public for all the world to know their import. If they desire to know what these teachings were Jerusalem can supply a thousand witnesses. The boldness and justice of this reply fills the priests with angry amazement. They see the prisoner, for whose arrest they had so long plotted, slipping through their hands, and in their anger they permit Him to be struck upon the mouth by one of their own officers. They are the more angry because they already stand committed to Pontius Pilate. When Pilate placed at their disposal the Roman guard for the arrest of Christ, it was with the distinct understanding that a dangerous revolutionary was to be arrested, and Pilate is not the kind of man to accept a ridiculous position without resentment. Already they foresee those difficulties with Pilate which afterwards occurred. Pilate will certainly demand some conclusive evidence of crime before he will pronounce a sentence of death which they are incompetent to execute. But what proof of guilt have they to offer? They seek eagerly for false witnesses, who may say something to incriminate their prisoner; but to their dismay the testimony of each of these men proves worthless. The worst that the most abandoned of these bribed ruffians can say is that Jesus had once threatened the destruction of the Temple. At last, in despair, Caiaphas appeals to the prisoner Himself. He adjures Him by the living God to declare whether He is in truth the Christ, the Son of God. And from those smitten lips the reply rings clear and loud, "Thou hast said,” which was the strongest form of affirmation. With what seems to them insensate folly, with what seems to us deliberate acquiescence in a fate which He felt foreordained, Christ condemns Himself. Once more we will see how truly the initiative of events is from first to last in His own hands; for had Jesus not spoken He must have been acquitted. The question is at once put to the Sanhedrim, "What

think ye?" The answer is unanimous, "He is guilty of death." And then, as if to show how little of a court of justice this tribunal was, the malice of its members breaks all bounds, and the hall of Caiaphas becomes a scene of insult, violence, and degraded rage. "Then did they spit in His face, and buffetted Him; and others smote Him with the palms of their hands, saying, Prophesy, thou Christ, who is he that smote Thee?"

Nothing in the history of Jesus, nothing perhaps in the history of the world, is so appalling as this scene in the house of Caiaphas. Jesus was after all the true Son of the Jewish Church, the Divine flower of her life, the perfect fruit of her teaching, and yet it was this very Church which slew Him. In the little Jewish synagogue at Nazareth He had learned all that He knew of the Hebrew Scriptures. His first boyish excursion had been to the Temple at Jerusalem, where the doctors of the law had treated Him as a prodigy. His teachings were full of quotations from the Hebrew Scriptures, and He often declared that He came not to destroy the law and the prophets, but to fulfil them. His career had been characterised by the utmost benevolence. In this disastrous hour, when many false witnesses came-hirelings and informers of the Sanhedrim, the paid creatures of Hanan and Caiaphas-ready to swear anything for money, it was impossible to prove anything to his discredit. His life had been lived in the honest daylight, and there was nothing hidden in it of which he was afraid, no record that could leap to light to shame Him. The Court of Caiaphas was the supreme tribunal of the national religion, and yet a glance is sufficient to assure us that it is not a court of justice, but a conclave of conspirators. Hatred, envy, and cruelty cast baleful shadows on every brow. It is a league of wolves against the Lamb. It is a hideous assembly, paralleled by that