James E. Talmage wrote:
Christ’s agony in the garden is unfathomable by the finite mind, both as to intensity and cause. . . . He struggled and groaned under a burden such as no other being who has lived on earth might even conceive as possible. It was not physical pain, nor mental anguish alone, that caused Him to suffer such torture as to produce an extrusion of blood from every pore; but a spiritual agony of soul such as only God was capable of experiencing, No other man, however great his powers of physical or mental endurance, could have suffered so. . . . In the hour of anguish Christ met and overcame all the horrors that Satan, “the prince of this world” (John 14:30) could inflict. . . .
In some manner, actual and terribly real though to man incomprehensible, the Savior took upon himself the burden of the sins of mankind from Adam to the end of the world. . . .
From the terrible conflict in Gethsemane, Christ emerged a victor. Though in the dark tribulation of that fearful hour, He pleaded that the bitter cup be removed from His lips, the request, however oft repeated, was always conditional; the accomplishment of the Father’s will was never lost sight of as the object of the Son’s supreme desire. The further tragedy of the night, and the cruel inflictions that awaited Him on the morrow, to culminate in the frightful tortures of the cross, could not exceed the bitter anguish through which He had successfully passed. ~James E. Talmage, The Gift of the Atonement (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2001) 49
