dominion, glory and kingdom, that all people, nations and languages shall serve him,—­an everlasting kingdom which shall not pass away.  How Jesus himself interprets his supremacy, as Son of Man, in Matt. x., xi., xxiii., xxv., and elsewhere, I have already observed.  To claim such a character, seems to me like plunging from a pinnacle of the temple.  If miraculous power holds him up and makes good his daring, he is more than man; but if otherwise, to have failed will break all his bones.  I can no longer give the same human reverence as before to one who has been seduced into vanity so egregious; and I feel assured a priori that such presumption must have entangled him into evasions and insincerities, which naturally end in crookedness of conscience and real imposture, however noble a man’s commencement, and however unshrinking his sacrifices of goods and ease and life.

The time arrived at last, when Jesus felt that he must publicly assert Messiahship; and this was certain to bring things to an issue.  I suppose him to have hoped that he was Messiah, until hope and the encouragement given him by Peter and others grew into a persuasion strong enough to act upon, but not always strong enough to still misgivings.  I say, I suppose this; but I build nothing on my supposition.  I however see, that when he had resolved to claim Messiahship publicly, one of two results was inevitable, if that claim was ill-founded:—­viz., either he must have become an impostor, in order to screen his weakness; or, he must have retracted his pretensions amid much humiliation, and have retired into privacy to learn sober wisdom.  From these alternatives there was escape only by death, and upon death Jesus purposely rushed.

All Christendom has always believed that the death of Jesus was voluntarily incurred; and unless no man ever became a wilful martyr, I cannot conceive why we are to doubt the fact concerning Jesus.  When he resolved to go up to Jerusalem, he was warned by his disciples of the danger; but so far was he from being blind to it, that he distinctly announced to them that he knew he should suffer in Jerusalem the shameful death of a malefactor.  On his arrival in the suburbs, his first act was, ostentatiously to ride into the city on an ass’s colt in the midst of the acclamations of the multitude, in order to exhibit himself as having a just right to the throne of David.  Thus he gave a handle to imputations of intended treason.—­He next entered the temple courts, where doves and lambs were sold for sacrifice, and—­(I must say it to my friend’s amusement, and in defiance of his kind but keen ridicule,) committed a breach of the peace by flogging with a whip those who trafficked in the area.  By such conduct he undoubtedly made himself liable to legal punishment, and probably might have been publicly scourged for it, had the rulers chosen to moderate their vengeance.  But he “meant to be prosecuted