And so out of the experience came a double blessing.  There was a much fuller working of God’s plan for His poor befooled world.  And there was an unspeakable nearness of intimacy with his Lord for Paul. The man was answered and the petition denied that the larger plan of service might be carried out.

Shaping a Prayer on the Anvil of the Knees.

The last of these pictures is like Raphael’s Sistine Madonna in the Dresden gallery; it is in a room by itself.  One enters with a holy hush over his spirit, and, with awe in his eyes, looks at Jesus in Gethsemane.  There is the Kidron brook, the gentle rise of ground, the grove of gnarled knotty old olive trees.  The moon above is at the full.  Its brightness makes these shadowed recesses the darker; blackly dark.  Here is a group of men lying on the ground apparently asleep.  Over yonder deeper in among the trees a smaller group reclines motionless.  They, too, sleep.  And, look, farther in yet is that lone figure; all alone; nevermore alone; save once—­on the morrow.

There is a foreshadowing of this Gethsemane experience in the requested interview of the Greeks just a few intense days before.  In the vision which the Greeks unconsciously brought the agony of the olive grove began.  The climax is among these moon-shadowed trees.  How sympathetic those inky black shadows!  It takes bright light to make black shadows.  Yet they were not black enough.  Intense men can get so absorbed in the shadows as to forget the light.

This great Jesus!  Son of God:  God the Son.  The Son of Man:  God—­a man!  No draughtsman’s pencil ever drew the line between His divinity and humanity; nor ever shall.  For the union of divine and human is itself divine, and therefore clear beyond human ken.  Here His humanity stands out, pathetically, luminously stands out.  Let us speak of it very softly and think with the touch of awe deepening for this is holiest ground.  The battle of the morrow is being fought out here.  Calvary is in Gethsemane.  The victory of the hill is won in the grove.

It is sheer impossible for man with sin grained into his fibre through centuries to understand the horror with which a sinless one thinks of actual contact with sin.  As Jesus enters the grove that night it comes in upon His spirit with terrific intensity that He is actually coming into contact—­with a meaning quite beyond us—­coming into contact with sin.  In some way all too deep for definition He is to be “made sin."[23] The language used to describe His emotions is so strong that no adequate English words seem available for its full expression.  An indescribable horror, a chill of terror, a frenzy of fright seizes Him.  The poisonous miasma of sin seems to be filling His nostrils and to be stifling Him.  And yonder alone among the trees the agony is upon Him.  The extreme grips Him.  May there not yet possibly be some other way rather than this—­this! A bit of that prayer