of the excited crowd, open-eyed and undeceived in his hour of “triumph”—­as little perturbed, too, when his name is cast out as evil.  How little men’s praise and their blame matter, when your eyes are fixed on God—­when you have Him and His facts to be your inspiration!  On the other hand, when you have not contact with God, how much men’s talk counts, and how easy it is to lose all sense of fact!

By and by the talk veers round to what Pilate had done one to the Galileans—­if the dates fit, or if for the moment we can make them fit, or anticipate once for all, and be done with the bazaar talk which never stopped.  Pilate had killed the Galileans when they went up to Jerusalem—­yes! mingled their own blood, you might say, with the blood of their sacrifices (Luke 13:1).  What would he do next?  There was no telling.  What was needed—­some time—­it was bound to come—­and the voice sank—­a Theudas, or a Judas again (Acts 5:36, 37)—­it would not be surprising. ...  There were no newspapers, no approved and reliable sources of news such as we boast to have from our governments and millionaires; all was rumour, bazaar talk—­“Lo! here!” and “Lo! there!” (Mark 13:21).  “Prohibiti sermones ideoque plures”, said Tacitus of Rome—­rumours were forbidden, so there were more of them.  The Messiah must come some time, said one man who might be a friend of the Zealots.  In any case, reflected another, those Galileans had probably angered Heaven and got their deserts; ill luck like that could hardly come by accident; think of the tower that fell at Siloam—­anybody could see there was a judgement in it.  Might it not be said that God had discredited John the Baptist, now his head was taken off?  So men speculated (cf.  John 9:2).  Jesus saw through all this, and was radiantly clear about it.

So they chattered, and he heard.  Then the talk took another turn, and tales were told—­bad eyes flashed and lips smacked, as one story-teller eclipsed the other in the familiar vein.  The Arabian Nights are tales of the crowd, it is said, rather than literature in their origin, and will give clues enough to what might be told.  Jesus heard, and he saw what it meant; and afterwards he told his friends:  “From within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders ... foolishness; all these evil things come from within, and defile the man” (Mark 7:21-23).  The evil thought takes shape to find utterance, and gains thereby a new vitality, a new power for evil, and may haunt both speaker and listener for ever with its defiling memory.

By and by he intervened and spoke himself.  Every one was shocked, and said, “Blasphemy!” They were not used to think of God as he did, and it seemed improper.