Toward the northeast corner of the city wall the sides of Bezetha are steep, rocky, and broken. There desolation is complete, and the seclusion profound. The Kidron Valley winds around those rugged declivities, and the opposite sides of Olivet are barren and cheerless. Midway the hill there is a projecting rock, not unlike in form a human skull; on the north of it, a small ravine descends into the vale below, and just beneath it, on the east, the highway passes to the Heights of Benjamin. The sides are steep and covered with black moss. The term Calvary neither implies, nor is it used to designate a mount, but, coming from the Latin _calvaria_ or _calva_, means a skull. If Golgotha is descriptive of a place where skulls lay uninterred, then this location agrees well with the sense of the word, as the dead that were here interred were so slightly covered with earth that the bones of such now lay scattered upon the ground; or if, as is more probable, it is the designation of a place where violent deaths occurred――the place for the capital punishment of criminals, whose bones, after the flesh had been devoured by wild beasts, lay bleaching in the sun, then this, of all other portions of the environs of the city, is singularly adapted for such a melancholy purpose. Reason and Scripture alike point to this spot as the scene of that great death, which has no parallel in suffering as it has no equal in results. Reading the four Evangelists from the brow of this desolate rock, all the details of the inspired account appeared fulfilled with an exactitude not unworthy an intelligent faith. Coming out of St. Stephen’s Gate, the mournful procession proceeded along that ancient road on which Simon of Cyrene was returning from the country, to whom fell the honorable part to bear the cross of the fainting Son of God.[220] Reaching this desolate scene, the horrid tragedy was enacted. The place was no less appropriate to the mind of the Divine Sufferer than to those who were the instruments of his death. It is nigh unto the city that had rejected him.[221] Before him rose Olivet, his bower of prayer; beneath his eye lay Gethsemane, the scene of his agony; while, as if to mitigate the sorrow of the final struggle and light up the darkest hour of his life, the Mount of Ascension rose in grandeur before him, crowned with the glory of his exaltation. Around the cross, both on the summit of Bezetha and on the slopes of Olivet beyond, is room for the multitude who had assembled to witness the melancholy spectacle, and for those women who, “beholding afar off,”[222] “bewailed and lamented him.”[223] From the adjacent walls of the city the chief priests, scribes, and elders beheld him, and mockingly said, “He saved others, himself he can not save.”[224] On the road which passed beneath the cross came those Jewish travelers who, on reading Pilate’s superscription, wagged their heads in disdain, and tauntingly greeted him, saying, “Thou that destroyest the Temple and