of prayer which he first and last, among all teachers, left as a guiding legacy to infinite generations; 2, the model of purity which he raised aloft in the little infant suddenly made the centre of his moral system as the normal form of innocence and simplicity of heart; 3, the Sermon on the Mount, which, by one sudden illumination, opened a new world in man's secret heart; 4, the translation of moral tests from the old and gross one of palpable acts to thoughts, and the most aerial of purposes, as laid down in the passage, "He that looketh upon a woman," &c. These four revelations of the Christian Founder being once reported to the pretended monastic body, must have caught the affections, and have prompted an insurmountable craving for personal intercourse with such a "" Prophet; "that is, in the Hebrew sense of Prophet, such a revealer out of darkness. In Affghanistan, amongst blind, prejudiced, sometimes fanatical, Mahometans, these extraordinary moral revelations had power deeply to shake and move; could they have had less in Judea? But, finally, suppose they had, and that an ascetic brotherhood. refused all intercourse with a teacher not ascetic, so much the more zealously would they have courted such intercourse with a teacher memorably and in an ultimate degree ascetic. Such a teacher was John the Baptist. Here, then, stands the case: in an age which Josephus would have us believe to have been the flourishing age of the Essenes, there arise two great revolutionary powers, who are also great teachers and legislators in the world of ethics. The

first, by a short space of time, was the Baptist;* the second was Christ. The one was uniquely ascetic, declining not only the luxuries, but the slenderest physical appliances against the wrath of the elements, or the changes of the seasons. The other described himself as one who came eating and drinking, in conformity to the common usages of men. With neither of these great authorities is there any record of the Essenes having had the most trivial intercourse. Is that reconcilable with their alleged existence on a large scale in an age of deep agitation and fervent inquiry?

*That John the Baptist was a moral teacher, as well as a herald of coming changes, may be inferred from the fact (noticed by the Evangelists), that the military body applied to him for moral instruction, which appeal must have grown out of the general invitation to do so involved in the ordinary course of his ministrations, and in the terms of his public preaching. In what sense he was to be held the harbinger of Christ, over and above his avowed mission for announcing the fast approaching advent of the Messiah, I have elsewhere suggested, in a short comment on the word Taroia; which word, as I contend, cannot properly be translated repentance; for it would have been pure cant to suppose that age, or any age, as more under a summons to repentance than any other assignable. I understand by Tarot

a revolution of thought a great intellectual change-in the accepting a new centre for all moral truth from Christ; which centre it was that subsequently caused all the offence of Christianity to the Roman people

JUDAS ISCARIOT.

EVERYTHING connected with our ordinary conceptions of this man, of his real purposes, and of his scriptural doom, apparently is erroneous. Not one thing, but all things, must ra..I as false which traditionally we accept about him. That neither any motive of his, nor any ruling impulse, was tainted with the vulgar treachery imputed to him, appears probable from the strength of his remorse. And this view of his case comes recommended by so much of internal plausibility, that in Germany it has long since shaped itself into the following distinct hypothesis: -Judas Iscariot, it is alleged, participated in the common delusion of the apostles as to that earthly kingdom which, under the sanction and auspices of Christ, they supposed to be waiting and ripening for the Jewish people. So far there was nothing in Judas to warrant any special wonder or any separate blame. If he erred, so did the other apostles. But in one point Judas went further than his brethren — viz., in speculating upon the reasons of Christ for delaying the inauguration of this kingdom. All things were apparently ripe for it; all things pointed to it; the expectation and languishing desires of many Hebrew saints - viz., the warning from signs; the prophetic

alarms propagated by heralds like the Baptist; the mysterious interchange of kindling signals rising suddenly out of darkness as secret words between distant parties-secret question, or secret answer; the fermentation of revolutionary doctrines all over Judea; the passionate impatience of the Roman yoke; the continual openings of new convulsions at the great centre of Rome; the insurrectionary temper of Jewish society, as indicated by the continual rise of robber leaders, that drew off multitudes into the neighboring deserts; and, universally, the unsettled mind of the Jewish nation, their deep unrest, and the anarchy of their expectations. These explosive materials had long been accumulated; they needed only a kindling spark. Heavenly citations to war, divine summonses to resist ance, had long been read in the insults and aggressions of paganism; there wanted only a leader. And such a leader, if he would but consent to assume that office, stood ready in the founder of Christianity. The supreme qualifications for leadership, manifested and emblazoned in the person of Jesus Christ, were evident to all parties in the Jewish community, and not merely to the religious body of his own immediate followers. These qualifications were published and expounded to the world in the facility with which everywhere he drew crowds about himself, in the extraordinary depth

*Drew crowds about himself: As connected with these crowds, I have elsewhere noticed, many years ago, the secret reason which probably governed our Saviour in cultivating the character and functions of a hakim, or physician. Throughout the whole world of civilization at that era (oizovμern), whatever might be otherwise the varieties of the government,

of impression which attended his teaching, and in the fear as well as hatred which possessed the Jewish rulers against him. Indeed, so great was this fear, so great was this hatred, that had it not been for the predominance of the Roman element in the government of Judea, it is pretty certain that Christ would have been crushed in an earlier stage of his career.

Believing, therefore, as Judas did, and perhaps had reason to do, that Christ contemplated the establishment of a temporal kingdom - the restoration, in fact, of David's throne; believing also that all the conditions towards the realization of such a scheme met and centred in the person of Christ, what was it that, upon any solution intelligible to Judas, neutralized so grand

there was amongst the ruling authorities a great jealousy of mobs and popular gatherings. To a grand revolutionary teacher, no obstacle so fatal as this initial prejudice could have offered itself. Already, in the first place, a new and mysterious body of truth, having vast and illimitable relations to human duties and prospects, presented a field of indefinite alarm. That this truth should, in the second place, publish itself, not through books and written discourses, but orally, by word of mouth, and by personal communication between vast mobs and the divine teacheralready that, as furnishing a handle of influence to a mob leader, justified a preliminary alarm. But then, thirdly, as furnishing a plea for bringing crowds together, such a mode of teaching must have crowned the suspicious presumptions against itself. One peril there was at any rate to begin with- - the peril of a mob that was certain. And, secondly, there was the doctrine taught which doctrine was mysterious; and in that uncertainty lay another peril. Thirdly, beside the opening to a mob interest, there was a mob connection actually formed. So that, equally through what was fixed and what was doubtful, there arose that "fear of change" which "perplexes monarchs. "

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