Day by day the strain increased. Finally Jesus spoke. The where and how of the betrayal he could not determine; the when he could. At the supper, he looked at Judas and then he spoke.[16] "What thou doest, do quickly." The man's face as he hurried out said "Yes" to the unspoken question--and for the moment it brought relief. This is the background of the garden-scene. What the agony meant spiritually, we can hardly divine. The physical cost is attested by the memory of his face which haunted the disciples. The profuse sweat that goes with acute mental strain is a familiar phenomenon, and its traces were upon him--visible in the torchlight. Last of all, upon the cross, Nature reclaimed her due from him. Jesus had drawn, as men say, upon the body, and in such cases Nature repays herself from the spirit. The worn-out frame dragged the spirit with it, and he died with the cry--"My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" Turning back, we find in Luke[17] that Jesus said to his disciples "Ye are they that have continued with me in my temptations." Dr John Brown[18] used to speak of Jesus having "a disposition for private friendships." A mind with the genius for friendliness is not only active but passive. We constantly find in history instances of men with such a gift failing in great crises because of it--they yield to the friendly word; it means so much to them. Thus when Peter, a friend of old standing and of far greater value since his confession at Philippi, spoke and reinforced the impressions made on Jesus' mind by his prevision of failure and death, the temptation was of a terrible kind. The sudden rejoinder, in which Jesus identifies the man he loved with Satan, shows what had happened. But, if friendship carried with it temptation, yet when physical exhaustion brought spiritual exhaustion in its train, the love and tenderness {130} of his friends upheld him. But, more still, their belief in him and in his ideas, their need of him, drove the tempter away. He could not disappoint them. The faces that softened to him,--all that came to his mind as he thought of his friends name by name--gave him hope and comfort, though the body might do its worst. It was perhaps in part this experience of the friendship of simple and commonplace men that differentiated the teaching of Jesus from the best the world had yet had. No other teacher dreamed that common men could possess a tenth part of the moral grandeur and spiritual power, which Jesus elicited from them--chiefly by believing in them. Here, to any one who will study the period, the sheer originality of Jesus is bewildering. This belief in men Jesus gave to his followers and they have never lost it. [Sidenote: Man's relations with God]