I. It is very usual, under this Word, to meditate on Christ's thirst for
souls; and this is, of course, a legitimate thought, since it is true
that His whole Being, and not merely one part of it, longed and panted
on the Cross for every object of His desire. Certainly He desired souls!
When does He not?

But it is easy to lose the proportion of truth, if we spiritualize
everything, and pass over, as if unworthy of consideration, His bodily
pain. For this Thirst of the Crucified is the final sum of all the pains
of crucifixion: the physical agony, the fever produced by it, the
torrential sweat, the burning of the sun--all these culminated in the
torment of which this Cry is His expression.

Bodily pain, then, since Jesus not only deigned to suffer it, but to
speak of it, is as much a part of the Divine process as the most
spiritual of derelictions: it is an intense and a vital reality in life.
It is the fashion, at present, to pose as if we were superior to such
things; as if either it were too coarse for our high natures or even
actually in itself evil. The truth is that we are terrified of its
reality and its sting, and seek, therefore, to evade it by every means
in our power. We affect to smile at the old penances of the saints and
ascetics as if we ourselves had risen into a higher state of development
and needed no longer such elementary aids to piety!

Let this Word, then, bring us back to our senses and to the due
proportions of truth. We are body as well as soul; we are incomplete
without the body. The soul is insufficient to itself, the body has as
real a part to play in Redemption as the soul which is its inmate and
should be its mistress. We look for the _redemption of our body_ and the
_Resurrection of the Flesh_, we merit or demerit before God in our soul