idolatry which Josephus would have us believe not only to be privileged, but (and that is the reason that we call him a miscreant) would have us believe to have been promoted by a collusion emanating from God. In fact, if once it had been said authentically, "Pay an outward homage to the Pagan Pantheon, but keep your hearts from going along with it," then in that countenance to idolatry as a sufferable thing, and in that commendation of it to the forbearance and indulgence of men, would have lurked every advantage that Polytheism could have desired for breaking down the total barriers of truth.

Josephus, therefore, will be given up to reprobation ; apologist he will find none; he will be abandoned as a profligate renegade, who, having sold his country out of fear and avarice, having sold himself, sold also his religion, and his religion not simply in the sense of selling his individual share in its hopes, but who sold his religion in the sense of giving it up to be polluted in its doctrine for the accommodation of its Pagan enemies.

VI.-But, even after all this is said, there are other aggravations of this Jew's crimes. One of these, though hurrying, we will pause to state. The founder of the Jewish faith foresaw a special seduction certain to beset its professors in every age. But how and through what avenues? Was it chiefly through the base and mercenary propensities of human nature that the peril lay? No; but through its gentleness, its goodness, its gracious spirit of courtesy. And in that direction it was that the lawgiver applied his warnings and his resistance. What more natural than that an idolatrous wife should honour the religious rites which she had seen honoured by her parents? What more essential to the dignity of marriage than that a husband should show a leaning to the opinions and the wishes of his wife? It was seen that this condition of things would lead to a collision of feelings not salutary for man. The condition was too full of strife, if you suppose the man strong-of temptation, if you suppose him weak. How, therefore, was the casuistry of such a situation practically met? By a prohibition of marriages between Jews and Pagans; after which, if a man

were to have pleaded his conjugal affection in palliation of idolatrous compliances, it would have been answered-"It is a palliation; but for an error committed in consequence of such a connexion. Your error was different; it com

menced from a higher point; it commenced in seeking for a connexion which had been prohibited as a snare." Thus it was that the "wisest heart" of Solomon was led astray. And thus it was in every idolatrous lapse of the Jews;they fell by these prohibited connexions. Through that channel it was, through the goodness and courtesy of the human heart, that the Jewish law looked for its dangers, and provided for them. But the treason of Josephus came through no such generous cause. It had its origin in servile fear, self-interest the most mercenary, cunning the most wily. Josephus argued with himself that the peculiar rancour of the Roman mind towards the Jews had taken its rise in religion. The bigotry of the Jews, for so it was construed by those who could not comprehend any possible ground of distinction in the Jewish God,-produced a reaction of Roman bigotry. Once, by a sudden movement of condescension, the Senate and People of Rome had been willing to make room for Jehovah as an assessor to their own Capitoline Jove. This being declined, it was supposed at first that the overture was too overwhelming to the conscious humility of Judea. The truth neither was comprehended, nor could be comprehended, that this miserable Palestine, a dark speck in the blazing orb of the Roman Empire, had declined the union upon any principle of superiority. But all things become known in time. This also became known; and the delirious passion of scorn retorting scorn was certainly never, before or since, exemplified on the same scale. Josephus, therefore, profoundly aware of the Roman feeling, sets himself, in this audacious falsehood, to propitiate the jealousy so wide awake, and the pride which had been so much irritated. "You have been misinformed," he tells the Romans; we have none of that gloomy unsociality which is imputed to us. It is not true that we despise alien gods. We do not worship, but we venerate, Jupiter. Our lawgiver commanded us to do so." Josephus hoped in this way to soothe the angry wounds of the Roman spirit. But it is certain that, even for

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a moment, he could not have succeeded. His countrymen of Jerusalem could not expose him; they had perished. But there were many myriads of his countrymen spread over the face of the world, who would contradict every word that any equivocating Jew might write. And this treachery of Josephus, therefore, to the very primal injunction of his native law must have been as useless in the event as it was base in the purpose.

VII. Now, therefore, we may ask, was there ever a more abject perfidy committed than this which we have exposed: this deliberate surrender, for a selfish object, of the supremacy and unity in the Jehovah of the Jews-this solemn renunciation of that law and its integrity, in maintenance of which seventy generations of Jews, including weak women and children, have endured the penalties of a dispersion and a humiliation more bitter by many degrees than death? Weighing the grounds of comparison, was a viler treason ever perpetrated? We take upon ourselves to say-No. And yet, even in treason there is sometimes a dignity. It is by possibility a bold act, a perilous act. Even in this case, though it will hardly be thought such, the treason of Josephus might have been dangerous: it was certainly committed under terror of the Roman sword, but it might have been avenged by the Jewish dagger. Had a written book in those days been as much a publication of a man's words as it is now, Josephus would not long have survived that sentence of his Antiquities. This danger gives a shadow of respectability to that act of Josephus. And therefore, when it is asked-Can a viler act be cited from History? we now answer- -yes: there is one even viler. And by whom committed? By Josephus. Listen, reader.

The overthrow of his country was made the subject of a Roman triumph-of a triumph in which his patrons, Vespasian and his two sons, figured as the centres of the public honour. Judea, with her banners trailing in the dust, was on this day to be carried captive. The Jew attended with an obsequious face, dressed in courtly smiles. The prisoners, who are to die by the executioner when the pomp shall have reached the summit of the hill, pass by in chains. What is

their crime? They have fought like brave men for that dear country which the base spectator has sold for a bribe. Josephus, the prosperous renegade, laughs as he sees them, and hugs himself on his cunning. Suddenly a tumult is seen in the advancing crowds-what is it that stirs them? It is the sword of the Maccabees: it is the image of Judas Maccabæus, the warrior Jew, and of his unconquerable brothers. Josephus grins with admiration of the jewelled trophies. Next-but what shout is that which tore the very heavens ? The abomination of desolation is passing by-the Law and the Prophets surmounted by Capitoline Jove vibrating his pagan thunderbolts. Judea, in the form of a lady, sitting beneath her palms,―Judea, with her head muffled in her robe, speechless, sightless,-is carried past. And what does the Jew? He sits, like a modern reporter for a newspaper, taking notes of the circumstantial features in this unparalleled scene, delighted as a child at a puppet-show, and finally weaves the whole into a picturesque narrative. The apologist must not think to evade the effect upon all honourable minds by supposing the case that the Jew's presence at this scene of triumph over his ruined country, and his subsequent record of its circumstances, might be a movement of frantic passion, bent on knowing the worst, bent on drinking up the cup of degradation to the very last drop. No, no; this escape is not open. The description itself remains to this hour in attestation of the astounding fact that this accursed Jew surveyed the closing scene in the great agonies of Jerusalem-not with any thought for its frenzy, for its anguish, for its despair, but absorbed in the luxury of its beauty, and with a single eye for its purple and gold. "Off, off, sir!"-would be the cry to such a wretch in any age of the world: to "spit upon his Jewish gaberdine" would be the wish of every honest man. Nor is there any thoughtful person who will allege that such another case exists. Traitors there have been many: and perhaps traitors who, trusting to the extinction of all their comrades, might have had courage to record their treasons. But certainly there is no other person known to history who did, and who proclaimed that he did, sit as a volunteer spectator of his buried country carried past in effigy, confounded with a vast

carnival of rejoicing mobs and armies, echoing their jubilant outcries, and pampering his eyes with ivory and gold, with spoils, and with captives, torn from the funeral pangs of his country. That case is unique, without a copy, without a precedent.

So much for Josephus. We have thought it necessary to destroy that man's character, on the principle of a king's ship in levelling bulkheads and partitions when clearing for action. Such a course is requisite for a perfect freedom of motion. Were Josephus trustworthy, he would sometimes prove an impediment in the way of our views and it is because he has been too carelessly received as trustworthy that more accurate glimpses have not been obtained of Jewish affairs in more instances than one. Let the reader understand also that, as regards the Essenes, Josephus is not trustworthy on a double reason: first, on account of his perfidy, as now sufficiently exposed, which too often interfered to make secondary perfidies requisite, by way of calling off the field of hunters from his own traces in the first; secondly, because his peculiar situation as a Pharisaic doctor of the law, combined with his character (which surely could not entirely have concealed itself in any stage of his public life), must have made it necessary for the Essenes to trust him very cautiously, and never to any extent that might have been irretrievable in the event of his turning informer. Essenes, at all events, had some secret to guard; in any case, therefore, they were responsible for the lives of all their members, so far as they could be affected by confidences reposed; and, if that secret happened to be Christianity, then were they trebly bound to care and jealousy, for that secret involved not only many lives, but a mighty interest of human nature, so that a single instance of carelessness might be the most awful of crimes. Hence we understand at once why it is that Josephus never advanced beyond the lowest rank in the Secret Society of the Essenes. His worldly character, his duplicity, his weakness, were easily discerned by the eagle-eyed fathers of Christianity. Consequently, he must be viewed as under a perpetual surveillance from what may be called the police of History: liable to suspicion as one

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