when at morn or eve He found His oratory in the palm groves of Bethphage or among the silent hills of Galilee. Such was the private life of Jesus. The loneliness of the mystic's mind, which turns as by the instinct of the cageless bird to the solitudes of Nature, is counterbalanced in Christ by the genial affections of the man. From those profound and constant meditations, in which veil after veil seemed lifted from the universe, until the human and Divine spirit met indissolubly, and found themselves one, Christ returned to the beaten roads of human life, not with a lessened but a quickened interest in man. The higher He soared above average humanity the more eager was He that humanity should accompany Him in His flight. If the ineffectual strength of man is ever to essay that great experiment, it can only be by the same means. Certainly that experiment will never be achieved by mysticism alone, for the inevitable effect of mysticism is to produce aloofness from the world, and to attenuate almost to nothingness the bonds that hold men to a life of social intercourse. Therefore the friendships of Christ's private life have a spiritual as well as a human significance. The love of God ought never to exclude the love of man. The private life of Christ reveals each in equal perfection, and the one as perpetually interfused with the other. The true motto of such a life may perhaps be best found in the familiar verse of Coleridge "He prayeth best who loveth best All things both great and small, CHAPTER XIII THE FALLING OF THE SHADOW THE presence of John's disciples at the feast which Matthew the publican made in Capernaum once more introduces to our history, and for the last time, the name of John. It is little wonder that these men, who subsisted in a constant state of hunger, looked on the prodigal profusion of Matthew's feast with astonishment and perplexity. Fasting, always a feature of Jewish religious practice, they had carried to unheard-of lengths. Among the stricter Jews it was no uncommon thing to devote two whole days in every week to a total abstinence from food. These were public fasts; but the religious devotee, devoured by his passion for austerity, added a general rigour of life which forbade any concession to appetite, beyond such as was absolutely needful to existence itself. These half-starved fanatics of the desert might well marvel at a kind of life which was a perpetual marriagefeast. Their thoughts turned with angry sympathy to their great leader, already deserted by the populace, and reduced once more to "a voice crying in the wilderness." Gloom was fast settling upon that strenuous and noble mind. The first enthusiasm of John's successful propaganda had already waned, and his words had been fulfilled; he had decreased as Jesus had increased. There was preparing a great tragedy, fatal to himself, and of decisive influence on the life of Christ. We may trace the first falling of the shadow on the mind of Christ to that hour when the news reached Him of the death of John. He who stands upon the summit of the Mount of Olives sees to the eastward a prospect full of grandeur and sterility. Immediately in the foreground is a bare and dreadful country, falling rapidly to those gloomy gorges where Elijah found a refuge, and broken by a single green oasis, the palm groves and balsam gardens of Jericho. Rising above the landscape are the mountains of Moab, deeply fissured and wonderfully coloured with a hundred hues of pink and carmine, melting into deepest purple. They form a vast bastion above the waters of the Dead Sea, which is as an amethyst enclosed in a setting of coral. Northward lies the Jordan valley, in which the sacred river can be traced, less by the gleam of silver in its windings than by the broad band of green that marks its course. It was to the eastward of the Jordan, close to its juncture with the Dead Sea, at a place called Enon, the site of which is lost, that John conducted the last acts of his public ministry. What happened to bring his ministry to a sudden close we cannot ascertain. It is certain, however, that he incurred the anger of Herod Antipas, or his suspicious curiosity, which was not less formidable. Perhaps some strong words of John, uttered to the multitude, were reported to the tyrant, whose spies were everywhere. Herod at this time was residing in the vast fortress of Machærus, which stands at a height of nearly four thousand feet above the Dead Sea. In the heart of this enormous fortress and arsenal he had built himself a stately palace, in which he imitated not merely the luxuries but the infamies of the most corrupt of Roman emperors. To this prison-palace John was brought. In its secret dungeons the final act of his heroic life was consummated. The story of the Herods is of great importance in the long drama of Jewish history. Herod the Great, the founder of the race, in some respects deserved his fame. It was he who built the Temple, transforming what was little more than a provincial sanctuary into the most splendid of religious edifices. For six-and-forty years vast regiments of workmen, under the guidance of a thousand priests, toiled to raise a building more magnificent than Solomon had ever dreamed of, rich with every kind of precious stone, roofed with gold, adorned with countless colonnades and porticos, vast enough for ceremonies which attracted all nations, and beautiful enough to become the envy of the world. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that not even the greatest buildings of antiquity, the Acropolis in its severe perfection, or Nero's Golden House in its most fantastic splendour, ever equalled this prodigious monument raised by the genius of the Idumean prince. But, so far as Herod was concerned, the Temple was a monument not of piety but of policy and pride. At heart he cared nothing for religion. He systematically browbeat and insulted the priests. He changed the priesthood at will, and once proclaimed a youth of seventeen High Priest. Those who saw the national religion suddenly emerge into the magnificence of world-wide fame; who wandered through that maze of marble with astonished eyes; who heard the silver trumpets of the priests call to prayer, even as the muezzin calls to-day from the Mosque of Omar-sole and alien relic standing on the enormous site where Herod's Temple once rose vast and arrogant; those, in fact, for whom all these glories were prepared, felt them to be an insult and a sarcasm. They had no grateful thoughts of Herod. They knew him to be ostentatious, cruel, vengeful, superstitious, dissolute, and unscrupulous. He was stained with the blood of a hundred murders. He knew neither shame nor pity when his passions were aroused. His life was full of guilty intrigues, culminating ever and again in acts of turpitude which even the base abhorred. As if to show his irony, he had built close to the Temple itself theatres and amphitheatres, which to the Jews appeared monstrous sinks of all iniquity. When Christ spoke in frank depreciation of the Temple perhaps He remembered who had built it, and His words should scarcely have surprised or offended men who in their hearts had cursed the name of Herod many times, knowing full well what little cause they had to be proud of a Temple built by an insolent usurper who had trampled the priesthood in the mire, a tyrant who had stained himself with the blood of the just and good. The vices of Herod the Great were reproduced in Herod Antipas, but they were unaccompanied by any genius or strength of character. He performed with meanness and calculation the kind of crimes to which Herod the Great had lent the glamour of arrogance and daring. It may not be true that "vice loses half its stain" when allied with great manners, or with the defiant scorn of some "archangel ruined"; but it is at least true that the vices of the coward are doubly odious. Herod Antipas was in all things a coward. He preferred the stealth of the assassin to the boldness of the open foe. He bribed and cajoled where the founder of his race would have beaten his antagonist with many stripes. With a hatred of the Jews not less deadly than that of any of his race, he feared the people. Thus we find that his conduct to John, like his conduct to Christ at a later date, unites the two worst features of all that man counts most detestabletimidity and cruelty. Like all his race he was the plaything of his passions. Even among the most degenerate Romans of the days of Nero it would be hard to parallel the profligacies of these Idumeans. They had carried |