Leo warns 
 us not to interpret the words "as if the omnipo- 
 tence of God had withdrawn from Him, for the 
 nature of God and the nature of man are so 
 
92 Golgotha 
 
 united that never can torments separate, nor 
 death divide. The word is not a murmur, but 
 a heavenly lesson." 
 
 We must not then interpret the words as if 
 our Lord were really forsaken by His Father, 
 except that being willing to drink, to the last 
 dregs, the chalice which was prepared for Him 
 and having taken the place of the sinner, He 
 experiences momentarily the last awful result 
 of sin, abandonment by God, as far as the Eter- 
 nal Son of God could experience such aban- 
 donment. 
 
 More in keeping with the prayerfulness which 
 our Lord ever manifested is the suggestion of 
 those who remind us that the 21st Psalm begins 
 with those words "My God, my God, look 
 upon Me! Why hast Thou forsaken Me?" They 
 assume that Christ was occupied, during the 
 hours of silent darkness, in the prayerful recital 
 of the Psalms, of those particularly which re- 
 ferred to His death. When He came to the 21st 
 which details the horrors of the crucifixion, He 
 began its recital in a loud voice, as if to call 
 our attention to the vividness Avith which David 
 described the Passion. Amongst other senti- 
 ments the Psalmist speaking in the Person of 
 Christ Crucified expresses himself thus : 
 
 "I am a worm and no man, the reproach of 
 
Golgotha 93 
 
 men and the outcast of the people. All they 
 that saw Me have laughed Me to scorn; they 
 have spoken with their lips and wagged their 
 heads, saying, He hoped in the Lord, let Him 
 save Him, seeing He delighted in Him. * * * 
 Many dogs have encompassed me; the council 
 of the malignant hath besieged Me. They have 
 dug My hands and feet, they have numbered 
 all My bones.* * * They have parted My gar- 
 ments amongst them and upon My vesture they 
 cast lots." 
 
 How remarkable is the description of David 
 and how natural it is for Him Whom David 
 impersonated to recall these prophetic words and 
 the prayers for mercy that are contained in the 
 Psalm, at the moment when they are being so 
 literally and so terribly fulfilled ! 
 
 There is still another explanation of the cry 
 of our Lord. It is St. Cyprian's. Our Lord, 
 the saint tells us, is thinking of us, praying for 
 us, appealing to us. "Why, O Father, hast 
 Thou forsaken Me? Why hast Thou permitted 
 this cruel agony? Is it not for the salvation of 
 the world ? Is it not because Thou hast so loved 
 the world as to deliver Me, Thine only begot- 
 ten Son, for its redemption?" Yes, let us ask 
 the question, in this spirit. Gazing upon the 
 face of Christ let us ask: "Why is He for- 
 
94 Golgotha 
 
 saken?" St. Paul tells us and he tells us in 
 words that strike us individually: "He loved 
 me and delivered Himself up for me!" That 
 is the answer, He is forsaken momentarily so 
 that I may not be forsaken forever! 
 
I THIRST 
 
 The end is drawing near, the great tragedy 
 is almost over. The soldiers who had caught 
 only the first syllables of the last cry of the 
 Sufferer were seized with the false impression 
 that He had called upon Elias and with great 
 excitement and terror they say one to another: 
 "Let us see if Elias will come to help Him." 
 Involuntarily, they were acknowledging a half- 
 belief in His Divinity which they took infinite 
 pains to smother. The unnatural eclipse was 
 well capable of inspiring this new dread. Their 
 half-belief was born of a full consciousness of 
 guilt. They look up at the Victim on the Cross, 
 their eyes meet His and He speaks to them ap- 
 pealingly: I thirst! 
 
 This is the first expression of physical pain 
 wrung from the Savior in the whole Sacred 
 Passion. Hitherto He thought only of us; He 
 prayed for mercy, He granted pardon to the 
 penitent, He appointed Mary the Mother of the 
 human race, He expressed, with terrifying vivid- 
 ness, the abandonment consequent on sin; but 
 now He complains of thirst. He has, seem- 
 ingly, directed His thoughts to Himself and to 
 His sufferings. 
 
g6 Golgotha 
 
 I thirst! What a strange word coming from 
 the lips of Jesus Christ! We know with what 
 abundant reason He thirsts; He had lost so 
 much blood in the Garden, during the scourg- 
 ing and on the Cross, and loss of blood causes 
 such thirst that sometimes a poor sufferer for- 
 gets all other pain and cries for something to 
 drink. No sufferer ever thirsted as Christ 
 thirsts; but still it is strange when we recall 
 the words which He uttered on other occasions, 
 "If any man thirst, let him come to Me and 
 drink" and "the water that I will give him 
 shall become in him a fountain springing up 
 unto life everlasting." It is strange, because 
 Crucified though He be, He is still God and 
 as God He spoke through the Prophet Jeremias : 
 "Be astonished O ye Heavens, and ye gates 
 thereof, be desolate. For My people have done 
 two evil things. They have forsaken Me, the 
 Fountain of living waters, and have digged foi 
 themselves cisterns, broken cisterns that can 
 hold no water." He gave others to drink, He 
 is the fountain of living waters, why is He Him- 
 self tortured by thirst? Such a question readily 
 suggests itself to us. It springs not from 
 blasphemous scepticism of the Jews, but from 
 a desire to understand in what sense and why 
 the Savior feels the additional torment of thirst. 
 
Golgotha 97 
 
 When we understand the nature of His thirst 
 and the excess of love that prompted the ap- 
 parent appeal for something to moisten His 
 parched lips, the words lose all their strange- 
 ness and what, at first sight, seems a complaint 
 becomes an heroic act of love. "Afterwards, 
 Jesus, knowing that all 'things were now accom- 
 plished, that the Scripture might be fulfilled, 
 said: I thirst." The Royal Psalmist had said: 
 "They gave Me gall for My food and in My 
 thirst they gave Me for drink, vinegar." Christ 
 then did not plead for a cooling potion, it was 
 not a cry for water; it was the expression of a 
 desire to drink the bitter chalice of His Pas- 
 sion to the last dreg. As soon as the soldiers 
 heard His cry they fixed a sponge on the point 
 of a spear and filling it with vinegar and hys- 
 sop, they put it to His mouth. This is what 
 our Lord wanted ; more suffering and more bit- 
 terness! It was in later years this thirst of 
 our Lord for suffering that made His fervent 
 followers, like St. Francis Xavier, sigh for ever 
 increasing suffering. "Yet more, O Lord, yet 
 more!" the great Apostle of the Indies cried 
 when, in an agony of pain and sorrow, he re- 
 called how the Savior suffered for the souls of 
 men. The same heroic desire to become Christ- 
 like prompted St. Teresa to long for one of two 
 
Golgotha 
 
 things; either "to suffer or to die." To suffer 
 in order to be like Christ, or, to die, in order 
 to be with Christ! 
 
 Exalted sanctity may be required to pray for 
 more suffering; but ordinary Christianity ought 
 to suffice for patience and resignation to the 
 Divine will. "Pray not," said a truly Christian 
 sufferer to one who had promised prayers for a 
 speedy cure, "pray not that I be relieved of 
 pain, but pray that God will give me grace to 
 bear with continual patience and resignation the 
 pain He is pleased to send." 
 
 "I thirst," said Christ before they gave Him 
 vinegar and gall. "I thirst the more," He may 
 well say now that His parched lips are drenched 
 in bitterness. But great as was this torment, 
 there was another thirst, of which the bystand- 
 ers knew nothing. It was more keenly felt and 
 more deeply fixed in the Savior's trembling 
 breast."/ thirst for souls!" 
 
 It is not impossible that at this very moment, 
 the Savior looked down upon a scene that to 
 His loving Heart was the cause of more bitter 
 pangs than those of bodily thirst. He saw a 
 man rushing madly through the streets of Jerus- 
 alem towards the temple where the High Priests 
 had assembled. Frightened by the midday dark- 
 ness and blinded by the still more terrible dark- 
 
Golgotha 99 
 
 ness of despair that encompassed his soul, Judas, 
 the traitor, Judas who had forfeited the Apos- 
 tolic dignity, sought the men to whom he had 
 sold his Master. Holding in deadly grasp the 
 bag of money, that yesterday seemed so tempt- 
 ing and that was such a heavy burden to-day, 
 trembling in every portion of his being, and 
 yet with the firmness of despair and reckless- 
 ness, he entered into the presence of the Priests. 
 "Murderers!" he cried, "Murderers and deceiv- 
 ers! You have caused me to barter away an 
 Apostle's glory and the inheritance of life eter- 
 nal ! And for what? For this ! for this wretched 
 gain, wages of guilt, blood-money ! I shall have 
 none of it. Take it back, and with it take the 
 curse of an apostate !" 
 
 The priests were willing to promote their in- 
 terests by murder, by bribery, by lies, but now, 
 hypocrites that they are, they have a scruple. 
 They will not compromise the purity of the 
 sacred treasury by taking back the sordid coin, 
 they will on no account defile their hands by 
 touching the blood-stained money. They saw 
 very clearly and unmistakably the blood upon 
 the pieces of silver; they did not see, nor care 
 to see, the blood upon their souls! 
 
 "What is it to us?" they ask, "it is your own 
 
ioo Golgotha 
 
 affair. See you to it!" And they bid the 
 traitor go. 
 
 But Judas does not go. He can at least rid 
 himself of the sordid gain. "Take back your 
 money!" he exclaims and flinging it upon the 
 pavement of the temple, he departs leaving the 
 priests overwhelmed with anxiety and scruples. 
 
 If Judas only turned to the Cross, if he but 
 prayed for mercy. He was sorry, but it was the 
 deadly sorrow of despair. He grieved, but he 
 grieved as one who had no hope. He would 
 not look upon the Cross. He would not say: 
 "Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!" He 
 would not seek for Mary to tell her of his 
 crime and so he added guilt to guilt, for despair 
 is an insult directed against the goodness of 
 God. He plunged from low to lower depth 
 until at last he secured a halter and hanged 
 himself. 
 
 We know not what miracle God's grace may 
 have wrought in his wretched soul, even when 
 he hung between heaven and earth, we even 
 feel inclined to confound the sorrow of despair 
 with the tears of the penitent, but this is an 
 awful mistake; despair is not contrition, it is a 
 terrible act of rebellion, an insult against the 
 goodness of God. When man sins he abuses 
 God's justice, when he despairs he abuses His 
 
Golgotha 101 
 
 infinite goodness. To despair is to say that God 
 is not good and merciful, and Judas despaired. 
 
 Christ saw it all. He saw beyond that scene 
 far down the avenue of centuries, even to the 
 end of time, and thought of those who like 
 Judas would refuse to turn to Him and ask 
 for pardon. He thought of the poor sinners 
 for whom He shed His blood in vain, and in 
 excess of love, He cries: I thirst, I thirst for 
 souls ! 
 
 I thirst! Ah if we were there! If, with the 
 knowledge we now have of His infinite love for 
 us and for the souls of men, should we not rush 
 to give Him to drink? Should we not claim 
 the privilege of offering a glass of water to 
 quench His dying thirst? We should act thus 
 in the case of the greatest criminal on earth! 
 And yet, we were there, everyone of us was 
 there, but not, alas, to comfort the dying Savior, 
 we were there as sinners to increase His thirst. 
 But now we can relieve Him, now we have 
 power to diminish His thirst for souls, we can 
 offer Him our own souls, we can dedicate our- 
 selves to His service and labor in bringing 
 others to a knowledge and an appreciation of 
 His love. 
 
 Yes and we can diminish His physical thirst. 
 Does He not tell us that, on the last day, He 
 

 IO2 Golgotha 
 
 will address us and say: "I was thirsty and 
 you gave Me to drink?" and does He not add, 
 by way of explanation, that "whatsoever you do 
 to the least of My brethern you do it unto Me?" 
 Yes, we can give Him to drink. He is in the 
 person of the poor and of the handicapped in 
 life's battle. The poor reach out their hands, 
 but He receives the gift. 
 
 How terribly destructive of the spirit of 
 Christian love is the teaching of those who, 
 denying the Divinity of Christ, deny also the 
 validity of this promise of Christ? The scoff- 
 ing atheist in the poem tells the devoted Sister 
 who is caring for the sick-poor that Christian- 
 ity has had its day and the answer of the Sister 
 is so full of eloquence that it brands the scoffing 
 of infidelity as a crime against humanity. 
 
 Has! Has it come? It has only dawned, it will 
 come by and by, , 
 
 O how could I serve in the wards, if the Hope of 
 the world were a lie? 
 
 How could I bear with the sights and the loath- 
 some smells of disease, 
 
 But that He said: You do it to Me when you do 
 it to these? 
 
 I thirst. This is an epitome of the strange 
 thing which we call life. Man has a manifold 
 thirst. He thirsts for knowledge, he thirsts for 
 pleasure, he thirsts for all the things which we 
 call good or beautiful, his soul thirsts and all 
 
Golgotha 103 
 
 his senses thirst, in one word, he thirsts for hap- 
 piness. It is a thirst that increases with the 
 years, and the more man tries to satisfy it, the 
 keener it becomes. "He that drinks of these 
 waters, shall thirst again," said Christ to the 
 Samaritan woman, and we may say the same 
 of those who drink of the springs of knowledge 
 or of pleasure. 
 
 The great scientist, Newton, when advanced 
 in age called some of his friends to his side and 
 said : "I know not what the verdict of posterity 
 will be in my regard, I know not how they will 
 look upon what are sometimes called intellectual 
 triumphs, but to myself I seem to have been in 
 the position of a little child playing on the sea 
 shore with the great ocean of truth all undis- 
 covered beside me." He drank deep of the 
 springs of human knowledge, few have ever 
 drunk deeper, but the result in his case, as in 
 the case of others, was and ever will be this : 
 He that drinks of these waters, will thirst 
 again. 
 
 The great German poet, Goethe, had a long 
 and prosperous life. He basked in the sunshine 
 of success, he moved along the rose-strewn path 
 accompanied by the music of friendly applause; 
 and yet, when at the end of the path he looked 
 back and summarized the history of his brilliant 
 
IO4 Golgotha 
 
 career, he said something like this: Men have 
 envied me, they have regarded me as a fortunate 
 and a happy individual, but to myself I seem 
 to have been "like a poisoned rat" running 
 hither and thither, tasting of this and of that in 
 a vain endeavor to quell the ceaseless gnawing 
 within. A vain endeavor. He had drunk of 
 the cup of pleasure, but in his case too, as in the 
 case of all others, the experience of mankind 
 has ever been: He that drinks of these waters 
 shall thirst again. 
 
 Nay even in the sacred matter of faith, when 
 the light of God illumines the intellect and the 
 goodness of God strengthens the will, so that 
 man feels impelled towards truth and goodness, 
 there is still a thirst. "We see now darkly and 
 in a mirror," we shall not possess the fullness 
 of truth until we are privileged to gaze face 
 to face upon God Who is eternal truth. We feel 
 too the ecstacy of goodness from time to time ; 
 all our yesterdays become as "the tide-washed 
 untrodden sands," and all our to-morrows loom 
 refulgent with golden promises; but even then 
 we know that we are but catching broken rays 
 of the happiness which God has prepared for 
 those who serve Him. Even in the midst of 
 spiritual exultation, the saints looked heaven- 
 ward and exclaimed: "How despicable earth 
 
Golgotha 105 
 
 seems when I look up to Heaven !" How de- 
 spicable indeed are earth's joys when compared 
 to the "torrents of delight" and to the unspeak- 
 able treasures of eternity! 
 
 Man's life on earth is a thirst, a ceaseless 
 longing for the fountains of living waters. Look 
 again to the Cross, look and listen. "I thirst," 
 says Christ. He said the same words to the 
 Samaritan woman, and he added: "If thou 
 didst but know the gift of God and Who He is 
 that sayeth to thee, 'Give Me to drink/ thou, 
 perhaps, wouldst have asked Him and He would 
 have given thee living waters." May we not, 
 without departing from the spirit of our study, 
 hear those same words from the lips of Jesus 
 Crucified? If we did but know Who it is that 
 says, "I thirst," we should cast ourselves in 
 adoration on the ground, or, with Magdalene, 
 throw our arms about the Cross and exclaim 
 from the depths of our souls: "O Fountain of 
 Living Waters, O Christ, Eternal Son of God, 
 Thou Who didst say : 'If any man thirst let him 
 come to Me and drink/ give us always of this 
 water that springeth up unto life eternal. Let 
 it flow in vivifying cataracts over our thirst- 
 ing souls, let it purify our sin-stained souls, so 
 that we may not thirst again forever!" 
 
IT IS FINISHED 
 
 Jesus, therefore, when He had tasted the vine- 
 gar said: It is finished! Just what an appear- 
 ance the scene presented at this time, is uncer- 
 tain. Some one has suggested that "the midday 
 night is beginning to lift," that the black pall 
 is torn by the winds and the silver lining on 
 the sable clouds, as they roll away, tell us that 
 the sun is still shining. It is a suggestion that 
 seems to be more descriptive of what takes 
 place in the soul of him who meditates on the 
 Passion than of what actually took place on 
 Golgotha. From the sixth to the ninth hour 
 darkness overshadowed the earth, and at the 
 ninth hour, far from decreasing, the gloom and 
 the consequent fear increased. We must, there- 
 fore, still view the Cross shrouded in darkness 
 and the figure of our Lord unhallowed by any 
 light from heaven. 
 
 If nature gives no comfort, the Savior does. 
 He utters what seems to be and what, in reality, 
 is, as far at least as we are concerned, a sigh of 
 relief: It is finished. Thank God, we very 
 naturally add, that it is finished. Our dear Lord 
 will suffer no more, the end has come or is 
 about to come and all His pain and sorrow will 
 
Golgotha 107 
 
 be things of the past. It is finished, the Pas- 
 sion has ended. 
 
 No, that is not what our Blessed Lord means, 
 because, as a matter of fact, it is not finished. 
 He is still in pain, He is still hanging on the 
 Cross, still athirst, still forsaken! And what 
 is more, the agony of death, the separation of 
 soul from body is yet to be ! What then is fin- 
 ished, O dear Lord? 
 
 At the Last Supper table, on the preceding 
 night, Christ addressed Himself to His Heavenly 
 Father and said : "Father I have glorified Thee 
 on earth. I have finished the work that Thou 
 gavest Me to do." "If," it has been asked, 
 "our Savior already finished the work which 
 God had given Him to do, why does He repeat 
 the same words upon the Cross? If, on the 
 other hand, it is only now that the work is fin- 
 ished, why did He claim that it was finished 
 when He sat down to His Last Supper?" 
 
 Our Divine Lord had two works to accom- 
 plish, to teach the world and to redeem the 
 world. He was, in other words, to be our Mas- 
 ter and our Redeemer. "Dominus ac Redemptor 
 N osier T During the three years of His public 
 ministry He taught us the way to Heaven. 
 According to some interpreters, it is to the work 
 of Teacher that He refers at the Last Supper, 
 
io8 Golgotha 
 
 and on the Cross to the work of Redemption. 
 But it is not possible to separate these two 
 phases of Christ's career; during His Passion 
 He taught more eloquently than ever and He 
 suffered from the moment of His incarnation. 
 Still we may with propriety regard His public 
 life as made up of two distinct parts, the minis- 
 try of the word and the ministry of suffering. 
 The former, in a sense, is finished on Thursday 
 night. The other is finished now. 
 
 It is finished. Coming so close upon the fulfill- 
 ment of the prophecy that in His thirst they would 
 give Him vinegar to drink, the words suggest, 
 at once, that the prophecies are all accomplished, 
 not only those that were spoken in the Old Law, 
 with so much vividness and unmistakable di- 
 rectness, but those also which He had Himself 
 spoken. "Behold, we go to Jerusalem," He had 
 said ten days ago, "when all things shall be ac- 
 complished which were written concerning the 
 Son of Man. He shall be betrayed to the 
 Chief Priests and Scribes. They shall condemn 
 Him to death, and shall deliver Him to the 
 Gentiles to be mocked and scourged and cruci- 
 fied." All that had been written, all that He had 
 said is now accomplished. It is finished. 
 
 O dear Lord, what more couldst Thou have 
 done, than what Thou hast done? He has over- 
 
Golgotha 109 
 
 looked nothing. Not a jot or tittle of the 
 prophecies has been neglected. 
 
 It is finished. The work of Redemption is 
 complete, God's justice is satisfied and the gates 
 of Heaven, closed by sin, are thrown open to 
 all mankind. Now more appropriately than ever 
 can we exclaim with Simeon, as we look upon 
 the Cross: "Now Thou dost dismiss Thy serv- 
 ant, O Lord, according to Thy word, in peace, 
 because my eyes have seen Thy salvation which 
 Thou hast prepared before the face of all peo- 
 ples." The aged Prophet who was privileged to 
 take the Child in his arms saw but the begin- 
 ning of our salvation. We who have looked 
 with love upon the Cross, behold its accomplish- 
 ment. The work of salvation is finished ! 
 
 No man who is capable of serious thought 
 can question the reality of the "fall." The rec- 
 ords of human depravity, the religions founded 
 on lust and pride and every kind of wicked- 
 ness, the human sacrifices, the unspeakable hor- 
 rors of the amphitheater, the prevalence of 
 infanticide, the degradation of woman, the de- 
 filement of marriage, purity despised, poverty 
 and sickness made criminal, meekness unknown, 
 all the public and social and domestic insti- 
 tutions made channels of blackest crime, pro- 
 claim, more eloquently than words can express, 
 
no Golgotha 
 
 how before Christ the race was in a fallen con- 
 dition, how man had become a slave of Satan 
 and reveled in the inglorious occupation of 
 feeding the swine-passions. 
 
 They who, at present, deny the need of re- 
 demption, they who speak against vicarious 
 atonement, are but furnishing additional proof 
 of the fall of man. It is pride that prompts 
 them, for pride alone can explain temerity. They 
 disregard the teachings of the Old Testament: 
 "He was wounded for our iniquities, He was 
 bruised for our sins." They spurn the explicit 
 assertions of our Divine Savior: "This is My 
 blood which shall be shed for the remission of 
 sins." They reject the belief of the centuries 
 so clearly expressed by St. Paul in his epistle 
 to the Hebrews when he tells them that "Christ 
 by His blood obtained eternal redemption," and 
 so eloquently asserted by the Sovereign Pontiff, 
 Benedict XV, who but recently informed the 
 world that his policy is "to labor for the accom- 
 plishment of that for which Christ shed His 
 blood, the eternal salvation of all men." 
 
 It is finished. Hell is conquered, sin is des- 
 troyed, Satan is bound in adamantine chains, 
 man is free. If it is finished, how is it that 
 Satan still reigns and man is still a slave of 
 sin? Christ's part is finished, man's part re- 
 
Golgotha 1 1 1 
 
 mains. For Him it is finished; for us it is not 
 finished. We must avail ourselves of the privi- 
 leges won for us by the Savior. Satan cannot 
 harm us unless we voluntarily place ourselves 
 in his service. Sin has no power over us unless 
 we freely run into its deadly arms. Death itself 
 has no terrors because, if we serve God, and the 
 service is made easy by the graces won for us 
 by Christ, death is but a going home, death is 
 but a meeting between the soul and the soul's 
 best Friend and the meeting is but the beginning 
 of eternal happiness. 
 
 It is finished. The foundation of the Chris- 
 tian religion is complete, the inauguration of the 
 New Law is sealed, the temple of truth has 
 reached completion and is topped by the Cross! 
 What a sublime religion! What a marvelous 
 law ! What an enduring temple ! All men know 
 that the aspirations of the race are centered 
 around the Cross. It is the keystone of the 
 mighty arch which we call history. With His 
 pierced hands Christ "lifted empires off their 
 hinges and turned the tide of centuries and still 
 rules the world." He curbed the passions that 
 made wolves of men more wolf-like than the 
 wolves, He raised degraded woman and placed 
 her on a throne, a queen; He ennobled labor, 
 changing it from the vulgar distinction of slaves 
 
ii2 Golgotha 
 
 into a dignity and a duty, He elevated poverty 
 from a curse into the first beatitude, He cast 
 a halo around purity, He made of marriage a 
 Sacrament or a channel of grace, He sanctified 
 obedience and sealed it with His life's blood. 
 No class of men, no condition of life, no circum- 
 stances were overlooked by Him. The orphan 
 was henceforth to be sheltered, the sick to be 
 nursed, the captive to be liberated, the slave set 
 free, the innocence of childhood guarded and the 
 aged cared for by ministering human angels. 
 
 It is finished. Is there anything else that He 
 has done ? Yes, the Savior of the world finished 
 the program of peace among nations. On Gol- 
 gotha, He erected a temple of peace, solid as 
 the granite foundations of the earth and lasting 
 as the pillars of heaven. A temple of peace! 
 Yes, it is finished, from foundation stone to 
 cross-crowned pinnacle! His part is finished. 
 The nations' part remains! If the nations have 
 failed to do their small part, no one can say 
 without blasphemy, that the work of Christ was 
 not complete. The nations have impiously built 
 another temple and tried other ways, but ring- 
 ing down the ages and echoing through the now 
 blood-stained world, there comes the cry of the 
 Savior: "I am the way, and there is no other 
 way." 
 
Golgotha 113 
 
 It is finished. Close upon the words and 
 forming what has been regarded as their con- 
 tinuation and completion there comes the last 
 expression of the dying Savior. "Father," He 
 cries aloud, "into Thy hands I commend My 
 spirit," and then bowing His head, He dies! 
 During life, He taught us how to live; in the 
 dread moment of death, He teaches an equally 
 important lesson, how to die. Eternity depends 
 upon our death and, in the ordinary disposition 
 of Providence, apart from the special intervention 
 of Divine Grace, our death depends upon our 
 life. As we live so we shall die. 
 
 Grant, O Lord Jesus, by Thy Sacred Passion 
 and death, by the sorrows of Mary, Thy Mother, 
 and by Thy infinite love for us that we may so 
 live, that when the last summons comes, when 
 we are forced to say, "it is finished," we may 
 add with strong faith, and firm hope, and child- 
 like love, "Father into Thy hands, I commend 
 my spirit!" 
 
EPILOGUE 
 
 You may, if devotion urges, fix your gaze 
 upon the lifeless, mangled Body that hangs on 
 the Cross, you may linger for awhile with the 
 bereaved Mother and the desolate John, on the 
 now silenced Golgotha. There are many les- 
 sons to learn. Beautiful among the sons of men 
 though Christ was, He is now but a leper and 
 as one struck by God. He was wounded for 
 our iniquities, He was bruised for our sins ! 
 Look then upon the dead Christ and you behold 
 the terrible picture of sin, "framed upon the 
 Cross !" Ordinarily, you cannot see sin, because 
 it affects an invisible soul, but Christ in His 
 Passion has made sin visible. The mangled body, 
 torn with scourges, pierced with nails and 
 drenched in blood, is an outward expression of 
 the heinousness of sin. 
 
 Look again upon the dead Christ and you will 
 find the last eloquent appeal made by God to the 
 human race. He appealed through the prophets 
 of the Old Law, He appealed with greater force 
 through the teachings of His Son, He appeals 
 with an eloquence that cannot be equaled 
 through His Crucified Son! "God so loved the 
 
Golgotha 115 
 
 world as to give His only begotten Son for its 
 salvation." 
 
 Look upon the Cross and you will learn, as 
 you can learn nowhere else, what the world 
 thinks of Jesus Christ. "Away with Him !", they 
 cried, "Crucify Him!" The cry was echoed 
 through all the ages, it is heard even in our own 
 day. The servants of Christ are treated just as 
 their Master was treated, the same charges are 
 urged against them, "they are enemies of Caesar" 
 and "they disturb the peace," and the same pun- 
 ishment is meted out to them. The blinded 
 minions of the world, the High Priests of 
 "Natural Religion," the present-day imitators of 
 the hypocritical Pharisees, have raged and are 
 raging against God and against His Church. 
 They are appealing to the multitude through the 
 sordid press, they are prompting the cry: Away 
 with Him and with His Church! In this coun- 
 try, thanks be to God, they have had little suc- 
 cess, the American people is, for the most part, 
 too fair minded to join the senseless rabble, but, 
 it is useless to deceive ourselves, we some- 
 times applaud the senseless rabble of other coun- 
 tries and thus give our moral support. Would 
 to God that it could be said that we never give 
 and never have given material support! 
 
 It is a sad thing to think that in the twentieth 
 
ii6 Golgotha 
 
 century, notwithstanding the lessons of the past, 
 men still sit in council against the Savior of the 
 world and boast of driving Him and His fol- 
 lowers into exile ; but though sad, it is not with- 
 out its comfort. By this very fact, we can 
 recognize the servants of Jesus Christ. "If you 
 were of the world," He has told us, "the world 
 would know its own; but because you are not 
 of the world, because I have chosen you out of 
 the world, therefore the world hates you." And 
 in the Sermon on the Mount, He has said: 
 "Blessed are ye when they revile you and per- 
 secute you, and speak all that is evil against 
 you, untruly, for My Name's sake. Be glad and 
 rejoice, for your reward is very great in 
 Heaven." 
 
 Such is the comfort; the servants can look for 
 no better treatment at the hands of the world, 
 than was received by their Master. The lesson 
 is that we must flee from the spirit of the world, 
 avoid its maxims and its principles and live al- 
 ways and only for God and build our hopes in 
 Heaven. 
 
 Amid these and similar thoughts which are in 
 part consoling and sad in part, there comes one 
 which borders on despair. Jesus of Nazareth is 
 dead ! He is conquered ! His friends secure 
 permission from Pilate to give a decent burial 
 
Golgotha 117 
 
 to His Body, they seal the tomb and retire to 
 their homes to mourn over His loss. His enemies 
 exult; the city has been rid of the Disturber! 
 No more will the people shout their hosannas 
 and proclaim the Upstart King. Their remem- 
 brance of what He said about the "third day" 
 causes a fear to linger in their hearts, and, 
 though they regard it as one of the many hal- 
 lucinations to which Christ was subject, still, to 
 make assurance doubly sure, they set a guard of 
 armed men to watch His sepulchre. 
 
 Now He is vanquished utterly and the human 
 heart is chilled by the thought. If we look back 
 through the years and through the centuries, 
 we find that there never has been a real con- 
 queror. Summon up in imagination the mighty 
 generals who led their soldiers through pools of 
 blood to victory, the brilliant lawmakers who 
 built kingdoms and empires and founded repub- 
 lics, the scientists who counted the stars in the 
 heavens, or analyzed the minerals of the earth 
 and who boasted from time to time of having 
 conquered the laws of nature. Where are they 
 now? You know where they are. They have 
 been conquered, every single one of them, by 
 Death. "Conquerors conquered" is the epitome 
 of human greatness. 
 
 What a sweeping conquest on the part of 
 
ii8 Golgotha 
 
 Death, and, O God, what an absolute failure on 
 man's part. Look back and you see a collection 
 of sepulchres and monuments with the terrible 
 inscription on them all, "Here they lie !" and the 
 big black banner of Death floating over the 
 tombs of the vanquished race of men. Look 
 around you, and you will observe how day by 
 day and hour by hour the universal conqueror 
 is reaping the never failing harvest. Look ahead 
 and you find nothing but the certain prospect of 
 your own defeat. 
 
 Alas! for poor human nature! Slaves in the 
 caravan of Death we are marching steadily for- 
 ward to defeat, marching onward even now to 
 the frontiers of the Kingdom of Death whence 
 no man returns. It is all very well to exclaim 
 with the boastful pride of the poet: 
 
 "Cowards die many times before their deaths, 
 The valiant never taste of death but once." 
 
 It is all very well to put fear aside but we 
 cannot put aside the fact that death is certain 
 and that it is most terrible. 
 
 "O Death, all eloquent, you only prove 
 What dust we dote on when 'tis man we love." 
 
 We should like to find in the records of his- 
 tory a conqueror of Death and Jesus of Naz- 
 areth, Whom we have seen crucified, seemed for 
 a time to satisfy this desire of human nature. 
 
Golgotha 119 
 
 He stood one day at the tomb of Lazarus and 
 with a mighty voice exclaimed, "Lazarus, come 
 forth," and Lazarus came forth. He met at 
 Nairn a funeral procession and, on inquiry, 
 learned that the only son of a widow was being 
 borne to the grave. He took the dead boy by 
 the hand and said, "Young man, arise," and the 
 young man arose. Similarly He summoned back 
 from the clutches of Death the daughter of 
 Jairus. Such was indeed the import of these 
 wonderful accomplishments that it has been 
 truly written : 
 
 The worm within each rose's heart was curled 
 Until His mystic might at Nairn hurled 
 Death's menace back upon itself and stilled 
 The immemorial wailing of the world. 
 
 Christ seemed to supply the only solace in 
 the thought of death, but now behold, He is 
 Himself dead and buried and an armed guard 
 is set about His sepulchre ! With Him is buried 
 the hope of the world, the immemorial wail 
 returns, and man must admit an universal defeat. 
 
 Ah no! it is not over yet. The story of 
 Christ's love is not fully written. It was Sun- 
 day morning, a glorious spring morning in Pal- 
 estine. The fields were carpeted in green and 
 interspersed with white lilies, which waved be- 
 fore the gentle morning breezes so that the land- 
 
I2O Golgotha 
 
 scape resembled a stretch of ocean's palpitating 
 breast. The winged songsters rose to greet the 
 rising sun that had already sent forth his herald 
 rays to paint the East with crimson and gold. 
 They entuned their sweetest spring-songs and 
 their music mingling with the fragrance that 
 arose, incense-like, from the meadows floated 
 sweetly towards the throne of God. 
 
 It was, you may say, a beautiful morning, ex- 
 cept for one thing. Down in the dark ravine 
 there was a tomb, and what is more it was His 
 tomb ! O Christians, followers of Jesus Christ, 
 O men and women of every race, of every creed, 
 of every age, there is, it is true, a tomb, but it 
 is empty! The stone has been rolled back, the 
 soldiers have been dispersed and Jesus of Naz- 
 areth, who was crucified is not to be sought 
 amongst the dead! Visit that tomb and read 
 His epitaph. What do you find : "Here lies 
 Jesus of Nazareth?" No! "Here lies the sin- 
 less Son of Mary?" No! "Here lies the Lamb 
 of God Who was unjustly slain?" No! a thou- 
 sand times No! His epitaph is dropped from 
 the lips of angels : "He is risen, He is not here, 
 behold the place where they laid Him !" 
 
 Now you have a Conqueror, Who has not 
 been conquered by Death, now you have One 
 Who conquered the universal enemy, and Who 
 
Golgotha 121 
 
 from His empty tomb could exclaim: O Death, 
 where is thy victory? It is this conquest, more 
 than anything else that has won for Him the 
 admiration of all the world and the adoring faith 
 of Christians. Once during His earthly life He 
 entered in triumph into Jerusalem. He has come 
 down the centuries in triumph. The burst of 
 enthusiasm "Hosanna to the Son of David! 
 Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the 
 Lord!" that re-echoed through the Holy City, 
 has been caught up in all ages, has found ex- 
 pression in all climes and has stirred the human 
 heart to its profoundest depths. If there be any 
 now and unfortunately there are some to 
 whom as to the Pharisees of old, the joy of the 
 believer is as gall and wormwood, and who in 
 their jealousy and pride would have the people 
 hold their peace, they may be answered as their 
 prototypes, the Pharisees, were answered: "If 
 these should hold their peace, the very stones 
 would cry out." 
 
 Indeed the stones have cried out, if we may 
 use this term to describe the hearts of the in- 
 fidel, the scoffer and the unbeliever. Too much 
 importance is not to be given to the testimony 
 of the irreligious for the simple reason that irre- 
 ligion is the deepest dye of insincerity to which 
 the human mind or heart is subject; it is in- 
 
122 Golgotha 
 
 sincerity with God and with oneself and from 
 those who are insincere with their God and 
 themselves, it is not reasonable to expect sin- 
 cerity in their dealings with us. Still it will 
 do no harm to listen to what the very stones 
 have to say of Jesus Christ. 
 
 "I esteem the Gospels," writes Goethe, "to 
 be thoroughly genuine, for there shines forth 
 from them the reflected splendor of a sublimity, 
 proceeding from the person of Jesus Christ, of 
 so divine a kind as only the Divine could ever 
 have manifested on earth." 
 
 "How petty," adds Rousseau, "are the books 
 of philosophers with all their pomp, compared 
 with the Gospels! Can it be that writings at 
 once so sublime and so simple are the work of 
 man? Can He, whose life they tell, be Himself 
 no more than a mere man? . . . What 
 sweetness, what purity in His ways, what touch- 
 ing grace in His teachings, what loftiness in His 
 maxims, what profound wisdom in His words ! 
 . . . Yes, if the death of Socrates be that of 
 a sage, the life and death of Jesus are those of 
 a God!" 
 
 "The morality of Jesus Christ," says Strauss, 
 "is the foundation of human civilization." And 
 his assertion is amplified by Renan : "The moral 
 teaching of Jesus Christ is the most beautiful 
 
Golgotha 123 
 
 doctrine that mankind ever received. . . . 
 Each one of us owes to Him what is best in 
 himself. . . . The Sermon on the Mount 
 will never be surpassed." 
 
 Jean Paul Richter corroborates the foregoing 
 with a tribute to the power of our Savior: "The 
 life of Christ concerns Him who, being the 
 holiest among the mighty, the mightiest among 
 the holy, lifted, with His pierced hand, empires 
 off their hinges and turned the stream of cen- 
 turies out of its channel and still governs the 
 ages." 
 
 To these testimonies of infidels we may add 
 that of one who, though not an infidel, was 
 during the greater part of his life a great bad 
 man. Napoleon "strode the world, in his day, 
 like a Colossus." However devoid he was of 
 morality no one will deny that his intellect was 
 gigantic and that, in the seclusion of exile, his 
 heart gradually settled down to a calm equili- 
 brium. "I think," he said one day at St. Helena, 
 "I understand somewhat of human nature and 
 I tell you all the heroes of antiquity were men, 
 and I am a man ; but not one is like Him ; Jesus 
 Christ was more than man. Alexander, Caesar, 
 Charlemagne and myself founded empires; but 
 upon what did the creations of genius depend? 
 Upon force. Jesus Christ alone founded His 
 
124 Golgotha 
 
 empire on love, and to this day millions would 
 die for Him." On another occasion he ex- 
 claimed more briefly: "I know men, and I tell 
 you, Jesus Christ is not a man!" 
 
 Other instances of how the very stones cried 
 out might be added without end, but it is always 
 more refreshing to listen to the voice of the 
 children of God. More refreshing and more 
 instructive because when the saints speak they 
 express something more than the emptiness of 
 admiration, they speak of hope and of salvation. 
 When Peter and John were apprehended, and 
 asked to explain in whose name they had cured 
 the lame man, Peter, filled with the Holy Ghost, 
 said to them: 
 
 "Ye princes of the people and ancients, hear: 
 If we this day are examined concerning the good 
 deed done to the infirm man, by what means he 
 hath been made whole, be it known to you all 
 and to all the people of Israel, that by the Name 
 of our Lord Jesus Christ of Nazareth, Whom 
 you crucified, Whom God hath raised from the 
 dead, even by Him this man standeth before you 
 whole. . . . Neither is there salvation in 
 any other. For there is no other name under 
 heaven given to men whereby we must be 
 saved." 
 
 All very well, you may say, Christ conquered 
 
Golgotha 125 
 
 Death and the world proclaims Him King and 
 Master, but we, poor w r eak mortals, are still 
 doomed to suffer and die. Look again at the 
 empty tomb, look upon the risen Christ and 
 listen, with love and with hope, to the words He 
 speaks to you and to all the world: 
 
 "I am the Resurrection and the Life. He 
 that believeth in Me, although he be dead, shall 
 live and every one that liveth and believeth in 
 me shall not taste death forever!" He con- 
 quered and He conquered for us ! 
 
 GOD BLESS YOU. 
 
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY, 
 BERKELEY 
 
 THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE 
 STAMPED BELOW 
 
 Books not returned on time are subject to a fine of 
 50c per volume after the third day overdue, increasing 
 to $1.00 per volume after the sixth day. Books not in 
 demand may be renewed if application is made before 
 expiration of loan period. 
 
 6 1332 
 
 75m-8,'31 
 
YB 13007 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY