into his palms and sobs. The other figure was that of Saint John, like a
gipsy or sunburnt Swabian peasant, very tall, his beard matted and
tangled, his robe of a scarlet stuff cut in wide strips like slabs of
bark. His mantle was a chamois yellow; the lining, caught up at the
sleeves, showed a feverish yellow as of unripe lemons. Spent with
weeping, but possessed of more endurance than Mary, who was yet erect
but broken and exhausted, he had joined his hands and in an access of
outraged loyalty had drawn himself up before the corpse, which he
contemplated with his red and smoky eyes while he choked back the cry
which threatened to rend his quivering throat.

Ah, this coarse, tear-compelling Calvary was at the opposite pole from
those debonair Golgothas adopted by the Church ever since the
Renaissance. This lockjaw Christ was not the Christ of the rich, the
Adonis of Galilee, the exquisite dandy, the handsome youth with the
curly brown tresses, divided beard, and insipid doll-like features, whom
the faithful have adored for four centuries. This was the Christ of
Justin, Basil, Cyril, Tertullian, the Christ of the apostolic church,
the vulgar Christ, ugly with the assumption of the whole burden of our
sins and clothed, through humility, in the most abject of forms.

It was the Christ of the poor, the Christ incarnate in the image of the
most miserable of us He came to save; the Christ of the afflicted, of
the beggar, of all those on whose indigence and helplessness the greed
of their brother battens; the human Christ, frail of flesh, abandoned by
the Father until such time as no further torture was possible; the
Christ with no recourse but His Mother, to Whom--then powerless to aid
Him--He had, like every man in torment, cried out with an infant's cry.

In an unsparing humility, doubtless, He had willed to suffer the Passion