Jesus was the most solitary of all these eternally solitary souls. Everything slept about Him. The city slept, its white, shadow-checkered mass sprawling beyond the Kedron; and in all the houses, in all the cities in the world, the blind race of ephemeral men were sleeping. The only ones awake at that hour were perhaps some woman waiting for the call of her lover; perhaps a thief in ambush in the dark, his hand on the hilt of his knife; perhaps a philosopher pondering the problem, “Does God exist?” But the leaders of the Jews and their guards were not asleep that night. Those who should have defended Jesus, who might at least have consoled Him, those who claimed to love Him and who in their way at times did really love Him, were stretched in sleep. But those who hated Him, who wished to kill Him, did not sleep. Caiaphas was not asleep and the only Disciple awake at that moment was Judas. Until the arrival of Judas His Master was alone with His death-like sadness. That He might feel less alone He began to pray to His Father, and once more those imploring words rushed to His lips. The effort to keep them back, the conflict which convulsed His whole being—because the divinity which was in Him accepted joyfully what it had willed, while the ruddy clay which clothed it shuddered—this human and superhuman effort brought to Him at last the victory. He was racked with suffering, but He was triumphant; He was utterly spent, but He had conquered. The spirit had once more overcome the flesh; but from now on His body was merely a trunk which bled and died. The tension of the terrible struggle had done so great a violence to all that was earthly in Him that the sweat stood out on Him, as though He had achieved an impossible task, had endured the unendurable. The sweat poured from all His person; but not merely the natural sweat which runs down the face of the man walking in the sun, or working in the fields or raving in fever. The blood which He had promised to shed for men was shed first on the grass of the garden of Gethsemane. Great drops of blood mixed with sweat fell on the earth as a first offering of His conquered flesh. It was the beginning of liberation, almost a relief to that humanity which was the greatest burden of His expiation. Then from His lips wet with tears, wet with sweat, wet with blood, arose a new prayer: “O my Father, if this cup may not pass away from me, except I drink it, thy will be done. Not my will, but thine, be done.” Gone now was any trace of cowardly shrinking; the will, that is the individual, abdicated in the obedience which alone can assure the freedom of the universal. He is no longer a man, but Man; the Man one with God, “I wish that which Thou wisheth.” From that moment His victory over death is assured, because he who gives himself wholly to the Eternal cannot die. “For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.”