of masters. Rome was a better queen than Jerusalem would have been; Pilate was a better administrator than Caiaphas. Yet Judaism might have conquered Rome. Rome, strong in military power, was weak in moral ideas. She had no earnest faith, no strong purpose, no central truths. Her heart was weak, her muscles only strong. In her palmiest days her gods had been poetic deifications of human virtues; but those days were already past, and the era was fast approaching when a corrupt and parasitical senate would vote emperors to be gods while they lived, whom history assigns among incarnate fiends since their death. Religion no longer satisfied the heart of the common people or the intellect of the wise, and it was sustained, not by any genuine reverence for itself, but because it was regarded by its rulers as a state necessity. The moral life of Rome shared the corruptions of its effete religious faith. Bribery was universal and unconcealed. In the courts-no longer courts of justice-gold was the plea of the wealthy suitor; the passions of the populace the defense of the poor. Chastity and temperance were the subjects of common satire. The drama was supplanted by gladiatorial combats, and feasting and revelry, continued through many days and nights, became banquets of death. "Nothing is left-nothing for future times So Juvenal portrays the life of Rome less than three quarters of a century later than the period of which we write. Here, then, was Rome's weakest point, and in these respects Judaism was strong. The one provoked the derision of the wise by presenting for their adoration a host of sensual gods and goddesses; the other demanded their reverence for one supreme and spiritual Jehovah. The one deduced the will of the gods by the tricks of the soothsayer from the chance flight of birds, or the study of the entrails of the sacrificial victim; the other pointed to the sublime enactments of Mount Sinai, the plain precepts of the prophets, and the moral maxims of the book of Proverbs. The one, regarding religion as a political instrument, left it to be regulated for the nation by the senate; the other, regarding it as an individual life, forbade any one from interfering between the soul and its God. The moral life of the one people, corrupted by its very religious faith, was rotten with self-indulgence and licentiousness; the moral life of the other, despite the corruptions of its Church and priesthood, was preserved comparatively free from the excesses of Oriental animalism by its faith in God, in the sanctions of his Word, and in the immortal destinies of the human soul. Thus, then, Judaism might have conquered Rome, not by the sword, but by its ideas. Thus already, in some measure, Greece subjugated her own conquerors. Thus Christianity, slain in the person of its founder by Roman decree, became mistress itself of her who claimed to be the mistress of the world. This was the conquest to which Jesus invited his nation. The time had now come for him to make this purpose clear. By a spontaneous effusion of popular feeling he had been proclaimed in the Holy City itself the Son of David. A considerable portion of the nation had thus practically acknowledged allegiance to him. By miracles wrought in the Temple courts, and witnessed to by his bitterest foes, he had justified the title. Their allegiance he now must test. The chimerical dream of military conquest he must rudely dispel, to substitute therefor the more substantial prospect of moral victory. This he must do with a full consciousness of the inevitable result. Jewish bigotry would never surrender its life-long expectations. To put aside popular enthusiasm is far harder than to deeline a crown. To turn the homage of a people into execrations loud and deep may well test the courage of the most heroic. This Jesus deliberately did, with the full consciousness of all the bitter consequences to himself. Tuesday, the fourth day of April, A.D. 34,* was by far the most eventful in the life of Christ-may almost be said to be the most eventful in the history of mankind. On the evening of that day, and for that day's utterances, not on the evening of his more formal trial, nor for any word of blasphemy, Jesus was condemned to die. When he first entered the Temple on that eventful morning, it was evident that systematic plans had been formed to silence him, if possible, effectually and forever. A common animosity fused all parties. Old feuds were forgotten, old party lines obliterated. Pharisee and Sadducee, Herodian, scribe, and priest, made common cause against him. They joined in the crowd which surrounded Jesus. They assumed to be his disciples. Mingling their questions with those of honest inquirers after truth, they endeavored to entrap him into answers that should arouse popular prejudice, or embroil him with the Roman government. They plied him with flatteries, and, praising his boldness and independence, sought to cozen him. The whole range of thought they traversed, and questioned him eagerly concerning their political duties. as citizens, concerning practical ethics, and concerning the most abstruse problems of abstract theology. Hitherto Jesus had disregarded all such dishonest inquiries of dishonest skeptics. He had either openly refused, or successfully evaded a direct answer. This morning he pursued a different course. He suffered himself to be catechized. He answered, with one exception, every question. It was his last day of public teaching. He sought to draw out the hierarchy, to make plain to all the people the antagonism between him and them, and to warn the populace against the priests. * That is, assuming Christ to have been born A.D. 1. If the more modern hypothesis, that he was born four years earlier, be accepted, this should be, of course, A.D. 30. See chronological note at the beginning of the book. + Mark xi., 27; xii., 13, 28. + Luke xx., 20. § Matt. xxii., 16; Mark xii., 14; Luke xx., 21. Refusing to interfere with questions of political administration, Jesus nevertheless declared that, so long as the people enjoyed the benefits of the Roman government-employed its currency, for example-they must yield it an ungrudging support. Since they accepted Cæsar as their emperor by using his coin, they must render to him obedience so long as his laws did not interfere with the higher duty of rendering to God the things that are God's. Refusing to participate in the puerile imaginings which filled the Rabbinical books concerning the conditions of the future state, he at once rebuked the materialistic ideas of Pharisaic theology by declaring, in effect, that flesh and blood can not inherit the kingdom of God, while he demonstrated to the Sadducees the doctrine of the resurrection by a reference to the Pentateuch, the only part of the Old Testament Scriptures which they universally and unquestionably accepted. Declining to take part in the casuistry of his day concerning the relative importance of the various laws of the ancient commonwealth, he comprised the whole law in one word-love; and by a single sentence sweeping away the religion of mere creeds, ceremonies, transient emotions, external moralities, and godless philanthropy, that he might substitute that of a genuine heart-life, he married piety and humanity in the wedlock of a true religion by the declaration that the whole law and prophets are only the amplification and application of the combined commandments: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and soul, and mind, and thy neighbor as thyself.* He no longer seemed to avoid controversy. He seemed even to provoke it. He became catechist in turn; asked, as they had asked him, not to ascertain their views, but to confound and silence them; and, much to their indignation, succeeded. Warnings and prophecies of coming doom, which * Matt. xxii., 15-40; Mark xii., 12-34; Luke xx., 20-40. + Matt. xxi., 24-26; xxii., 42-46; Mark xi., 29-33; xii., 35-37; Luke xx., 3-7, 41-44. Сс heretofore had been generally confined to confidential discourses with his disciples, he now publicly repeated. He declared that the religion of the Pharisees was one of profession and pretense; that the publicans and harlots would enter the kingdom of God before them; that the Jewish nation was no longer the favored people of God; that its privileges and prerogatives would be taken from it; that it was a nation of murderers; that the present generation would, by slaying the Son of God, fulfill the measure of the iniquity of their fathers; and that, so far from becoming the mistress of mankind, the stone which they refused would grind them to powder, the open door to the feast of God's love would be forever closed against them, the avenging sword of God would utterly destroy them, and their Holy City would be burned with fire.* Nothing are the common people so quick to resent as the act of one who dispels their dream of national glory. No one so quickly arouses their passions as a prophet of evil. These denunciations were at first couched under the guise of parables. At length that guise was thrown off. The infinite patience of Christ seemed to have been exhausted. Endurance ceased to be a virtue. For the moment he appeared to be no longer the Savior, but the Judge of mankind, and to have already ascended his judgment throne, that he might denounce the sure penalties of God upon a people whose piety was but a poor pretense to conceal lives of selfishness and sin. Literature may be searched in vain for philippics more terrible than those which constitute Christ's last public address in the Temple at Jerusalem; and we can well conceive the awe with which the people, transfixed by the spell of his more than mortal eloquence, listened to these terrible denunciations of their religious leaders-denunciations enforced by an air and manner that spoke unmistakably the fires of pent-up indignation which even the calm soul of Jesus could restrain no longer, and yet that ended at the last in an outery of infinite pathos, of divine pity and compassion. * Matt. xxi., 28-46; xxii., 1-13; Mark xii., 1-12; Luke xx., 9-19. |