This hymn, from the lips of the Perfect One, could be no “dying swan-song.” It uplifted that more than heroic heart to the wonderful tranquillity which presently said, “When I am risen, I will go before you into Galilee.” It is full of victory. And now they go unto the Mount of Olives. Is it enough considered how much of the life of Jesus was passed in the open air? He preached on the hill side; He desired that a boat should be at His command upon the lake; He prayed upon the mountain; He was transfigured beside the snows of Hermon; He oft-times resorted to a garden which had not yet grown awful; He met His disciples on a Galilean mountain; and He finally ascended from the Mount of Olives. His unartificial normal life, a pattern to us, not as students but as men—was spent by preference neither in the study nor the street. In this crisis, most solemn and yet most calm, He leaves the crowded city into which all the tribes had gathered, and chooses for His last intercourse with His disciples, the slopes of the opposite hill side, while overhead is glowing, in all the still splendour of an Eastern sky, the full moon of Passover. Here then is the place for one more emphatic warning. Think how He loved them. As His mind reverts to the impending blow, and apprehends it in its most awful form, the very buffet of God Who Himself will smite the Shepherd, He remembers to warn His disciples of their weakness. We feel it to be gracious that He should think of them at such a time. But if we drew a little nearer, we should almost hear the beating of the most loving heart that ever broke. They were all He had. In them He had confided utterly. Even as the Father had loved Him, He also had loved them, the firstfruits of the travail of His soul. He had ceased to call them servants and had called them friends. To them He had spoken those affecting words, “Ye are they which have continued with me in My temptations.” How intensely He clung to their sympathy, imperfect though it was, is best seen by His repeated appeals to it in the Agony. And He knew that they loved Him, that the spirit was willing, that they would weep and lament for Him, sorrowing with a sorrow which He hastened to add that He would turn into joy. It is the preciousness of their fellowship which reminds Him how this, like all else, must fail Him. If there is blame in the words, “Ye shall be offended,” this passes at once into exquisite sadness when He adds that He, Who so lately said, “Them that Thou gavest Me, I have guarded,” should Himself be the cause of their offence, “All ye shall be caused to stumble because of Me.” And there is an unfathomable tenderness, a marvellous allowance for their frailty in what follows. They were His sheep, and therefore as helpless, as little to be relied upon, as sheep when the shepherd is stricken. How natural it was for sheep to be scattered.