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PONTIUS PILATE, THE GOVERNOR.

Kingsley pictures his Hereward, "the last of the English," standing staring and dreaming over renown to come, a true pattern of the half-savage hero of those rough times, capable of all virtues save humility, and capable, too, of all vices except cowardice.

PONTIUS PILATE, THE GOVERNOR.

PONTIU

St. MATTHEW xxvii.; ST. JOHN Xviii., xix.

ONTIUS PILATE, the governor, is in some sort a representative man as ruler who rules et qui ne gouverne pas. The late Lord Brougham, in his inaugural address to the Social Science Congress in 1862, illustrated by several historical examples the proposition he strenuously enforced, that the gravest offence which rulers can commit, is the yielding of their own opinion to the pressure of the multitude. After relating how a prince, the most accomplished warrior and statesman of his time, Bedford, tarnished his great reputation by yielding to public clamour, and sacrificing the Maid of Orleans to its fury, well aware that she had committed no offence, and was a prisoner of war, after rendering services beyond all price to her sovereign, the duke's ally; the aged orator went on to say, "But a yet more memorable instance of this heinous crime, vainly sought to be disguised under the name of weakness, is the great Sacrifice, suffered, nay designed by Providence, acting as ever through second causes, the giving up our Saviour by a governor who thrice over declared his belief in the innocence, nay in the Divine mission of Jesus, but unable to resist the clamour of the mob, when referring to Cæsar, and using his name as well as the high priest'sa Church and King mob; and when we hear sceptics, or rather unbelievers, commending Pilate for his fairness in declaring the mob's victim guiltless, and his courage in standing up against the priests, their leaders, it is exactly that which works his condemnation, and of which he himself distinctly expressed

AN EXECRATED NAME.

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his shame, ascribing it to his blameable weakness, as all do who have acted this atrocious part, when the danger is over which they have escaped by their baseness." Lord Brougham adds, that Pilate in truth confessed himself guilty of murder, and dismisses him with a glance at the "universal and merited contempt" into which he fell, at the removal of him from his government, and at his alleged death by his own hand.

A branded name, for all time, is that of Pontius Pilate, the governor.

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Pursue thy life, and live aye with thy name!"

is the sort of wish that seems to have attached to him, and blighted his career, and blasted his credit. To be nameless in worthy deeds, says Sir Thomas Browne in his Urn Burial, exceeds an infamous history; and after citing the Canaanitish woman as living more happily without a name than Herodias with one, who, he asks, "had not rather have been the good thief, than Pilate ?" When Simeon Stylites, in the Laureate's poem, would avow with unsurpassable emphasis the flagrant wickedness of his nature, he couples Pilate with Judas as saintly in comparison :

"From my high nest of penance I proclaim
That Pontius and Iscariot by my side
Showed like fair seraphs."

Commenting on Spenser's consignment of Pilate to the "loathly
lakes" of Tartarus, Leigh Hunt indulges in a fancy of the
astonishment of this Roman Governor of Jerusalem, could
he have foreseen the destinies of his name. "He doubtless
thought, that if another age spoke of him at all, it would treat
him as a good-natured man who had to rule over a barbarous
people, and make a compromise between his better judgment
and their laws and prejudices." Whereas, in point of fact,
no name, except Iscariot's, has received more execration from
posterity. "Ce Ponce-Pilate
ne se doutait guère
de l'immortalité qu'il se préparait en faisant mettre en croix
un juif obscur," says M. Sylvestre de Sacy, in his review of

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PONTIUS PILATE, THE GOVERNOR.

*

Salvador's Domination Romaine en Judée. It is markworthy that in the old mystery plays of the Passion, the actor who took Pilate's part made a point of speaking in a hoarse, gruff voice, calculated to set every one against him as a matter of principle and a matter of course. Hence the allusion in Chaucer to the rude rough miller who swore by blood and bones, and who

in Pilates voys began to crye."

As procurator, Pilate must be got by instant pressure and urgent importunity to ratify the condemnation of the Sanhedrim, which, since the occupation of the Romans, as historical critics explain, was no longer sufficient ;-not that the procurator was invested, like the Imperial legate, with the disposal of life and death; but Jesus was not a Roman citizen, and it only required the authorization of the governor for the sentence pronounced against Him to be carried out. "As always happens, when a political people subjects a race in which the civil and the religious laws are blended [or confounded], the Romans had been brought to give the Jewish law a sort of official support;" and thus, although neutral in religion, the Romans very often sanctioned penalties inflicted for “religious ' faults. As to Pontius (presumably surnamed Pilate from the pilum, or javelin of honour with which he or one of his ancestors had been decorated), indifferent to the internal quarrels of the Jews, he only saw,-an apologetic expositor contends,—in all these movements of sectaries, the results of

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* On the other hand, at the Ammergau Mystery, the character of Pilate, as described by a competent spectator, is in dignity and gravity second only to that of Christ; and the true historical tact of nature has enabled the peasant players to catch the grandeur of the Roman magistrate. Every movement is intended to produce the impression of the superiority of the Roman justice and the Roman manners to the savage, quibbling, vulgar clamours of the Jewish priests and people. "His noble figure, as he appears on the balcony of his house, above the mob-his gentle address the formal reading of the sentence-the solemn breaking asunder of the staff, to show that the sentence has been delivered—are bold delineations of the better side of the judge and of the law, under which the catastrophe of the sacred history was accomplished.”—Macmillan's Magazine, ii. 474.

WILLING TO RELEASE.

353

intemperate imaginations and disordered brains: in general, he did not like the Jews, and the Jews detested him: they thought him hard, scornful, passionate, and, as we learn from Philo, accused him of improbable crimes. Eventually he became involved in sanguinary repression of revolts (like that of the Galileans mentioned in the Gospel), which tended to, and ended in, his recall. The experience of many conflicts had rendered him what M. Renan calls " "very prudent in his relations with this intractable people." The procurator is accordingly described as seeing himself with extreme displeasure led to play a cruel part in the case of Him of Nazareth, for the sake of a law he hated; aware that religious fanaticism, when it has obtained the sanction of civil government for some act of violence, is afterwards the first to throw responsibility on the government, which it all but charges with being the author of the act. "Pilate then would fain have saved Jesus." Certain it is that he was prepossessed in His favour. He questioned Him not unkindly, and with an obvious desire of finding an excuse for sending Him away exculpated absolutely and for good. In George Herbert's poem of The Sacrifice, He whose wailing note rings at the end of every stanza "Was ever grief like Mine ?" is made to say,—

“Pilate, a stranger, holdeth off; but they,

Mine own dear people, cry, Away, away!"

And the voices of these prevailed. Pontius was confused and disquieted by the accusing and accepted title of King; yet he held out wistfully for a while against the popular tumult; he proposed a release, but the tumult increased; he ordered the Accused to be scourged, the usual preliminary to crucifixion, in the possible hope (as some surmise) that the preliminary might here suffice; but all this time the frenzy of riot was gathering force; to gain time he tried, but at least nothing else was gained; he began to fear for his office; and so at last he gave way, yielding a compliance which "was to deliver his name to the scorn of history," and symbolically washing his hands in the presence of the multitude.

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PILATE WASHING HIS HANDS.

Twice at least in Shakspeare the exculpatory act of washing of hands is referred to; as where one of the murderers of Clarence exclaims, ex post facto,—

"A bloody deed, and desperately despatch'd!

How fain, like Pilate, would I wash my hands

Of this most grievous guilty murder done!"

And the unhappy, offcast, discrowned King Richard II. is made to tell the revolted nobles,

"Though some of you, with Pilate, wash your hands,

Showing an outward pity; yet you Pilates

Have here deliver'd me to my sour cross,
And water cannot wash away your sin."

Believing Jesus to be innocent, for the Roman governor to give Him up to death was to take a large share of the criminality upon himself; and yet he thought, or—as the washing of hands may indicate, he tried to think,* that when he got the Jews to take that criminality upon them he had relieved himself, mainly, if not wholly, of the irksome responsibility. He tries to regard himself, an impartial expositor has said, as one coerced by others; and when these others are quite willing to take on themselves the entire weight of the wrong-doing, he imagines that this will go a great length in clearing him. And so he washes his hands. In which eternalized act he is seen by Spenser's Guyon in another world:

"But both his handes most filthy feculent,
And faynd to wash themselves incessantly,
Yet nothing cleaner were for such intent,

* In reference to the directors of a certain bubble company hastening as soon as ever the bubble burst, to "wash their hands of the whole affair," a plain-spoken reviewer observed, that to him this same washing of hands had always seemed so difficult an operation, that he often wondered how people came to take up the phrase, especially when we remember its associations. "Pontius Pilate, so far as we know, was the original proprietor of the patent; and his success was hardly such as to encourage imitators." It is smartly put, that whenever we hear of a person washing his hands of anything, the only points on which we may feel assured are-first, that they are unusually dirty; and next, that he is not likely to mend the matter by the process.

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