for treason, not for felony,” to use the words of a modern offender.  He therefore commenced the most exasperating attacks on all the powerful, calling them hypocrites and whited sepulchres and vipers’ brood; and denouncing upon them the “condemnation of hell.”  He was successful.  He had both enraged the rulers up to the point of thirsting for his life, and given colour to the charge of political rebellion.  He resolved to die; and he died.  Had his enemies contemptuously let him live, he would have been forced to act the part of Jewish Messiah, or renounce Messiahship.

If any one holds Jesus to be not amenable to the laws of human morality, I am not now reasoning with such a one.  But if any one claims for him a human perfection, then I say that his conduct on this occasion was neither laudable nor justifiable; far otherwise.  There are cases in which life may be thrown away for a great cause; as when a leader in battle rushes upon certain death, in order to animate his own men; but the case before us has no similarity to that.  If our accounts are not wholly false, Jesus knowingly and purposely exasperated the rulers into a great crime,—­the crime of taking his life from personal resentment.  His inflammatory addresses to the multitude have been defended as follows: 

“The prophetic Spirit is sometimes oblivious of the rules of the drawing-room; and inspired Conscience, like the inspiring God, seeing a hypocrite, will take the liberty to say so, and act accordingly.  Are the superficial amenities, the soothing fictions, the smotherings of the burning heart,... really paramount in this world, and never to give way? and when a soul of power, unable to refrain, rubs off, though it be with rasping words, all the varnish from rottenness and lies, is he to be tried in our courts of compliment for a misdemeanor?  Is there never a higher duty than that of either pitying or converting guilty men,—­the duty of publicly exposing them? of awakening the popular conscience, and sweeping away the conventional timidities, for a severe return to truth and reality?  No rule of morals can be recognized as just, which prohibits conformity of human speech to fact; and insists on terms of civility being kept with all manner of iniquity.”

I certainly have not appealed to any conventional morality of drawing-room compliment, but to the highest and purest principles which I know; and I lament to find my judgment so extremely in opposition.  To me it seems that inability to refrain shows weakness, not power, of soul, and that nothing is easier than to give vent to violent invective against bad rulers.  The last sentence quoted, seems to say, that the speaking of Truth is never to be condemned:  but I cannot agree to this.  When Truth will only exasperate, and cannot do good, silence is imperative.  A man who reproaches an armed tyrant in words too plain, does but excite him to murder; and the shocking thing is, that this seems to have been the express