“Darkness—sooty, portentous darkness—shrouds the whole scene; only above the accursed wood, as if through a horrid rift in the murky ceiling, a rainy deluge—‘sleety-flaw, discoloured water’—streams down amain, spreading a grisly, spectral light, even more horrible than that palpable night. Already the Earth pants thick and fast! The darkened Cross trembles! The winds are dropt—the air is stagnant—a muttering rumble growls underneath their feet, and some of the miserable crowd begin to fly down the hill. The horses sniff the coming terror, and become unmanageable through fear. The moment rapidly approaches, when, nearly torn asunder by His own weight, fainting with loss of blood, which now runs in narrower rivulets from His slit veins, His temples and breast drowned in sweat, and His black tongue parched with the fiery death-fever, Jesus cried, ‘I thirst.’ The deadly vinegar is elevated to Him.
“His head sinks, and the sacred corpse ‘swings senseless on the cross.’ A sheet of vermilion flame shoots sheer through the air and vanishes; the rocks of Carmel and Lebanon cleave asunder; the sea rolls on high from the sands its black, weltering waves. Earth yawns, and the graves give up their dwellers. The dead and the living are mingled together in unnatural conjunction, and hurry through the Holy City.
“New prodigies await them there. The veil of the Temple—the unpierceable veil—is rent asunder from top to bottom, and that dreaded recess, containing the Hebrew mysteries—the fatal ark, with the tables and seven-branched candelabrum—is disclosed by the light of unearthly flames to the God-deserted multitude.”
“Strange!” he mused, as his eyes stared into space, his mind occupied with the thought of the extract. “Strange how everything of late seems to be compelling my attention to the Christ—Christ past, Christ future.”
At that instant he heard someone mention the name of his paper. He glanced in the direction of the voices. Two gentlemen were talking together. It was evident that his own identity was utterly unknown to them.
“You’re right, you’re right,” the second man was saying. “A very clever fellow, evidently, that editor of the Courier.”
“You have noticed, of course,” the first man went on, “those striking paragraphs, of late, about the Jews. Though, to a keen student of the subject, they show a very superficial knowledge; still, it is refreshing to find a modern newspaper editor writing like that at all.”
“Yes,” the other said, “but it is strange how few people, even Christian people, ever realize how intimately the future of the Jewish race is bound up with that other shamefully neglected truth—the coming of the Lord for His Church. I wish the editor of the Courier, and every other newspaper editor, could be induced to go this afternoon and hear Major H—— speak on these things at the —— Room.”
“British Museum!” called the conductor of the car. The two talkers got out. Tom Hammond also alighted. As he mounted in the lift to the street, he decided that he would hear this major on the subject that was occupying his own perplexed thought so much.
Three o’clock that afternoon found him one of a congregation of three to four hundred persons in the —— Room. He was amazed at the quality of the audience. He recognized quite a dozen well-known London clergymen and ministers, with a score of other equally well-known laymen—literary men, merchants, etc. All were of a superior class. There was a large sprinkling of ladies, who, in many cases, were evidently sisters. Unaccustomed to such meetings, Tom Hammond did not know how enormous is the number of Christian women who are to be found at special religious gatherings, conventions, etc.