In this reply not only the poor and uneducated, but many likewise of the rich and educated, recognize “majesty and sanctity:”  yet I find it hard to think that my strong-minded friend will defend the justness, wisdom and honesty of it.  To imagine that because a coin bears Caesar’s head, therefore it is Caesar’s property, and that he may demand to have as many of such coins as he chooses paid over to him, is puerile, and notoriously false.  The circulation of foreign coin of every kind was as common in the Mediterranean then as now; and everybody knew that the coin was the property of the holder, not of him whose head it bore.  Thus the reply of Jesus, which pretended to be a moral decision, was unsound and absurd:  yet it is uttered in a tone of dictatorial wisdom, and ushered in by a grave rebuke, “Why tempt ye me, hypocrites?” He is generally understood to mean, “Why do you try to implicate me in a political charge?” and it is supposed that he prudently evaded the question.  I have indeed heard this interpretation from high Trinitarians; which indicates to me how dead is their moral sense in everything which concerns the conduct of Jesus.  No reason appears why he should not have replied, that Moses forbade Israel voluntarily to place himself under a foreign king, but did not inculcate fanatical and useless rebellion against overwhelming power.  But such a reply, which would have satisfied a more commonplace mind, has in it nothing brilliant and striking.  I cannot but think that Jesus shows a vain conceit in the cleverness of his answer:  I do not think it so likely to have been a conscious evasion.  But neither does his rebuke of the questioners at all commend itself to me.  How can any man assume to be an authoritative teacher, and then claim that men shall not put his wisdom to the proof?  Was it not their duty to do so?  And when, in result, the trial has proved the defect of his wisdom, did they not perform a useful public service?  In truth, I cannot see the Model Man in his rebuke.—­Let not my friend say that the error was merely intellectual:  blundering self-sufficiency is a moral weakness.

I might go into detail concerning other discourses, where error and arrogance appear to me combined.  But, not to be tedious,—­in general I must complain that Jesus purposely adopted an enigmatical and pretentious style of teaching, unintelligible to his hearers, and needing explanation in private.  That this was his systematic procedure, I believe, because, in spite of the great contrast of the fourth gospel to the others, it has this peculiarity in common with them.  Christian divines are used to tell us that this mode was peculiarly instructive to the vulgar of Judaea; and they insist on the great wisdom displayed in his choice of the lucid parabolical style.  But in Matth. xiii. 10-15, Jesus is made confidentially to avow precisely the opposite reason, viz. that he desires the vulgar not to