object of Jesus.  No good result could be reasonably expected.  Publicly to call men in authority by names of intense insult, the writer of the above distinctly sees will never convert them; but he thinks it was adapted to awaken the popular conscience.  Alas! it needs no divine prophet to inflame a multitude against the avarice, hypocrisy, and oppression of rulers, nor any deep inspiration of conscience in the multitude to be wide awake on that point themselves A Publius Clodius or a Cleon will do that work as efficiently as a Jesus; nor does it appear that the poor are made better by hearing invectives against the rich and powerful.  If Jesus had been aiming, in a good cause, to excite rebellion, the mode of address which he assumed seems highly appropriate; and in such a calamitous necessity, to risk exciting murderous enmity would be the act of a hero:  but as the account stands, it seems to me the deed of a fanatic.  And it is to me manifest that he overdid his attack, and failed to commend it to the conscience of his hearers.  For up to this point the multitude was in his favour.  He was notoriously so acceptable to the many, as to alarm the rulers; indeed the belief of his popularity had shielded him from prosecution.  But after this fierce address he has no more popular support.  At his public trial the vast majority judge him to deserve punishment, and prefer to ask free forgiveness for Barabbas, a bandit who was in prison for murder.  We moderns, nursed in an arbitrary belief concerning these events, drink in with our first milk the assumption that Jesus alone was guiltless, and all the other actors in this sad affair inexcusably guilty.  Let no one imagine that I defend for a moment the cruel punishment which raw resentment inflicted on him.  But though the rulers felt the rage of Vengeance, the people, who had suffered no personal wrong, were moved only by ill-measured Indignation.  The multitude love to hear the powerful exposed and reproached up to a certain limit; but if reproach go clearly beyond all that they feel to be deserved, a violent sentiment reacts on the head of the reviler:  and though popular indignation (even when free from the element of selfishness) ill fixes the due measure of Punishment, I have a strong belief that it is righteous, when it pronounces the verdict Guilty.

Does my friend deny that the death of Jesus was wilfully incurred?  The “orthodox” not merely admit, but maintain it.  Their creed justifies it by the doctrine, that his death was a “sacrifice” so pleasing to God, as to expiate the sins of the world.  This honestly meets the objections to self-destruction; for how better could life be used, than by laying it down for such a prize?  But besides all other difficulties in the very idea of atonement, the orthodox creed startles us by the incredible conception, that a voluntary sacrifice of life should be unacceptable to God, unless offered by ferocious and impious hands.  If Jesus had “authority from the Father to lay