"When Jesus, therefore, saw his mother, and the disciple standing by whom he loved, he saith unto his mother, Woman, behold thy son! Then saith he to his disciple, Behold thy mother!" By these words, He bade His mother look for comfort to His beloved disciple; bidding him treat her for the future as if she were his own mother. Faithfully was this last commandment obeyed, "And from that hour that disciple took her unto his own home." Jesus had now been hanging on the cross for three hours, suffering the extreme of bodily agony; but the worst was not yet over. It was the sixth hour, or twelve o'clock,--mid-day, as we call it,--when an event took place, which must have greatly alarmed all men. Without any apparent cause, "the sun was darkened"; "when the sixth hour was come, there was darkness over all the earth until the ninth hour." During these three hours of darkness, we have reason to believe that Jesus was allowed to feel the full weight of God's wrath against sin. All the misery deserved by sinful man was in some wonderful and mysterious way laid upon Him, so that in some incomprehensible manner, He, holy as He was, tasted the bitterness of that death from which by His agonies He delivered man. What His sufferings really were, we know not. God grant we never may! But for the time He felt as if His Father had cast Him off for ever. What a dreadful thing must sin be, since it could not be forgiven without such terrible agony, as for three hours was endured in silence by our blessed Lord; and at length wrung from Him that heart-rending cry, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" Let us, for whose redemption He thus felt the wrath of God, watch and pray, that His sufferings may not have been in vain for any one of us. Chapter XLIII.--JESUS DIES. Three hours of agony beyond what we can imagine passed slowly away; and then, "at the ninth hour, Jesus cried with a loud voice, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? which is, being interpreted, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"--the very words which stand, at the beginning of the 22nd Psalm, wherein David foretells many things that would happen at this time. "Some of them that stood by," not understanding Hebrew, "when they heard the words spoken by Jesus, said, Behold, he calleth Elias. After this, Jesus, knowing that all things were now accomplished," and that His release was at hand, "that the Scripture might be fulfilled, saith, I thirst. Now there was set a vessel full of vinegar: and straightway one" of the by-standers, more humane than the others, "ran, and took a spunge, and filled it with vinegar, and put it upon hyssop, and put it on a reed," with which he raised it high enough "to put it to his mouth, and (so) gave him to drink. The rest said, Let be; let us see whether Elias will come to take him down."