VI. demnation in the simple fact of adhering to a СНАР Galilean prophet. The council dispersed without coming to any decision. taken in adultery. On the next day, for the former transactions had Woman taken place in the earlier part of the week, the last, the most crowded and solemn day of the festival, a more insidious attempt is made, whether from a premeditated or fortuitous circumstance, to undermine the growing popularity of Jesus; an attempt to make him assume a judicial authority in the case of a woman taken in the act of adultery. Such an act would probably have been resisted by the whole Sanhedrin as an invasion of their province; and as it appeared that he must either acquit or condemn the criminal, in either case he would give an advantage to his adversaries. If he inclined to severity, they might be able, notwithstanding the general benevolence of his character, to contrast their own leniency in the administration of the law (this was the characteristic of the Pharisaic party, which distinguished them from the Sadducees, and of this the Rabbinical writings furnish many curious illustrations), with the rigour of the new teacher, and thus to conciliate the naturally compassionate feelings of the people, which would have been shocked by the unusual spectacle of a woman suffering death, or even condemned to capital punishment, for such an offence.* If, on the other Grotius has a different view:Ut eum accusarent aut apud Romanos imminutæ majestatis, aut apud populum imminutæ libertatis. That they might accuse him to the Romans of encroaching on their ence. VI. CHAP. hand, he acquitted her, he abrogated the express letter of the Mosaic statute; and the multitude might be inflamed by this new evidence of that which the ruling party had constantly endeavoured to instil into their minds, the hostility of Jesus to the law of their forefathers, and his secret design of abolishing the whole long-reverenced and heaven-enacted code. Nothing can equal, if the expression may be ventured, the address of Jesus, in extricating himself from this difficulty; his turning the current of popular odium, or even contempt, upon his assailants; the manner in which, by summoning them to execute the law, he extorts a tacit confession of their own loose morals, -"He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her" (this being the office of the chief accuser); and finally shows mercy to the accused, without in the least invalidating the decision of the law against the crime, yet not without the most gentle and effective moral admonition. Jesus teaches in After this discomfiture of his opponents, Jesus the Temple. appears to have been permitted to pursue his course of teaching undisturbed, until new circumstances occurred to inflame the resentment of his enemies. He had taken his station in a part of the Temple court called the Treasury. His language became more mysterious, yet at the same time more authoritative more full of those allusions to his character as the Messiah, to his divine descent, and at length to his pre-existence. The former of these were in some degree familiar to the popular conception; the latter, though it en tered into the higher notion of the Messiah, which was prevalent among those who entertained the loftiest views of his character, nevertheless, from the manner in which it was expressed, jarred with the harshest discord upon the popular ear. They listened with patience to Jesus while he proclaimed himself the light of the world: though they questioned his right to assume the title of "Son of the Heavenly Father" without further witness than he had already produced, they yet permitted him to proceed in his discourse: they did not interrupt him when he still further alluded, in dark and ambiguous terms, to his own fate: when he declared that God was with him, and that his doctrines were pleasing to the Almighty Father, a still more favourable impression was made, and many openly espoused his belief; but when he touched on their rights and privileges as descendants of Abraham, the subject on which above all they were most jealous and sensitive, the collision became inevitable. He spoke of their freedom, the moral freedom from the slavery of their own passions, to which they were to be exalted by the revelation of the truth; but freedom was a word which to them only bore another sense. They broke in at once with indignant denial that the race of Abraham, however the Roman troops were guarding their Temple, had ever forfeited their national independence.* He spoke as if the legitimacy of their descent from Abraham depended not on their hereditary genealogy, but on the moral evidence of their similarity in virtue to * John, viii. 33. CHAP. VI. .VI. CHAP. their great forefather. The good, the pious, the gentle Abraham was not the father of those who were meditating the murder of an innocent man. If their fierce and sanguinary dispositions disqualified them from being the children of Abraham, how much more from being, as they boasted, the adopted children of God; the spirit of evil, in whose darkest and most bloody temper they were ready to act, was rather the parent of men with dispositions so diabolic.* At this their wrath bursts forth in more unrestrained vehemence; the worst and most bitter appellations by which a Jew could express his hatred, were heaped on Jesus; he is called a Samaritan, and declared to be under dæmoniac possession. But when Jesus proceeded to assert his title to the Messiahship, by proclaiming that Abraham had received some intimation of the future great religious revolution to be effected by him; when he who was "not fifty years old " (that is, not arrived at that period when the Jews, who assumed the public offices at thirty, were released from them on account of their age), declared that he had existed before Abraham; when he thus placed himself not merely on an equality with, but asserted his immeasurable superiority to, the great father of their race; when he uttered the awful and significant words which identified him, as it were, with the great self-existent Deity, "Before Abraham was, I am," they immediately rushed forward to crush without trial, without further hearing, him * John, viii. 44.. VI. whom they considered the self-convicted blasphemer. CHAP. As there was always some work of building or repair going on within the Temple, which was not considered to be finished till many years after, these instruments for the fulfilment of the legal punishment were immediately at hand; and Jesus only escaped from being stoned on the spot by passing, during the wild and frantic tumult, through the midst of his assailants, and withdrawing from the court of the Temple. * the blind But even in this exigency he pauses at no great Healing distance to perform an act of mercy. There was man. a man, notoriously blind from his birth, who seems to have taken his accustomed station in some way I hesitate at the arrangement of no passage in the whole narrative more than this history of the blind man. Many harmonists have placed it during the visit of Jesus to Jerusalem, at the Feast of Dedication. The connection in the original, however, seems more natural, as a continuation of the preceding incident; yet at first sight it seems extremely improbable that Jesus should have time during his hurried escape to work this miracle; and still more that he should again encounter his enraged adversaries without dangerous or fatal consequences. We may however suppose that this incident took place without the Temple, probably in the street leading down from the Temple to the Valley of Kidron, and to Bethany, where Jesus spent the night. The attempt to stone him was an outburst of popular tumult it is clear that he had been guilty of no offence, legally capital, or it would : have been urged against him at his |