stricken out in all these passages, and, instead, we were merely told that one of the disciples said or did so and so, that one disciple would stand forth to our minds in bold and unmarred individuality. We could not mistake him. No one could suppose that the writer or writers of the New Testament had any intention-any thought of communicating to us an idea of Peter. And yet such an idea is received far more vividly than it could have been from the most minute and laboured description. No one has ever read the New Testament with any degree of attention without gathering from it an impression of Peter, distinct and peculiar. And yet, let it not be forgotten, no care is taken by the historians to produce this impression. It is the direct but undesigned result of a simple record of a few simple facts. This is that divine harmony of nature, that truthful consistency which infinitely outweighs, in my esteem, all the discrepancies of words and dates, and which the most transcendent genius may imitate, but never equal.

The impression derived from the Gospels of the moral character of the Roman Procurator, Pontius Pilate, is wonderfully vivid and consistent; especially when we consider how brief is his appearance in the Divine Drama. He had degenerated greatly from the old Roman nobleWant of moral strength was his chief trait. This defect continually produces results as disastrous as those that flow from a determined malignity of purpose. Men of good feelings, but destitute of the guidance of a good principle, bring calamities upon themselves and others, as

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heavy as if they were actuated by the basest motives, and had deliberately said unto evil, 'Be thou our good! Of the truth of this remark, Pilate affords an ever memorable instance. That such was his character is most evident from the Christian records. Almost every word attributed to him is in keeping with it. He appears to have been persuaded of the innocence of Jesus, but he had not courage to resist the mob headed by the priests. And the miserable expedients to which he had recourse to throw off his inevitable responsibility, all betray the same imbecility. He first tried to get rid of the case altogether-to make the Jews settle it themselves. Failing in this, he caught at the mention of Galilee, and as soon as he was told that Jesus was a Galilean, he sent him to Herod who was then at Jerusalem, and within whose jurisdiction Galilee was. But Herod returned the prisoner upon his hands. As the next resort he attempted to persuade the populace to bestow their mercy upon Jesus, rather than Barabbas. I am aware that it was customary among the Romans to scourge those condemned to be crucified, just before execution. But from the different accounts we are led to infer that Pilate caused this part of the punishment to be inflicted on Jesus under the idea that it would appease the Jews. He brought the prisoner forth, bleeding under the recent tortures of the scourge, and called the attention of the mob to him, as if he hoped thereby to induce them to relent. Is not this precisely the course a weak man under such circumstances would adopt, as if by yielding he would not inflame and encourage the cruel

When

passions of the people instead of subduing them? Jesus, seeing that words were of no avail, and that the magistrate had no strength to withstand the priests, preserved a dignified silence, Pilate attempts to make him speak by reminding him of his power. "Speakest thou not unto me? knowest thou not that I have power to release thee, and have power to crucify thee?" How palpable here is his cowardice in the idle vaunt of a power existing, as he must have known in his own soul, only in name! He was awed too, as indeed a much stronger man might, and so weak a man must have been, by the look and bearing of the prisoner, connected with the rumour of his extraordinary career, which could not have failed to reach his ears; with the dream of his wife, whose imagination, no doubt, had been excited by reports of the words and works of the remarkable person arraigned before her husband, and with the declaration of the priests that Jesus had called himself the Son of God. And then again, the symbolical act of washing his hands before all the people, to which the numbers and uproar of the mob compelled Pilate to have recourse, to signify that he had nothing to do with the death of Jesus, expressive though it was, was utterly vain. He could not throw off the responsibility of his office as he dashed the water from his hands; and only a weak-minded man could have found any satisfaction in such a device. When the Jews indirectly menace him with an accusation of a want of loyalty to the Roman Emperor, he is evidently alarmed and overborne. And he endeavours to conceal the effect of

the threat under a ridicule, which he dwells upon so long that we may well suspect it to be affected. "No man," Dr. Johnson has somewhere observed, "thinks much of that which he despises." Thus Pilate repeats the title of King in application to Jesus too often, to allow it to be believed that he really ridiculed and despised the charge which the Jews threatened to allege against him. "Behold your king!" he said to the Jews. And when they shouted, "Away with him, crucify him," he replies "Shall I crucify your king?" And the inscription which he caused to be affixed to the Cross in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek-" This is the King of the Jews," and which he refused to alter, was partly dictated we may suppose by this state of mind, and partly by the mean desire of ridiculing the Jews and so revenging himself upon them for the painful fears they had awakened in his breast. That a suspicion of his loyalty should have made such an impression upon Pilate, cannot surprise us when we bring into view his subsequent fate,-banishment upon a charge of treason,—and the distrustful character of the reigning Emperor, Tiberius. With this prince, as Tacitus informs us, the charge of treason was the sum of all charges.

In the instance of Pilate, as in the other cases mentioned, how all-unconscious are the narrators of the consistency they have preserved! They have thought only of giving a simple relation of the things they had seen and heard. And the keeping, discernible between the details of their histories, is the natural result and accompaniment of real facts, a portion of that harmony pervading all real

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objects, all actual occurrences. In short, we behold here the presence of that Divinity that not only shapes our ends, but impresses and moulds all realities, abrupt, rough-hewn, and disjointed as they may at first seem.

I cannot altogether omit a brief reference to the disciple John, as an example of that trait which we are now considering. From all the Gospels we gather that he was one of the three favourite friends of Jesus. Not much is told of him, but he speaks of himself as the especial object of the Master's love. But he shows no consciousness of the evidence he gives in support of this character when he tells us that he sat next to Jesus at the last supper and leaned upon his bosom. How beautiful too is the correspondence between his intimacy with his venerated Friend, and the benign and spiritual tenor of his Epistles!

A similar consistency is maintained in the notices, not only of individuals, but also of whole classes of men. The Pharisees are represented as attaching the first importance to forms, to external rites, disregarding the moral requisitions of the Law, cherishing without restraint the most selfish and corrupt passions. Everything ascribed to them, accords with this representation. At one time they are on the watch to see whether Jesus would perform a cure on the Sabbath. Zealous for the sacredness of that day, they had no hearts for a work of mercy. At another they pronounced him a Sabbath-breaker, because on that day he had not only given sight to a man