Perhaps the warning had been given because Christ read the mean and worthless nature of the man; at any rate, there is something at first sight peculiarly revolting in the 15th verse. "The man went and told the Jewish authorities that it was Jesus who had made him whole." It is barely possible, though most unlikely, that he may have meant to magnify the name of One who had wrought such a mighty work; but as he must have been well aware of the angry feelings of the Jewsas we hear no word of his gratitude or devotion, no word of amazement or glorifying God-as, too, it must have been abundantly clear to him that Jesus in working the miracle had been touched by compassion only, and had been anxious to shun all publicity-it must be confessed that the prima facie view of the man's conduct is that it was an act of needless and contemptible delation-a piece of most pitiful self-protection at the expense of his benefactor-an almost inconceivable compound of feeble sycophancy and base ingratitude. Apparently the warning of Jesus had been most deeply necessary, as, if we judge the man aright, it was wholly unavailing.

For the consequences were immediate and disastrous. They changed in fact the entire tenor of His remaining life. Untouched by the evidence of a most tender compassion, unmoved by the display of miraculous power, the Jewish inquisitors were up in arms to defend their favourite piece of legalism. "They began to persecute Jesus because He did such things on the Sabbath day."

And it was in answer to this charge that He delivered the divine and lofty discourse preserved for us in the 5th chapter of St. John. Whether it was delivered in the Temple, or before some committee of the Sanhedrin, we cannot tell; but, at any rate, the great Rabbis and Chief Priests who summoned Him before them, that they might rebuke and punish Him for a breach of the Sabbath, were amazed and awed, if also they were bitterly and implacably infuriated, by the words they heard. They had brought Him before them in order to warn, and the warnings fell on them. They had wished to instruct and reprove, and then, perhaps, condescendingly, for this once, to pardon; and lo! He mingles for them the majesty of instruction with the severity of compassionate rebuke. They sat round Him in all the pomposities of their office, to overawe Him as an inferior, and, lo! they tremble, and gnash their teeth, though they dare not act, while with words like a flame of fire piercing into the very joints and marrow-with words more full of wisdom and majesty than those which came among the thunders of Sinai-He assumes the awful dignity of the Son of God.

And so the attempt to impress on Him their petty rules and literal pietisms-to lecture Him on the heinousness of working miraculous cures on the Sabbath day-perhaps to punish Him for the enormity of bidding a healed man take up his bed-was a total failure.

With His very first word He exposes their materialism and ignorance. They, in their feebleness, had thought of the Sabbath as though God ceased from working thereon because He was fatigued; He tells them that that holy rest was a beneficent activity. They thought apparently, as men think now, that God had resigned to certain mute forces His creative energy; He tells them that His Father is working still; and He, knowing His Father and loved of Him, was working with Him, and should do greater works than these which He had now done. Already was He quickening the spiritually dead, and the day should come when all in the tombs should hear His voice. Already He was bestowing eternal life on all that believed in Him; hereafter should His voice be heard in that final judgment of the quick and dead which the Father had committed into His hands.

Was He merely bearing witness of Himself? Nay, there were three mighty witnesses who had testified, and were testifying, of Him-John, whom, after a brief admiration, they had rejected; Moses, whom they boasted of following, and did not understand; God Himself, whom they professed to worship, but had never seer or known. They themselves had sent to John and heard his testimony; but He needed not the testimony of man, and mentioned it only for their sakes, because even they for a time had been willing to exult in that great Prophet's God-enkindled light. But He had far loftier witness than that of John-the witness of a miraculous power, exerted not as prophets had exerted it, in the name of God, but in His own name, because His Father had given such power into His hand. That Father they knew not: His light they had abandoned for the darkness; His word for their own falsehoods and ignorances; and they had rejected Him whom He had sent. But there was a third testimony. If they knew nothing of the Father, they at least knew, or thought they knew, the Scriptures; the Scriptures were in their hands; they had counted the very letters of them; yet they were rejecting Him of whom the Scriptures testified. Was it not clear that they the righteous, the pious, the scrupulous, the separatists, the priests, the religious leaders of their nation-yet had not the love of God in them, if they thus rejected His prophet, His word, His works, His Son ?

And what was the fibre of bitterness within them which produced all this bitter fruit? Was it not pride? How could they believe, who sought honour of one another, and not the honour that cometh of God only? Hence it was that they rejected One who came in His Father's name, while they had been, and should be, the ready dupes and the miserable victims of every false Messiah, of every Judas, and Theudas, and Bar-Cochebas-and, in Jewish history, there were more than sixty such—who came in his own name.

And yet He would not accuse them to the Father; they had another accuser, even Moses, in whom they trusted. Yes, Moses, in whose lightest word they professed to trust-over the most trivial precept of whose law they had piled their mountain loads of tradition and commentary-even him they were disbelieving and disobeying. Had they believed Moses, they would have believed Him who spoke to them, for Moses wrote of Him; but if they thus rejected the true meaning of the written words (ypáμμaow) which they professed to adore and love, how could they believe the spoken words (pýμaoi) to which they were listening with rage and hate?

We know with what deadly exasperation these high utterances were received. Never before had the Christ spoken so plainly. It seemed as though in Galilee He had wished the truth respecting Him to rise like a gradual and glorious dawn upon the souls and understandings of those who heard His teaching and watched His works; but as though at Jerusalem-where His ministry was briefer, and His followers fewer, and His opponents stronger, and His mighty works more rare-He had determined to leave the leaders and rulers of the people without excuse, by revealing at once to their astonished ears the nature of His being. More distinctly than this He could not have spoken. They had summoned Him before them to explain His breach of the Sabbath; so far from excusing the act itself, as He sometimes did in Galilee, by showing that the higher and moral law of love supersedes and annihilates the lower law of mere literal and ceremonial obedience-instead of showing that He had but acted in the spirit in which the greatest of saints had acted before Him, and the greatest of prophets taught-He sets Himself wholly above the Sabbath, as its Lord, nay, even as the Son and Interpreter of Him who had made the Sabbath, and who in all the mighty course of Nature and of Providence was continuing to work thereon.

Here, then, were two deadly charges ready at hand against this Prophet of Nazareth: He was a breaker of their Sabbath; IIe was a

blasphemer of their God. The first crime was sufficient cause for opposition and persecution; the second an ample justification of persistent and active endeavours to bring about His death.

But at present they could do nothing; they could only rage in impotent indignation; they could only gnash with their teeth and melt away. Whatever may have been the cause, as yet they dared not act. A power greater than their own restrained them. The hour of their triumph was not yet come; only, from this moment, there went forth against Him from the hearts of those Priests and Rabbis and Pharisees the inexorable irrevocable sentence of violent death.

And under such circumstances it was useless, and worse than useless, for Him to remain in Judæa, where every day was a day of peril from these angry and powerful conspirators. He could no longer remain in Jerusalem for the approaching Passover, but must return to Galilee ; but He returned with a clear vision of the fatal end, with full knowledge that the hours of light in which He could still work were already fading into the dusk, and that the rest of His work would be accomplished with the secret sense that death was hanging over His devoted head.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

THE MURDER OF JOHN THE BAPTIST.

Ir must have been with His human heart full of foreboding sadness that the Saviour returned to Galilee. In His own obscure Nazareth He had before been violently rejected; He had now been rejected no less decisively at Jerusalem by the leading authorities of His own nation. He was returning to an atmosphere already darkened by the storm-clouds of gathering opposition; and He had scarcely returned when upon that atmosphere, like the first note of a death-knell tolling ruin, there broke the intelligence of a dreadful martyrdom. The heaven-enkindled and shining lamp had suddenly been quenched in blood. The great Forerunner-He who was greatest of those born of women-the Prophet, and more than a prophet, had been foully murdered.

Herod Antipas, to whom, on the death of Herod the Great, had fallen the tetrarchy of Galilee, was about as weak and miserable a prince as ever disgraced the throne of an afflicted country. Cruel, crafty, and voluptuous like his father, he was also, unlike him, weak in war and vacillating in peace. In him, as in so many characters which stand conspicuous on the stage of history, infidelity and superstition went hand in hand. But the morbid terrors of a guilty conscience did not save him from the criminal extravagances of a violent will. He was a man in whom were mingled the worst features of the Roman, the Oriental, and the Greek.

It was the policy of the numerous princelings who owed their very existence to Roman intervention, to pay frequent visits of ceremony to the Emperor at Rome. During one of these visits, possibly to condole with Tiberius on the death of his son Drusus, or his mother Livia, Antipas had been, while at Rome, the guest of his brother Herod Philip-not the tetrarch of that name, but a son of Herod the Great and Mariamne, daughter of Simon the Boëthusian, who, having been disinherited by his father, was living at Rome as a private person. Here he became entangled by the snares of Herodias, his brother Philip's wife; and he repaid the hospitality he had received by carrying her off. Everything combined to make the act as detestable as it was ungrateful and treacherous. The Herods carried intermarriage to an extent which only prevailed in the worst and most dissolute of the Oriental and post-Macedonian dynasties. Herodias being the daughter of Aristobulus, was not only the sister-in-law, but also the niece of Antipas; she had already borne to her husband a daughter, who was now grown up. Antipas had himself long been married to the daughter of Aretas, or Hâreth, Emîr of Arabia, and neither he nor Herodias were young enough to plead even the poor excuse of youthful passion. The sole temptation on his side was an impotent sensuality; on hers an extravagant ambition. She preferred a marriage doubly adulterous and doubly incestuous to a life spent with the only Herod who could not boast even the fraction of a vice-regal throne. Antipas promised on his return from Rome to make her his wife, and she exacted from him a pledge that he would divorce his innocent consort, the daughter of the Arabian prince.

But "our pleasant vices," it has well been said, "are made the instruments to punish us;" and from this moment began for Herod Antipas a series of annoyances and misfortunes, which only culminated in his death years afterwards in discrowned royalty and unpitied exile.