shall receive the greater damnation." "Child of hell!” "Ye blind guides." "Ye fools, and blind." "Hypocrites!" "Ye strain at a gnat and swallow a camel." "Full of extortion and excess." "Whited sepulchres full of dead men's bones!" "Serpents!" "Generation of vipers!" "How can ye escape the damnation of hell?" Of similar strain was the parable of the vineyard keepers - those rulers of Israel who forgot that their position at the head of the nation was a stewardship, a trust to be used for the people, and who exploited that trust for their own enrichment! "And the chief priests and the scribes sought to lay hold on him, but feared the people; for they knew that he had spoken the parable against them."

His purging of the Temple that capitol building of the Jewish nation, the centre of its civic life and his invective against the traitorous Jerusalem set, had now introduced the Nazarene to the thousands of Jews from abroad who were in the city for the festal season. The Jews of the dispersion were fanatical in their attachment to Israel and to her tradition of the rights of man: so much so that their presence in the capital at feast time was always the signal for extraordinary precautions on the part of the rulers against outbreak. Pilate's official seat was at Cæsarea, but he changed his residence to Jerusalem during each passover season, to preserve order. Quite as much as any other section of their race, these Jews from abroad were turbulent in their protests against the presence of the Romans in Israel's capital, and against the traitorous Jewish oligarchy for coalescing with those Romans. In quelling an insurrection at the

passover season a few years before this, Archilaus the Herodian king had slaughtered three thousand of these -Jewish pilgrims. Moreover because of Rome's mounting jealousy of Jerusalem - the latter disputed with Rome the honour of being the world capital - the empire was putting ever increasing dangers in the way of the Jews of the dispersion to revisit their holy city. These pilgrims, therefore, hailed with joy this popular hero from Galilee who was announcing the advent of a new order of society: "The Pharisees said among themselves, Perceive ye how ye prevail nothing? behold the world is gone after him." The Jews of the diaspora would go back to their homes when the passover should be ended; back to the valley of the Euphrates, to the Greek islands in the Ægean, to the ports of the Mediterranean from the Pillars of Hercules to the Caspian Sea; and there they would tell how a leader, a redeemer of the working class, had at last appeared; and they would prepare an entry for him into their countries, when he should reach them on his tour among the nations.

It would almost seem as if the fear of some such a tour on his part, as soon as the passover should be ended, prompted the Temple clique to action; for it was when he was eating the paschal supper that they came down upon him. A few hours more, and there would be nothing to keep him in the city, for the passover would be closed and he would be free to follow up among the =nations the success which his daring in the presence of representatives from all the world had in the last few days achieved for him.

CHAPTER X

ASSASSINATION

A COMPLIMENT is due the Caiaphas crowd for the shrewdness which they displayed in effecting the capture of The Carpenter. Jesus, when the people were present, was safe. In the daytime, therefore, he walked openly: "Then said some of them of Jerusalem, Is not this he whom they seek to kill? But lo, he speaketh boldly, and they say nothing unto him." The night was the time of danger, for then the people were asleep. It seems that Jesus accordingly concealed his whereabouts carefully after sundown. He did not trust himself in the city then, but went outside the walls to a camp in the fields. He also took the additional precaution of arming two of his disciples with swords. He seems effectually to have hidden his place of nightly sojourn, because we find that the authorities were baffled. The bribe to Judas would not have been negotiated had they not needed some one on the inside to guide them in a night attack. In keeping his whereabouts a secret, Jesus seems furthermore to have had the active coöperation of the people at large. For the rulers had issued an edict whose purpose was to break up a popular conspiracy of concealment: "Now both the chief priests and the Pharisees had given commandment that if any

man knew where he was, he should show it, that they might take him."

The night of the paschal supper presented to Caiaphas and his party the opportunity they sought. The Carpenter realized the danger; nevertheless he did not permit it to take him out of the city on this night when the passover was to be celebrated. Another name for the supper was, The Feast of Unleavened Bread; because the Israelites in their haste to escape from the brickyards of Egypt had not had time to set bread for the journey and allow it to raise. An upper room was chosen by Jesus, perhaps for the reason that it could be more easily defended in case of attack. The venom of the privileged caste against him has now reached a point where his chances of life are slim. And he purposes, if this shall be the last passover he can eat with his disciples, to make it a memorable occasion. It was customary at this feast for the youngest present to ask: "Why is this night different from all other nights? what mean ye by this service?" Whereupon the head of the family or of the company would reply by a recapitulation of the history of the escape out of Egypt. Jesus seizes upon this custom to connect forever after his own movement for the liberation of the people, with this supper. With characteristic brazenness the Jerusalem set had wrested the paschal feast from its original significance; they were proclaiming themselves to be the successors of Moses. Jesus pointed out the ludicrousness of this position: "The Scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses's seat." The priest-mind was keen to garnish the tombs of the prophets those revolutionists who were dead and therefore safe but they had no ears for this plebeian

and dangerous fellow from Nazareth. They embalmed Moses, the labour-leader of the past, into the orthodoxy of the present. As is done in every age; your true conservative is he who worships a dead radical. Jesus now purposes that this indecency shall be permitted no longer: "With desire I have desired to eat this passover with you." And he proceeds to point out the parallel between that ancient deliverance under Moses, and the one to which he himself is summoning the people. He bids them, should he be killed, to celebrate him also in this feast for all time thereafter. The wine and the unleavened bread, which memorialized Israel's escape from the slave pens of Goshen, were to be symbols also of this new restoration unto which he was summoning them. "Do this, as oft as ye shall eat it, in remembrance of me."

The Caiaphas set had already begun to tamper with the disciple band, by holding out bribes of money. Hints to this effect had reached Jesus, perhaps through some member of the upper class; for patriotism still lived in the breasts of some of the Jewish nobles. The glitter of Roman gold and Roman pomp could not dazzle from their vision all remembrance of Israel's tradition of democracy. So that, "among the chief rulers also many believed on him; but because of the Pharisees they did not confess him, lest they should be put out of the synagogue." Nicodemus was one of these. Another was Joseph of Arimathea, "a good man and a just.”

Wherever the leak, Jesus got the information. At the supper he refers to it. Some one of the disciple band, says he, has been listening too willingly to the clink of