“ROCKAWAY, August, 1810.

“Hebrews is my ordinary, when no other passage of Scripture attracts my particular attention.  This is the third morning I have opened the New Testament on the 14th chapter of John, and have fed delightfully on the first three verses.  There is at all times a thorn in my heart, keeping me in continual remembrance of my vile, ungrateful backslidings, so that I eat my sweetest morsels with bitter herbs.  It was particularly painful to me this morning; nevertheless; the Lord God, merciful and gracious, repeated on my heart, ’Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.’  I was arrested at the fourth verse, ‘Whither I go ye know, and the way ye know.’  I have had many comfortable exercises on the eighth verse, the Redeemer’s answer to Philip’s inquiry.  But this morning my mind was led to a different view of that saying, and which I think was literally included.  The Redeemer was going to his Father, and his way lay through death, the death of the cross.  The hour was at hand when he was to make his holy and righteous soul an offering for sin, that he might become the author of salvation to all who obey him.  All the sins confessed and pardoned by the sacrifices under the law were laid on this blessed Surety—­they were only the shadows, he was the substance—­the real Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world, was now to be offered up.  This was he who said, ’Sacrifice and offering thou wouldest not, but a body hast thou prepared me; in burnt-offerings and offerings for sin thou hast had no pleasure; then said I, Lo, I come to do thy will, O God:’  by which will we are sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.

“He was going to the garden—­Oh that garden!  Peter had said he was able to drink of that cup and to be baptized with that baptism.  Ah no, Peter; that exceeding sorrow in the garden, when no visible hand was upon him, was a cup the least drop of which would have overwhelmed the strongest angel.  No strength short of omnipotent could have sustained that hour and power of darkness.  It was not the scourge, the thorns, the nails, nor the last pangs of dissolution; through all these he was as a lamb led to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers, dumb.  It was a mysterious horror, of which no created being can have any conception.  It was this that wrung the great drops of blood through every pore of his sacred body—­this that extorted the agonizing prayer, ’Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me;’ and again, in his last moments on the cross, ’My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ Blessed, for ever blessed be our Jehovah Jesus, who said, ‘Not my will, but thine be done.’  The will of God was done, and he said, ‘It is finished,’ and gave up the ghost.

“All his people must follow him by the way of death; nearly all his disciples followed by the death of the cross, and many others after them, supported by his almighty grace, rejoiced that they were counted worthy to suffer for his sake; but they drank not of that cup.