it and with uplifted eyes he whispered that I might hear, "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do."
And, then as I live, there came a darkness over the world—a strange unclouded fading of the light of day—a sort of shadow as if that the day of our act, our horrid deed, placed us beyond the pale of those kindly rays that shone for others, but not for us. It was as though we had darkened the face of God that day and as the darkness grew, a hush spread over all—all, until at noon, there was a dusk almost of midnight and in the dusk, the murmuring fear of the populace, the fierce unshrouded reviling of the persecutors and the sighs of him whose own life was slowly clouding into darkness. As the fever of his pain set in, with my own hands, I offered him upon a reed, the customary stupefying draught, but Marcus, he would not take it. This man, humiliated, tortured, scourged and scorned; his nerves torn with pain; his body racked with fever; his veins sapped of strength—refused. It was the noblest, most heroic act mine eyes have ever seen. He must suffer; therefore, he would suffer. As the flesh of him grew weak, I swear the soul of him grew stronger. It was the same spirit I saw in the garden and in the man before Caiaphas. The man suffers because he will, not because he must. I do not understand it; I could not comprehend it, but here is the most powerful man that ever lived with capacity to inspire devotion beyond all others in history, I am sure, who might have had at his back by the slightest exertion of his personal power and majesty an army that would sweep our nation's capital into the Tiber, yet suffering and dying at the hands of vengeful men because he
