Peter Clark MacFarlane

“ My heart was touched with sympathy for the youth and for the great hope in his breast. I myself was wandering on the mountainside in the raw night air because the spell of the Galilean lingering after death had caught upon my nerves, and yet I knew the man was dead. I knew the tomb was cold and silent and tenantless save by withering flesh. I was but waiting for the rising sun to proclaim the folly of Pilate's precautions, so I sought to rescue the young man from his delusions. ”

“ But, even while I write these words and pause to scoff at man's mischance of nature, yet I tell you that if there be ever a time when Nature would rue her work upon the frame of a human being, when rocks and hills and trees and birds and glistening seas and whispering winds and booming thunders, and all the vast impeopled constitution of the universe would, with one voice, cry out "Come back, come back, oh, man! come back! and live thy life and work thy mortal will again upon us and among us," it would be for this man Jesus.
For, by the way, it is of him, Jesus the Nazarene, that I write. ”

“ For, as you shall see, Pilate's haunting, suspicious fear was not that we had killed him, for he knew I would see well to that, but that he should remain dead when once he was slain. What a foolish fear! what an idle superstition! What a power in life this Jew must have been that he could haunt with fears when he was dead those who hated him and torture them with horrid suspense lest he break the seal of death and move again among the people or cast a spell so strong that thrones would crumble and empires fall away. ”

“ I bade the soldiers turn their faces from me while I myself did the foolish thing, for I knew the grinning rascals mocked me, especially that black-browed Stephen whose own spear had pierced the prophet's heart. Too often he had given the death thrust not to know when it was well done, and here, while the very heavens mocked and while the deep, breaking sobs of women chanted a dirge of death, we were making confession of a procurator's shameful fear. Do I err, Marcus, when I set you this down in such painful detail? ”

“ I heard the sound of hurried footsteps and up the path to the garden came the dark-eyed youth whom I had met in the night upon the mountain, followed closely by a great, shaggy haired giant of a Galilean whom I had seen with the Jew at the time of his arrest—he who smote off the ear of Malchus—and again as a member of the burial party. The youth was fleeter of foot and reaching the tomb first, stooped and looked in, and after him the larger man laboured heavily up the way. ”

“ What seal of Emperor or Gods is half so strong to keep a man entombed as that unturning process of the Universe that grinds life into being with pain and sorrow and grinds it out again at the last with sorrow and pain. Cæsar's seal to keep the dead dead! ”

“ With a little push, he sent the scourged man tottering forward to the baluster. The Nazarene recovered his pose instantly. There was no droop to his shoulders, no pathos in his face and no pallor on his cheeks; only a slight tightening of every line of every feature and a certain added rigidity of pose as by sheer force of an unconquerable will, he lifted himself above his pain and above his weakness and above that nausea which scourging causes and stood there, the finest figure of a man that I have ever seen. This, my Marcus, was our hero at his greatest moment ”

“ But all mystery and all marvel is to-day as nothing. For, Marcus, I have looked upon the face of the Inscrutable. My soul has been bathed in mystery, I have seen the spirit of the cosmos itself, or indeed I must say himself, for the spirit is a man, and the man is God. ”

“ I have stood before a rock-hewn tomb over the brow of this hill, scarce a dozen furlongs, and heard his voice wake one who for four days had slumbered in the cloying embrace of death, and the dead, swathed round about with grave-clothes, strode forth instinct with quivering life. ”

“ So it went into the tomb with him, and in truth, here it now lay neatly folded on the shelf of the crypt, its silken binding cord beside it. Since the world was fluid fire what grave-robber ever stopped to fold a head-tire? Write that down on the first piece of papyrus at hand, Marcus, and send it to me by swiftest military post, or I shall hold that never it was done, and that in this folded head-tire is a voice that cries out like thunder that my senses were not deceived and my memory does not stumble on the way to perfect recollection. ”

“ There will be other prophets, but never that prophet again. Only in that great beyond of which we have spoken, our shades living on, there, it may be in a voiceless existence, his spirit may mingle with our own and we three, by such means as spirits use, may commune upon the nature of human existence."
The young man watched the breeze take up the rose petals one by one and bear them away, and then with a heavy sigh and a grave manner, as of one whose thoughts were far too deep for words, he turned and groped his way into the path that led down the mountainside to Jerusalem. ”

“ The stretching on rude and lifeless wood of the finest figure of a man that ever came walking on the seas of life; the crashing of the mallet that forced rude nails through the finest fibered, sensitive flesh to the insensate wood; the uplifted cross, the jar and grind and shock as it fell into its socket, the wrench and strain of thews—the small cataracts of plashing blood that came splattering down upon the rocky soil at the instant of elevation! ”

“ The face I could not describe since every feature seemed so complete that they blended into the one perfect character of a man. Forehead and eyes and mouth, I saw, and wavy hair flung back and beard enough, with heavy brows, but no feature stood out—all was subject unto the character, unto the face as a whole, unto the soul of the man who himself looked, subject unto nothing. My mind ran back through all the kingly souled men I have seen. ”

“ A Roman and a Procurator pleading with this rabble and yet, by Hercules, had I not had more spirit than Pilate to let them nag him thus, I myself would have pleaded for this noble piece of man flesh ere I had seen it tottering to the cross. I, too, would have sued upon my knees for his life, but the fiends would not be denied. Pilate grew more embarrassed. At length he called for water and a basin. The Jews clamoured. Jesus looked on. The water trickled through the Roman fingers and splattered on the pavement, washing out the stain of one of the Nazarene's footsteps. ”

“ One human incident I must relate that shows the fine, high calm and utter selflessness of the man. When the darkness was thickest, instinctively we all huddled closer to the cross, for there appeared once more that strange luminous glow upon his hair and features which I had noted in the garden. ”

“ It was Stephen, the hard-featured Galician who plunged the spear in the side of the Jew upon the cross. I seized him by the throat and forced him to his knees. "Coward," I said, "what have you seen?" "Seen?" he muttered. "Seen?" he gasped. "We have seen nothing, but a golden cloud that hangs above the tomb and there is life within the tomb. We have heard a rustling within and the voices of men." "Is the seal broken?" I asked, and flung him from me and rushed to the tomb. ”

“ Given any man who has power to wake the multitudes to enthusiastic devotion by the magic of his spell, and he will have art enough to earn a reputation as one who can call back the dead to life. But let me tell yon, while I have travelled far, I have never yet seen the prophet or magician who could put one single, living spasm in that heart through which a Roman spear has passed. ”

“ Two questions mount themselves like twin consuls in my mind, each inquiring insistently of the other, and one says, "He must be god, for how could man bear himself as he bore himself to-day, and die as he died?" ”

“ My half dozen men muttering over the dusty way, four or five stout fishermen of Galilee who bore the dead, this Joseph of the garden, and the handful of women who talked in low tones and wailed in high ones, and as we climbed the hill were saying how often the Jew himself had come over this pathway with his disciples to find repose at night in this very garden of Joseph where now they made his tomb. ”

“ Only here let me set down that the vengeful malevolence of the hateful priests continued to the end. They matched his sighs with sneers, they countered his groans with jeers and for every line of his own noble gentleness and magnificent manhood they matched it with a feature of harshest bitterness, revealing that men in bloody anger are more heartless than the beasts. It hurt me to the core when we lifted this man upon the cross and he knew 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. ”

“ With smug assurance, Herod prepared himself to have sport with his Galilean subject, but Jesus stood before him in a silence that was dignified but for all that, contemptuous and full of merited rebuke. Herod tried in vain to get a word out of him and then had to have recourse to the cheap and vulgar use of his own brutal power, for here I could not protect but must needs obey. Under Herod's orders my own soldiers mocked and jeered at him. ”

“ These Jews scoff at our gladiatorial combats. But to lash a good man unarmed, helpless, until his tender flesh is in ribbons and his full veins are empty is justice with them and Divine justice at that. Pilate himself went out again to the mob and pleaded for the life of his prisoner. ”

“ 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 would not lift a finger. ”

“ It was a strange thing that on the morrow the grove and the garden cast a spell over me. I could not wait for the guard to report but myself was there and saw the watch changed. All was as we had left it.
The next day was the Jewish Sabbath and again I found myself in the garden when the morning watch was changed. "All's well," they reported. "Hath nothing chanced?" "No," they answered, stolidly. I was foolish, Marcus. I was provoked with them for their indifference. Why had not something chanced? "Have you seen nought?" I asked. ”

“ These others fell before his glance because his eye swept them as a scorching fire, because they were arrant cowards. I fell upon my knees in admiration of the man. But while I looked, the kingliness seemed to retire. That self-assertion of a high-born majesty went back a little into the face of him. Something as though a man could do, yet would not do what he could. Once, I am told, when a woman pressed upon him in a throng for healing and touched the hem of his garment, he said, "My power goeth out from me." ”

“ Things that seemed to me wonderful and passing knowledge I have come either to understand or to catalogue as occupying some fit and proper place in the vast unsearched areas of the cosmos beyond the power of man to know. ”

“ The old fox it seems has done nothing but think of this young prophet since the trial and his mind was sticking at some talk of women that the man was a god and could not die. It was this superstition that brought the message from Pilate's wife I told you of, and made him wish to save the Jew, if such might be; but Pilate is an obstinate dog and once he has chosen a course he will walk in it to the turn of the road. Since he had delivered the man up to death, he would have no halfway measures ”

“ To say the ship ceases to be when it drops over the watery hill is not reasonable and to say that our friends cease to be when they drop out of sight of our childish, wondering eyes is not an answer that has commended itself to my mind for long at a time. ”

“ Not Zeus, himself, could be more kingly than they, yet there in the shadow, with only the flickering light from the torch upon his face, plus some strange luminous glow that seemed to be upon his hair and for which I could not account, was one who somehow flung these other men out of memory. There he stood in the shadow, and yet his face was light, lighter, I swear, than the combined rays of all the feeble flickering torches the cowardly priests held above him. "Whom do you seek? "he asked in that calm voice of his that seemed to me to have the strength of the Universe in its tone and timbre ”