And those that saw this of a sudden felt their hearts beat, felt the blood mount to their temples, their breathing grow hard. Their knees shook. To be the slave of a powerful, stern divinity, to fling one’s self at the feet of the Lord, to be His own, not in mute devotion, not in the mild inefficacy of prayer, but in a fury of passion, in the intoxication of self-humiliation, in blood and lamentation, and smitten with the moist, glistening tongues of scourges—this they could understand. Even the butcher held his peace; and the toothless philosophers bowed their grizzled heads.
Silence reigned in the church; only a gentle breathing passed through the multitude.
Then one of the strangers, a young friar, rose and spoke. His was the pallor of bloodless flesh; his black eyes glowed; and the sad lines of his mouth were as if cut with a knife in wood, and not mere furrows in a human face.
He lifted up his thin, suffering hands in prayer to Heaven, and the black sleeves of his gown slipped back from his lean arms.
Then he spoke—of hell, of its eternity, of the eternity of Heaven, of the solitary world of pain which each of the damned must suffer and must fill with his cries of agony. In that world were seas of sulphur, meadows of wasps, flames to be wrapped about them like a cloak, and hard flames that would pierce them like a probe twisting in a wound.
Breathlessly all listened to his words; for he spoke as if he had seen these things with his own eyes. And they asked themselves: “Is this man not one of the damned, sent to us from the mouth of hell, to testify?”
Then he preached long of the commandments and their rigor, of the need of obeying them to the very letter, and of the dire punishment that awaited him who sinned against them. “'But Christ died for our sins,’ ye say. 'We are no longer bound by the Word.’ But I say that hell will not be cheated of one of you, and not one of the iron teeth of hell’s wheel will your flesh escape. Ye build upon Calvary’s cross? Come! Come and see it! I will lead you to its foot. It was on a Friday, as ye know, when they cast Him from their gates and laid the heavier end of a cross upon His shoulders and suffered Him to bear it to a barren and naked hill without the city; and they walked beside Him and stirred up the dust with their feet, so that it rested over them like a red cloud. And they tore His garments from Him, even as the lords of justice strip a criminal before all eyes, that all might see His body. And they threw Him down upon His cross, and stretched Him upon it, and drove an iron nail through each of His unresistant hands and a nail through His crossed feet. And they raised the cross in a hole dug in the earth; but it would stand neither firm nor upright. So they shook it and drove wedges and blocks around it. And those that did this turned down the brims of their hats so that the blood of His hands might not drip into their eyes.
“And He from on high looked down upon the soldiers casting dice for His seamless coat, and down upon all the howling mob for whose salvation He suffered. Not one tearful eye was there in all the multitude. And those who were below looked up at Him, hanging from the cross, suffering, and faint. They read the inscription above His head: 'King of the Jews,’ and they mocked Him and called up to Him: 'Thou that destroyest the temple, and buildest it in three days, save Thyself. If Thou be the Son of God, come down from the cross.’
“Then God’s noble Son waxed wroth and saw that these were unworthy of salvation, this mob that swarmed over the earth; and He wrenched His feet from the nail, and He clenched His fingers and tore His hands away, so that the arms of the cross bent as a bow. And He leaped to the earth and caught up His garment, so that the dice rolled over the precipice of Golgotha, and threw it about His person with the righteous wrath of a king, and ascended into heaven. And the cross stood bare; and the great work of atonement remained unfulfilled. No mediator stands between us and God. No Jesus died for us on the cross! No Jesus died for us on the cross!”
He ceased.