does not, kick him to Hades. But, meantime, give the man a trial."

Such, there can be little doubt, was the opinion of Cæsar about this man. But now it remains to give our own, with the reasons on which it rests.

I.—First of all-which we bring merely as a proof of his habitual mendacity-in one of those tongue-doughty orations which he represents himself as having addressed to the men of Jerusalem, they standing on the walls patiently, with paving-stones in their hands, to hear a renegade abuse them by the hour (such is his lying legend), Josephus roundly asserts that Abraham, the patriarch of their nation, had an army of three hundred and sixty thousand troops, that is, somewhere about seventy-five legions: an establishment beyond what the first Cæsars had found requisite for mastering the Mediterranean Sea with all the nations that belted it —that is, a ring-fence of five thousand miles by seven hundred on an average. Now, this is in the style of the Baron Munchausen. But it is worthy of a special notice for two illustrations which it offers of this renegade's propensities. One is the abject homage with which he courted the Roman notice. Of this lie, as of all his lies, the primary purpose is to fix the gaze and to court the admiration of the Romans. Judea, Jerusalem-these were objects never in his thoughts; it was Rome, the haven of his apostasy, on which his anxieties settled. Now, it is a judgment upon the man who carried these purposes in his heart-it is a judicial retribution-that precisely this very lie, shaped and pointed to conciliate the Roman taste for martial splendour, was probably the very ground of that disgust which seems to have alienated Tacitus from his works. Apparently Josephus should have been the foremost authority with this historian for Jewish affairs. But enough remains to show that he was not; and it is clear that the confidence of so sceptical a writer must have been shaken from the very first by so extravagant a tale. Abraham, a mere stranger and colonist in Syria, whose descendants in the third generation mustered only seventy persons in emigrating to Egypt, is here placed at the head of a force greater than great empires had commanded or had needed. And from

what resources raised? From a little section of Syria, which (supposing it even the personal domain of Abraham) could not be equal to Wales. And for what objects? To face what enemies? A handful of robbers that might congregate in the desert. Such insufferable fairy tales must have vitiated the credit even of his rational statements; and it is thus pleasant to see the apostate missing one reward which he courted, purely through his own eagerness to buy it at the price of truth. But a second feature which this story betrays in the mind of Josephus is the thorough defect of Hebrew sublimity and scriptural simplicity which marks his entire writing. How much more impressive is the picture of Abraham, as the father of the faithful, the selected servant and feudatory of God, sitting in the wilderness, majestically reposing at the door of his tent, surrounded by a little camp of servants and kinsmen, a few score of camels and a few herds of cattle, than in the melodramatic attitude of a general, belted and plumed, with a glittering staff of officers at his orders? But the mind of Josephus, always irreligious, was now violently warped into a poor imitation of Roman models. He absolutely talks of "liberty" and "glory" as the moving impulses of Hebrew saints, and does his best to translate the Maccabees, and many an elder soldier of the Jewish faith, into poor theatrical mimics of Spartans and Thebans. This depravity of taste, and abjuration of his national characteristics, must not be overlooked in estimating the value whether of his opinions or his statements. We have evidence superabundant to these two features in the character of Josephus: that he would distort everything in order to meet the Roman taste, and that he had originally no sympathy whatsoever with the peculiar grandeur of his own country.

II. It is a remarkable fact that Josephus never speaks of Jerusalem and those who conducted its resistance but in words of abhorrence, and of loathing that amounts to frenzy. Now in what point did they differ from himself? Change the name Judea to Galilee, and the name Jerusalem to Jotapata, and their case was his; and the single difference was that the men whom he reviles as often as he mentions them

had persevered to martyrdom, whilst he-he only had snatched at life under any condition of ignominy. But precisely in that difference lay the ground of his hatred. He could not forgive those whose glorious resistance (glorious, were it even in a mistaken cause) emblazoned and threw into relief his own apostasy. This we cannot dwell on ; but we revert to the question-What had the people of Jerusalem done which Josephus had not attempted to do?

III.- Whiston, another Caliban worshipping another Trinculo, finds out a divinity in Josephus, because, on being brought prisoner to Vespasian, he pretended to have seen in a dream that the Roman general would be raised to the purple. Now,

1. When we see Cyrus lurking in the prophecies of Isaiah, and Alexander in those of Daniel, we apprehend a reasonableness in thus causing the spirit of prophecy to settle upon those who were destined to move in the great cardinal revolutions of this earth. But why, amongst all the Cæsars, must Vespasian, in particular, be the subject of a prophecy, and a prophecy the most thrilling, from the mysterious circumstances which surrounded it, and from the silence with which it stole into the mouths of all nations? The reigns of all the three Flavian Cæsars,-Vespasian, with his sons Titus and Domitian,- —were memorable for nothing: with the sole exception of the great revolution in Judea, none of them were marked by any great event; and all the three reigns combined filled no important space of time.

2. If Vespasian, for any incomprehensible reason, were thought worthy of being heralded by a prophecy, what logic was there in connecting him with Syria? That which raised him to the purple, that which suggested him to men's minds, was his military eminence, and this was obtained in Britain.

3. If the mere local situations from which any uninteresting emperor happened to step on to the throne merited this special glorification from prophecy, why was not many another region, town, or village, illustrated in the same way? That Thracian hamlet from which the Emperor Maximin arose had been pointed out to notice before the event as a place likely to be distinguished by some great event.

And yet, because this prediction had merely a personal reference, and no relation at all to any great human interest, it was treated with little respect, and never crept into a general circulation. So of this prophecy with respect to one who should rise out of the East, and should ultimately stretch his sceptre over the whole world (rerum potiretur): if Josephus is allowed to ruin it by his sycophancy, instantly, from the rank of a Hebrew prophecy-a vision seen by "the man whose eyes God had opened "-it sinks to the level of a vagrant gipsy's gossip. What! shall Rome combine with Jerusalem for we find this same mysterious prediction almost verbally the same in Suetonius and in Tacitus, no less than in the Jewish prophets. Shall it stretch not only from the east to the west in point of space, but through the best part of a thousand years in point of time, all for the sake of preparing one day's adulatory nuzzur, by which a trembling Jew may make his propitiation to an intriguing lieutenant of Cæsar? And how came it that Whiston (who, to do him justice, was too pious to have abetted an infidel trick, had his silliness suffered him to have seen through it) failed to perceive this consequence? If the prophecy before us belong to Vespasian, then does it not belong to Christ. And in that case the worst error of the Herodian Jews, who made the Messiah prophecies terminate in Herod, is ratified by Christians; for between Herod and Vespasian the difference is none at all, as regards any interest of religion. Can human patience endure the spectacle of a religious man, for perfect folly, combining in their very worst efforts with those whom it was the object of his life to oppose?

4. But, finally, once for all, to cut sharp off by the roots this corruption of a sublime prophecy, and to re-enthrone it in its ancient sanctity, it was not in the "Orient" (which both technically meant Syria in that particular age, and is acknowledged to mean it here by all parties) that Vespasian obtained the purple. The oracle, if it is to be translated from a Christian to a Pagan oracle, ought at least to speak the truth. Now, it happens not to have been Syria in which Vespasian was saluted Emperor by the legions, but Alexandria a city which in that age was in no sense either in Syria or in Egypt. So that the great prophecy, if it is once

suffered to be desecrated by Josephus, fails even of a literal fulfilment.

IV.—Meantime, all this is a matter of personal falsehood in a case of trying personal interest. Even under such a temptation, it is true that a man of generosity, to say nothing of principle, would not have been capable of founding his own defence upon the defamation of his nobler compatriots. But in fact it is ever thus: he who has sunk deepest in treason is generally possessed by a double measure of rancour against the loyal and the faithful. What follows,

however, has respect, not to truth personal, truth of fact, truth momentary, but to truth absolute, truth doctrinal, truth eternal. Let us preface what we are going to say by directing the reader's attention to this fact: how easy it is to observe any positive feature in a man's writings or conversation, how rare to observe the negative features. The presence of this or that characteristic is noticed in an hour, the absence shall often escape notice for years. That a friend, for instance, talks habitually on this or that literature, we know as familiarly as our own constitutional tastes; that he does not talk of any given literature (the Greek, suppose) may fail to strike us through a whole life, until somebody happens to point our attention in that direction, and then perhaps we notice it in every hour of our intercourse. This only can excuse the various editors, commentators, and translators of Josephus, for having overlooked one capital omission in this author: it is this-Never in one instance does Josephus allude to the great prophetic doctrine of a Messiah. To suppose him ignorant of this doctrine is impossible; it was so mixed up with the typical part of the Jewish religion, so involved in the ceremonies of Judaism, even waiving all the Jewish writers, that no Jew whatever, much less a master in Israel, a Pharisee, a doctor of the law, a priest, all which Josephus proclaims himself, could fail to know of such a doctrine, even if he failed to understand it, or failed to appreciate its importance.

Why, then, has Josephus suppressed it? For this reason: the doctrine offers a dilemma-a choice between two interpretations, one being purely spiritual, one purely political.