It still remained, however, within the scope of God’s omnipotence to eliminate the Affliction for him also. Wherefore, as once he prayed with the believers, “And lead us not into the Temptation,” so now he prays for himself, that God may permit the cup of suffering to pass his lips by. True, if it be God’s will, he feels himself strong enough to drink it. He is sorrowful rather for the Three. The sons of Zebedee, to gain the seats upon the throne, have boasted that they can drink with him the cup of suffering and receive with him the baptism of suffering. Peter swore that he would stand by him even if he must die with him. He knows not what God has ordained for them,—whether he will lay upon them what they desire to undertake. Therefore he bids them remain near him. And while he prays God for himself he thinks of them and twice wakes them up, bidding [pg 273] them remain awake and beseech God that he may not lead them through the Temptation. The third time he comes to them the betrayer with his band is near. The hour is come,—therefore he draws himself up to the full stature of his majesty. He is alone, his Disciples flee. The hearing of witnesses is merely a pretence. After they have gone the High Priest puts directly the question about the messiahship. “I am,” said Jesus, referring them at the same time to the hour when he shall appear as Son of Man on the clouds of heaven surrounded by the angels. Therefore he was found guilty of blasphemy and condemned to death. On the afternoon of the fourteenth of Nisan, as they ate the Paschal lamb at even, he uttered a loud cry and died. [pg 274] POSTSCRIPT THE judgments passed upon this realistic account of the life of Jesus may be very diverse, according to the dogmatic, historical, or literary point of view of the critics. Only, with the _aim_ of the book may they not find fault: _to depict the figure of Jesus in its overwhelming heroic greatness and to impress it upon the modern age and upon the modern theology._ The heroic recedes from our modern “Weltanschauung,” our Christianity, and our conception of the person of Jesus. Wherefore men have humanised and humbled him. Renan has stripped off his halo and reduced him to a sentimental figure, coward spirits like Schopenhauer have dared to appeal to him for their enervating philosophy, and our generation has modernised him, with the notion that it could comprehend his character and development psychologically. We must go back to the point where we can feel again the heroic in Jesus. Before that mysterious Person, who, in the form of his time, knew that he was creating [pg 275] upon the foundation of his life and death a moral world _which bears his name,_ we must be forced to lay our faces in the dust, without daring even to wish to understand his nature. Only then can the heroic in our Christianity and in our “Weltanschauung” be again revived. TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES