sion of the city; for the messengers, sent to prepare the supper, would enter it from the direction of Bethany, and may be presumed to have found the house almost as soon as they entered it. In this case, the distance to the garden would be somewhat more than the interval between the city walls and the mount of Olives, that is, about half or three quarters of an English mile: so that there was still time for the conversation recorded Matt. xxvi. 31-35. and Mark xiv. 27-31. to come to pass by the way; a conversation, memorable on two accounts; one, that now was delivered the prediction on which so much stress is laid by St. Matthew in his account of the resurrection, viz. that Jesus, after his resurrection, should precede his disciples into Galilee; the other, that the turn of the conversation again led to the prediction of the denials of Peter; and consequently to the third and last instance of the kind. The distinctness and independence of these several predictions it is not possible, without running into the grossest inconsistencies, and sapping the foundations of historical testimony, to call into question. It is to be observed, however, that St. Matthew's and St. Mark's account of such a prediction being reckoned as one and the same, each of the Evangelists records only a single instance out of the three; the fact of which number we are, consequently, left to collect from the comparison and conjunction of each of the narratives. But it is an instance, supplied in each case by matter peculiar to the Gospel which has specified it. It is also to be observed that the moral lesson, furnished by this most impressive and instructive incident, is wonderfully enhanced, if it appears, as it must now do, that the number of times for which it was predicted that Peter should deny his master; and the number of times for which he protested, in the confidence of a genuine sin VOL. III. cerity, that he would rather die than deny him; and the number of times for which, on being put to the test so shortly after, he did deny him: were precisely the same. Nor is it more extraordinary that on three several occasions the futurity of these denials should have been simply predicted, than that on three several occasions, and much nearer in point of time to each other, the fact of three such denials should actually have taken place. XII. The next event is the agony of which St. John, though he brings our Saviour to the garden before it, and makes him to be apprehended in the garden after it, yet gives no account; and clearly because the other Evangelists had given a full account. Yet Paley has observed that in our Lord's allusion to his cup, xviii. 11. there is, even in St. John, a tacit reference to the thoughts and the expressions of the agony itself; such as might naturally ensue on so recent an event. The reconciliation of St. Matthew and of St. Mark, in their relation of this transaction, may be easily effected, as the Harmony will shew, down even to the letter of the narrative in each. I shall merely observe, that the concluding sentence of our Lord's address to his disciples, καθεύδετε τὸ λοιπὸν, καὶ ἀναπαύεσθε, which most commentators have so inexplicably mistaken for ironical, (and what could irony have to do with so solemn and so serious an occasion as this, or with the frame of the speaker's mind at the time?) is to be interrogatively understood, like each of the preceding addresses: Sleep ye on still, and take ye your rest? Are ye sleeping, even for the little time which remains? It is enough; let it suffice you to have slept thus long; the hour is come, and the Son of man is delivered into the hands of sinners. This sense of TÒ XOTòv is the most common imaginable. With regard to St. Luke, it may well admit of a question whether the supplementary character of his Gospel is not here to be strictly taken into account. It is true that he records no part of the agony except what plainly relates to the first trial, and the first prayer; and so far his account may appear more succinct than that of St. Matthew or of St. Mark. But, even in relation to this, he records certain particulars distinctly from them, which shew that he had it in view to supply their omissions here as well as elsewhere; viz. the appearance of the angel who strengthened Christ; and that most expressive token of the intensity of the agony, the bloody sweat. But for the sake of specifying these particulars, so characteristic and so affecting, we know not that he would have noticed at all, any more than St. John, an event circumstantially related as it was, by his predecessors. Independently of these additions, his account, compared with their's, is studiedly concise. On the second and the third repetition of the prayer in question, the violence of our Lord's emotion previously was sensibly diminished; and his mind was recovering its wonted composure. These, therefore, he omits altogether. And as to the rest, it seems to me that he proposed to supply a further deficiency in St. Matthew and St. Mark; viz. the account of what passed personally between Jesus and the EIGHT disciples, in contradistinction to what passed between him and the THREE, before and after the agony, respectively. They had sufficiently, or rather exclusively specified the latter; but had said nothing of the former. Now it is evident from the testimony of St. John, that as the agony took place in the garden, so before the agony our Lord, and his eleven disciples, all entered into the garden; and after the agony, that Jesus at the head of, or apart from the same disciples, went out from the garden, to meet the approaching band of Judas. Hence, if all the eleven, before and after the agony, were in the garden, though the three in particular might be nearer spectators of the scene, yet the eight also must have been partially witnesses of it: and though, before the agony, Jesus withdrew himself with the three to some distance from the eight, yet, after the agony, and before the arrival of the band of Judas, he must have rejoined the eight. St. Luke's definition of the distance, ὡσεὶ λίθου βολήν—to which he withdrew himself from those whom he supposes him afterwards to address, accords better to the case of the eight, left by themselves at the entrance of the garden, than to that of the three whom he took with him further on into it: for, from these, according to St. Mark, he went but a little way off before he began to pray; whereas Xilov Boλn implies the distance of a stone's cast from a sling*; which could not be properly called a little way off, and would be much greater than could have permitted that clear view, especially in the night-time, of his mental and his bodily distress, with which these three in particular were favoured. Jesus then, after addressing his last admonition to these three, as recorded by St. Matthew and St. Mark, may be supposed to have gone on to the rest, left probably at the entrance of the garden and if he found them asleep also, it would not be more surprising than the fact that he had found the three others, thrice successively, in the same situation before. Yet for their being found asleep St. Luke has assigned a reason, which might * Tantum aberat scopulis, quantum balearica torto Ovid, Metamorphoseon iv. 708. indeed apply to the three, but is specified solely of the eight. They were asleep from grief and dejection of spirit; affections, which the course of events hitherto, the many ominous declarations of their Master respecting himself and them, the ingratitude and perfidy of Judas, by this time perhaps only too reasonably suspected, the power and agency of evil spirits, now permitted to molest and disturb them in some manner more than usual; but above all, sympathy with their Master, in the spectacle of mental and of corporeal anguish, so recently exhibited, however imperfectly, to their observation, were well calculated to have excited to which we may add the natural effect of the lateness of the hour itself. As all this would take place without loss of time, it might still be said with truth that Judas appeared, eri αὐτοῦ λαλοῦντος : for instantaneous as this appearance might be, it could not have come so critically in the midst of our Lord's last address to the three Apostles, as not to allow him time to go forth, and to anticipate the entrance of the band, before its intrusion into the garden. We may conclude, then, this consideration of the agony by observing that its duration was probably a little more than one hour. The first, and by far the most intense, of its paroxysms seems to have occupied, proportionably, the greatest part of the time; and the duration of that, as we may infer from the words addressed to Peter on the first return, Simon, sleepest thou? hast not thou been able to wake one hours? was nearly an hour. Both the others, we may presume, would be transacted in half the same time; whence, if our Lord arrived in the garden a little before, or not later than, midnight, the whole would be over soon g Mark xiv. 37. |