We are accustomed, in our meditations on the passion, to contemplate the emaciated, agonized form of our Lord stretched and racked upon the cross; or, after the Consummatum est, when eventide was come, laid stark and bloodless in the arms of the Queen of martyrs, his most desolate Mother. Naturally we lose out of sight, by comparison, other agents and events in what followed his expiring cry. Yet look again. In the growing dusk of that first Good Friday, at the foot of the cross, and in the group of five or six persons to whom the eternal Father seems to commit the lifeless body of his Son, there is the saint of Glastonbury. With the dolorous Mother, and the beloved disciple, and the saintly, penitent Magdalene, and the other holy women, and Nicodemus, St. Joseph of Arimathea also bears his part.
To come back to Glastonbury; we must pass over some thirty years from that sacred paschal eve. Pentecost soon followed it, with its fiery tongues on the apostles' brows. They were illuminated and strengthened to preach the faith over the earth lying in darkness. So they separated on this world-wide mission, each on the path whereon the guidance of God's Spirit led him. "Their sound went over all the earth, and their words unto the ends of the whole world." St. Philip went into Phrygia, and, by some accounts, was martyred there. Others make him to have preached the gospel in what is now France, and that St. Joseph was one of his companions. A better supported tradition has it that St. Joseph, with St. Lazarus and his two holy sisters, Martha and Mary, landed at Marseilles from Judea. Anyhow, here comes St. Joseph of Arimathea to Britain, with a faithful band of eleven disciples. He has reached the distant region of tin-mines which the old Phoenicians had discovered and worked in Cornwall, Scilly, and, perhaps, the Mendip Hills. He is come not for precious metals, but to bring the priceless word of life.
So, rather more than sixty years after the Incarnation, and while Saints Peter and Paul are still alive in Rome, though the day of their martyrdom draws near, we find ourselves on the brow of Weary-All Hill, a mile or so south-west of the spot where Glastonbury Abbey will be built.
Weary-All Hill! the name it has been known by for generations back. But not a likely name to be given it by St. Joseph and his eleven companions, as they stood on it for the first time, eighteen centuries ago; as they looked on the marshy plain, dotted with islands, in and out of which the glassy stream is winding. Weariness, at least lassitude of spirit, was unknown to those apostolic men. Had they not come all this way to bring the everlasting gospel? Had not their feet been "beautiful upon the mountains" as they crossed them, bearing this message of heavenly love?—mountains deep in snow, yawning with frightful clefts and precipices, gloomy with impenetrable forests, to which this Weary-All is scarcely a mole-hill?
"At length, then," said St. Joseph, when the twelve had paused on the brow of it to recover breath; for few of them were young, and it was rather a pull for a Somersetshire hill—"at length we have reached the end of our pilgrimage."
As he spoke, he pointed with his long staff to the little group of islands already noticed. A cheery December sun lingered on the scene, and, though it was evening, still cast a gleam upon the wide-spread water. The Brue was winding along, noiseless and limpid, sprinkled with its dark islets, as the shining coils of a snake are variegated with the spots upon its skin. There was no ice yet, though it was already the Christmas season. Perhaps the sea-water that mingled with the marsh from the Bristol Channel prevented its formation. The leafless thickets that fringed the slopes of West Sedgemoor, and clothed both islands and marshland in irregular clumps, allowed a more distinct view of the mirror of waters than when shaded with summer foliage. There was a kind of grave and sober animation over the whole scene.
A short distance further off, to the east, rose a solitary peaked hill, perhaps even then called the Tor. It has several scarped lines, or passes, drawn around it, denoting that the Romans had fortified it as a stronghold, which they occupied from time to time. Years after, a little chapel in honor of St. Michael the archangel will be built on its summit. Years later, again, that little chapel will be enlarged into a stately church, the tower of which still remains. And nearly fifteen centuries after St. Joseph first stood on Weary-All, the last abbot of the stately Benedictine monastery, as Glastonbury had become, was martyred there with two of his monks. His crime was, that he rendered to Caesar only those things that were Caesar's, and refused to acknowledge the tyrant Henry VIII. as head of God's church in England.
Northward of where we stand, at the distance of five miles and more, the abrupt range of the Mendip Hills caught at that moment almost the last beams of the declining sun, as it sank, fiery red, toward the western ocean.
"The end of our pilgrimage," said St. Joseph again, slowly, and gazed down on the peaceful spot. "These are the islands of which the heathen king spoke:—how are we to name him?"