execution of the vengeance a pretext for satisfying their own savageness, greed, and envy:  the men who sanctioned with the name of Christ a barbaric and blundering copy of pagan fatalism in taking the words “His blood be upon us and on our children” as a divinely appointed verbal warrant for wreaking cruelty from generation to generation on the people from whose sacred writings Christ drew His teaching.  Strange retrogression in the professors of an expanded religion, boasting an illumination beyond the spiritual doctrine of Hebrew prophets!  For Hebrew prophets proclaimed a God who demanded mercy rather than sacrifices.  The Christians also believed that God delighted not in the blood of rams and of bulls, but they apparently conceived Him as requiring for His satisfaction the sighs and groans, the blood and roasted flesh of men whose forefathers had misunderstood the metaphorical character of prophecies which spoke of spiritual pre-eminence under the figure of a material kingdom.  Was this the method by which Christ desired His title to the Messiahship to be commended to the hearts and understandings of the nation in which He was born?  Many of His sayings bear the stamp of that patriotism which places fellow-countrymen in the inner circle of affection and duty.  And did the words “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do,” refer only to the centurion and his band, a tacit exception being made of every Hebrew there present from the mercy of the Father and the compassion of the Son?—­nay, more, of every Hebrew yet to come who remained unconverted after hearing of His claim to the Messiahship, not from His own lips or those of His native apostles, but from the lips of alien men whom cross, creed, and baptism had left cruel, rapacious, and debauched?  It is more reverent to Christ to believe that He must have approved the Jewish martyrs who deliberately chose to be burned or massacred rather than be guilty of a blaspheming lie, more than He approved the rabble of crusaders who robbed and murdered them in His name.  But these remonstrances seem to have no direct application to personages who take up the attitude of philosophic thinkers and discriminating critics, professedly accepting Christianity from a rational point of view as a vehicle of the highest religious and moral truth, and condemning the Jews on the ground that they are obstinate adherents of an outworn creed, maintain themselves in moral alienation from the peoples with whom they share citizenship, and are destitute of real interest in the welfare of the community and state with which they are thus identified.  These anti-Judaic advocates usually belong to a party which has felt itself glorified in winning for Jews, as well as Dissenters and Catholics, the full privileges of citizenship, laying open to them every path to distinction.  At one time the voice of this party urged that differences of creed were made dangerous only by the denial of citizenship—­that you must make a man a citizen before he could feel