The sun was westering as the darkness rolled away from the completed sacrifice. They who had not thought it a pollution to inaugurate their feast by the murder of their Messiah, were seriously alarmed lest the sanctity of the following day--which began at sunset--should be compromised by the hanging of the corpses on the cross. And horrible to relate, the crucified often lived for many hours--nay, even for two days--in their torture. The Jews therefore begged Pilate that their legs might be broken, and their bodies taken down. This _crurifragium_, as it was called, consisted in striking the legs of the sufferers with a heavy mallet, a violence which seemed always to have hastened, if it did not instantly cause, their death. Nor would the Jews be the only persons who would be anxious to hasten the end by giving the deadly blow. Until life was extinct the soldiers appointed to guard the execution dared not leave the ground. The wish, therefore, was readily granted. The soldiers broke the legs of the two malefactors first, and then, coming to Jesus, found that the great cry had been indeed his last, and that he was dead already. They did not therefore break his legs, and thus unwittingly preserved the symbolism of that Paschal lamb, of which he was the antetype, and of which it had been commanded that "a bone of it shall not be broken." And yet, as he might be only in a syncope--as instances had been known in which men apparently dead had been taken down from the cross and resuscitated--and as the lives of the soldiers would have had to answer for any irregularity, one of them, in order to make death certain, drove the broad head of his _hasta_ into his side. The wound, as it was meant to do, pierced the region of the heart, and "forthwith," says St. John, with an emphatic appeal to the truthfulness of his eye-witness--an appeal which would be singularly and impossibly blasphemous if the narrative were the forgery which so much elaborate modern criticism has wholly failed to prove that it is--"forthwith came there out blood and water." Whether the water was due to some abnormal pathological conditions caused by the dreadful complication of the Saviour's sufferings, or whether it rather means that the pericardium had been rent by the spear point, and that those who took down the body observed some drops of its serum mingled with the blood, in either case that lance thrust was sufficient to hush all the heretical assertions that Jesus had only _seemed_ to die; and as it assured the soldiers, so should it assure all who have doubted, that he, who on the third day rose again, had in truth been crucified, dead, and buried, and that his soul had passed into the unseen world. FOOTNOTES: [26] The disputed date of the Crucifixion of Jesus--long variously placed between A.D. 29 and 33--is definitely fixed by many later authorities at the year 30. THE RISE AND SPREAD OF CHRISTIANITY A.D. 33 RENAN WISE NEWMAN