Excerpt from Christ's Last Agony: His Seven Words

"Then therefore Pilate delivered Him to them to be crucified. And they took Jesus, and led Him forth. And bearing His own Cross, He went forth to that place which Is called Calvary, but in Hebrew Golgotha. Where they crucified Him, and with Him two others, one on each side, and Jesus in the midst. And Pilate wrote a title also, and he put it upon the Cross. And the writing was: Jesus op Nazareth, the King of the Jews. This title, therefore, many of the Jews did read: because the place where Jesus was crucified was nigh to the city. And it was written in Hebrew, in Greek, and in Latin." - (John xix. 16-20.)

In Christ's Last Agony, there is the agony of every dying man. Hence it has a moral value for contemplation for every man that lives and will die. Christianity is the only creed that attempts to lend succor to suffering humanity, because it holds up the virtue of dignified composure even in the grasp of torture, manifested in Christ Who is both Eternal and Divine. It shows Him endowed with the virtue of courage at the crucial moment of the soul's struggle. When the tide of desolation reached the breaking point, He did not morally break, even though physically and literally He died of a broken Heart when the soldier plunged a spear in His Side: "They shall look upon Me Whom they have pierced."

This fact, although it gives no thorough reason for the existence of suffering, at least manifests the comforting truth that Christ in some unthinkable and preeminent manner has suffered to the final degree of dereliction. He has shown us that there must be something sweet and meritorious even in the bitterness and indignity of human suffering. There is, moreover, solace in the thought, especially for the abandoned, the sick, the sorrowing and the lonely, that Christ, the Manifestation of God, has suffered and suffers with every suffering soul: "I will draw all things to Myself."

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