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Rh midst of my bowels, thou hast brought me to the dust of death.”

This constituted what the ancient church called the unknown sufferings of Christ. In the cup which the Father gave him to drink, there was something sharper than the vinegar, and more bitter than the gall. The darkness which at that time covered the face of the earth, was but a faint emblem of that blacker cloud which overwhelmed this soul. What the degree of these unknown sufferings was, how they were inflicted, or how they were sustained, we cannot tell. But the complaint of dereliction, which the Saviour then uttered, the sense which all nature had of its Creator rising in wrath, when the earth trembled, the rock were rent asunder, and the grave gave up its dead; testify that they were such as God only could inflict, and the Son of God only could sustain.

Never was there sorrow like unto this sorrow, wherewith the Lord now chastened him in the day of the fierceness of his anger. Upon his agony in the garden, an angel from heaven strengthened him. But in this hour, when he bore the sins of his people, when the pangs of death took hold of him, when the sorrows of hell encompassed him; in this hour of inutterable woe, where the heavenly messengers, and where was the countenance of his father who used to comfort him, and to smile upon him? Alas! from his Father