that before the transparent innocence of the youthful Rabbi of Nazareth the hoary hypocrisy of the crafty Sadducee was abashed. "Answerest thou the High Priest so?" said one of them with a burst of illegal insolence; and then, unreproved by this priestly violator of justice, he profaned with the first infamous blow the sacred face of Christ. Then first that face which, as the poet-preacher says, "the angels stare upon with wonder as infants at a bright sunbeam," was smitten by a contemptible slave. The insult was borne with noble meekness. Even St. Paul, when similarly insulted, flaming into sudden anger at such a grossly illegal violence, had scathed the ruffian and his abettor with "God shall smite thee, thou whited wall" (Acts xxiii. 3); but He, the Son of God-He who was infinitely above all apostles and all angels-with no flash of anger, with no heightened tone of natural indignation, quietly reproved the impudent transgressor with the words, "If I spoke evil, bear witness concerning the evil; but if well, why smitest thou me ?" It was clear that nothing more could be extorted from Him; that before such a tribunal He would brook no further question. Bound, in sign that He was to be condemned-though unheard and unsentenced—Annas sent Him across the court-yard to Joseph Caiaphas, his son-in-law, who, not by the grace of God, but by the grace of the Roman Procurator, was the titular High Priest.

ii. Caiaphas, like his father-in-law, was a Sadducee-equally astute and unscrupulous with Annas, but endowed with less force of character and will. In his house took place the second private and irregular stage of the trial. (Matt. xxvi. 59—68; Mark xiv. 55—65.) There—for though the poor Apostles could not watch for one hour in sympathetic prayer, these nefarious plotters could watch all night in their deadly malice-a few of the most desperate enemies of Jesus among the Priests and Sadducees were met. To form a session of the Sanhedrin there must at least have been twenty-three members present. And we may perhaps be allowed to conjecture that this particular body before which Christ was now convened was mainly composed of Priests. There were in fact three Sanhedrins, or as we should rather call them, committees of the Sanhedrin, which ordinarily met at different places-in the Lishcat Haggazzith, or Paved Hall; in the Beth Midrash, or Chamber by the Partition of the Temple; and near the Gate of the Temple Mount. Such being the case, it is no unreasonable supposition that these committees were composed of different elements, and that one of them may have been mainly

sacerdotal in its constitution. If so, it would have been the most likely of them all, at the present crisis, to embrace the most violent measures against One whose teaching now seemed to endanger the very existence of priestly rule.

But, whatever may have been the nature of the tribunal over which Caiaphas was now presiding, it is clear that the Priests were forced to change their tactics. Instead of trying, as Hanan had done, to overawe and entangle Jesus with insidious questions, and so to involve Him in a charge of secret apostacy, they now tried to brand Him with the crime of public error. In point of fact their own bitter divisions and controversies made the task of convicting Him a very difficult one. If they dwelt on any supposed opposition to civil authority, that would rather enlist the sympathies of the Pharisees in His favour; if they dwelt on supposed Sabbath violations or neglect of traditional observances, that would accord with the views of the Sadducees. The Sadducees dared not complain of His cleansing of the Temple: the Pharisees, or those who represented them, found it useless to advert to His denunciations of tradition. But Jesus, infinitely nobler than His own noblest Apostle, would not foment these latent animosities, or evoke for His own deliverance a contest of these slumbering prejudices. He did not disturb the temporary compromise which united them in a common hatred against Himself. Since, therefore, they had nothing else to go upon, the Chief Priests and the entire Sanhedrin "sought false witness"—such is the terribly simple expression of the Evangelists-"sought false witness against Jesus to put Him to death." Many men, with a greedy, unnatural depravity, seek false witness-mostly of the petty, ignoble, malignant sort; and the powers of evil usually supply it to them. The Talmud seems to insinuate that the custom, which they pretend was the general one, had been followed in the case of Christ, and that two witnesses had been placed in concealment while a treacherous disciple-ostensibly Judas Iscariot —had obtained from His own lips an avowal of His claims. This, however, is no less false than the utterly absurd and unchronological assertion of the tract Sanhedrin, that Jesus had been excommunicated by Joshua Ben Perachiah, and that though for forty days a herald had proclaimed that he had brought magic from Egypt and seduced the people, no single witness came forward in His favour. Setting aside these absurd inventions, we learn from the Gospels that though the agents of these priests were eager to lie, yet their testimony was so false, so shadowy, so self-contradictory, that it all melted to

nothing, and even those unjust and bitter judges could not with any decency accept it. But at last two came forward, whose false witness looked more promising. They had heard Him say something about destroying the Temple, and rebuilding it in three days. According to one version His expression had been, "I can destroy this Temple;" according to another, "I will destroy this Temple." The fact was that He had said neither, but "Destroy this Temple;" and the imperative had but been addressed, hypothetically, to them. They were to be the destroyers; He had but promised to rebuild. It was just one of those perjuries which was all the more perjured, because it bore some distant semblance to the truth; and by just giving a different nuance to His actual words they had, with the ingenuity of slander, reversed their meaning, and hoped to found upon them a charge of constructive blasphemy. But even this semblable perjury utterly broke down, and Jesus listened in silence while His disunited enemies hopelessly confuted each other's testimony. Guilt often breaks into excuses where perfect innocence is dumb. He simply suffered His false accusers and their false listeners to entangle themselves in the hideous coil of their own malignant lies, and the silence of the innocent Jesus atoned for the excuses of the guilty Adam.

But that majestic silence troubled, thwarted, confounded, maddened them. It weighed them down for the moment, with an incubus of intolerable self-condemnation. They felt, before that silence, as if they were the culprits, He the judge. And as every poisoned arrow of their carefully-provided perjuries fell harmless at His feet, as though blunted on the diamond shield of His white innocence, they began to fear lest, after all, their thirst for His blood would go unslaked, and their whole plot fail. Were they thus to be conquered by the feebleness of their own weapons, without His stirring a finger, or uttering a word? Was this Prophet of Nazareth to prevail against them, merely for lack of a few consistent lies? Was His life charmed even against calumny confirmed by oaths? It was intolerable.

Then Caiaphas was overcome with a paroxysm of fear and anger. Starting up from his judgment-seat, and striding into the midst with what a voice, with what an attitude we may well imagine!— "Answerest Thou NOTHING?" he exclaimed. "What is it that these witness against Thee?" Had not Jesus been aware that these His judges were wilfully feeding on ashes, and seeking lies, He might have answered; but now His awful silence remained unbroken.

Then, reduced to utter despair and fury, this false High Priestwith marvellous inconsistency, with disgraceful illegality-still standing as it were with a threatening attitude over his prisoner, exclaimed, "I adjure Thee by the living God to tell us "-what? whether Thon art a malefactor? whether Thou hast secretly taught sedition? whether Thou hast openly uttered blasphemy ?—no, but (and surely the question showed the dread misgiving which lay under all their deadly conspiracy against Him)-" WHETHER THOU ART THE CHRIST, THE SON OF GOD ?"

Strange question to a bound, defenceless, condemned criminal; and strange question from such a questioner—a High Priest of His people! Strange question from the judge who was hounding on his false witnesses against the prisoner! Yet so adjured, and to such a question, Jesus could not be silent; on such a point He could not leave Himself open to misinterpretation. In the days of His happier ministry, when they would have taken Him by force to make Him a King-in the days when to claim the Messiahship in their sense would have been to meet all their passionate prejudices half way, and to place Himself upon the topmost pinnacle of their adoring homage-in those days He had kept His title of Messiah utterly in the background: but now, at this awful decisive moment, when death was near—when, humanly speaking, nothing could be gained, everything must be lost, by the avowal-there thrilled through all the ages-thrilled through that Eternity, which is the synchronism of all the future, and all the present, and all the past-the solemn answer-"I AM; and ye shall see the Son of Man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming with the clouds of heaven." In that answer the thunder rolled- —a thunder louder than at Sinai, though the ears of the cynic and the Sadducee heard it not then, nor hear it now. In overacted and ill-omened horror, the unjust judge who had thus supplemented the failure of the perjuries which he had vainly sought-the false High Priest rending his linen robes before the True-demanded of the assembly His instant condemnation.

"BLASPHEMY!" he exclaimed; "what further need have we of witnesses? See, now ye heard his blasphemy! What is your decision ? And with the confused tumultuous cry, "He is ish mareth," "A man of death," "Guilty of death," the dark conclave was broken up, and the second stage of the trial of Jesus was over.

CHAPTER LIX.

THE INTERVAL BETWEEN THE TRIALS.

AND this was how the Jews at last received their promised Messiah— longed for with passionate hopes during two thousand years; since then regretted in bitter agony for well-nigh two thousand more! From this moment He was regarded by all the apparitors of the Jewish Court as a heretic, liable to death by stoning; and was only remanded into custody to be kept till break of day, because by daylight only, and in the Lishcat Haggazzith, or Hall of Judgment, and only by full session of the entire Sanhedrin, could He be legally condemned. And since now they looked upon Him as a "fit person to be insulted with impunity, He was haled through the court-yard to the guardroom with blows and curses, in which it may be that not only the attendant menials, but even the cold but now infuriated Sadducees took their share. It was now long past midnight, and the spring air was then most chilly. In the centre of the court the servants of the priests were warming themselves under the frosty starlight as they stood round a fire of coals. And as He was led past that fire He heard-what was to Him a more deadly bitterness than any which His brutal persecutors could pour into His cup of anguish-He heard His boldest Apostle denying Him with oaths.

For during these two sad hours of His commencing tragedy, as He stood in the Halls of Annas and of Caiaphas, another moral tragedy, which He had already prophesied, had been taking place in the outer court.

As far as we can infer from the various narratives, the palace in Jerusalem, conjointly occupied by Annas the real, and Caiaphas the titular High Priest, seems to have been built round a square court, and entered by an arched passage or vestibule; and on the farther side of it, probably up a short flight of steps, was the hall in which the committee of the Sanhedrin had met. Timidly, and at a distance, two only of the Apostles had so far recovered from their first panic as to follow far in the rear of the melancholy procession. One of thesethe beloved disciple-known perhaps to the High Priest's household as a young fisherman of the Lake of Galilee-had found ready admittance, with no attempt to conceal his sympathies or his identity. Not to the other. Unknown, and a Galilæan, he had been stopped at the