Yet one thing more Pilate will do.  He will scourge Jesus.  Perhaps that may satisfy these savage Jews.  For scourging was a savage punishment.  The whip was loaded with lead and sharp fish-bones, and at every stroke the flesh was cut.  Men often died under this severe treatment.  Pilate had it inflicted on Jesus, knowing Him to be innocent; but hoping that, if He survived, no more might be required.  It was an abominable compromise.  If Jesus were innocent—­and Pilate knew He was innocent—­He should have been set free unscathed, with apologies for a mistaken arrest.  If he were guilty, of course he ought to receive the death-penalty for the crime of treason.  Justice could allow of no middle course.  But Pilate is not thinking of Justice.  He only wants to escape the onus of killing an innocent man.  Then he has Jesus brought forth, bleeding, in agony, His lacerated flesh exposed to the view of that heartless multitude. “Behold the man,” says Pilate.  “Look at your victim; is not this enough?” If Pilate thought his appeal ad misericordiam would touch those hardened sinners of the Sanhedrin, he was strangely mistaken.  The sight of their victim in His agony only maddens them.  They are like hounds who had tasted blood.  Like hounds, they “give tongue,” and yell for His death.  Pilate can resist no longer.  He has played his last card, and it has been taken.  Thoroughly humiliated and quite helpless, he gives sentence, and so in spite of the governor’s desperate efforts to escape the stigma of his awful crime, it goes down to all the ages that Jesus was “crucified under Pontius Pilate.”

BARABBAS

BY REV.  J. G. GREENHOUGH, M.A.

“And they cried out all at once, saying, Away with this man, and release unto us Barabbas.”—­ST LUKE xxiii. 18.

You have heard a crowd of people cry out all at once.  It is always impressive, it is sometimes very terrible, occasionally it is sublime.  It begins in a way that no one can explain.  Somebody in the crowd utters a name, or ejaculates a brief sentence.  What happens?  Often nothing at all.  Men are not in the mood for it; it drops unnoticed, or provokes a jeer or two and is then forgotten.  But sometimes the word falls like a spark on a mass of dry tinder—­ten thousand hearts have been prepared for it—­swift as a flash of lightning a sympathetic current passes through the whole throng—­ten thousand lips take up the cry.  They are all carried away by contagion, magnetism, or madness, and a shout goes up enough to rend the sky.  When some great and noble sentiment has laid hold of them, the shout of a people is one of the grandest things on earth; when it is some awful prejudice, unreasoning hatred, or cowardly terror that sways them, the shout is the most inhuman and hellish thing on earth; and that was the character of the shout that was raised here.