XVII.

Judas Iscariot: After the Compact.

"Horror and doubt distract

His troubl'd thoughts, and from the bottom stirr
The Hell within him, for within him Hell
He brings, and round about him, nor from Hell
One step no more than from himself can y
By change of place: Now conscience wakes despai.
That slumberd, wakes the bitter memorie

Of what he was, what is, and what must be
Worse ..

*

Ah, wherefore! he deservd no such return
From me, whom he created what I was
In that bright eminence, and with his good
Upbraided none; nor was his service hard.
What could be less than to afford him praise,
The easiest recompence, and pay him thanks,
How due! yet all his good prov'd ill in me,
And wrought but malice"

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the light shed by foregoing scenes upon the character of the traitor, we may now look at the part he bore in the train of events leading up to the Crucifixion. The upper room has been visited that we might trace the restful love of a John, the self-confidence of a Peter, the eager questionings of a Philip and a Thomas; once more we seek it to witness the obduracy and abandonment of him to whom his Lord's grace proved but a savour of death unto death.

That Jesus did not even yet regard the resolution to betray him as irrevocable may be inferred from his conduct towards Iscariot at the beginning of the feast; no public denunciation is uttered, no precaution adopted; the disciple is treated as still accessible to appeal by Him who follows to the verge of the precipice ere he will give him up to destruction. He stoops to wash his feet, and kneeling surely whispers some word of private entreaty or lifts to him a gaze of unutterable sorrow that must have melted any but a fossil heart. Picture the traitor seated before his

Lord, accepting those lowly offices with marble coldness or feigned affection! Yet wherein does his attitude differ from ours, whom God is daily stooping to cleanse and to refresh, yet with a return of apathy that justifies the confession

"I could not use a friend as I use thee"?

Warning however might prevail where tenderness had been repulsed. Therefore the washing was accompanied by the dark hint "Ye are clean, but not all," words which St. John is again careful to apply to Judas. When the towel had been laid aside, the robe resumed and the empty seat reoccupied, this brief intimation was expanded: “I speak not of you all: I know whom I have chosen: but that the scripture may be fulfilled, Hc that eateth bread with me hath lifted up his heel against me." And ever, as the feast went sadly on, the coronach rose in awful intensity, until with a troubled spirit which John was quick to observe, the pent-up secret was set free: "Verily, verily I say unto you, that one of you shall betray me."

The best proof that no separation existed as yet between Judas and his fellow-apostles is found in their reception of this fatal announcement. Suspicion does not strike him with her fang; but being exceedingly grieved they look one on another and, starting with common impulse from their seats, cry in conscious innocence "Lord, is it I?" Not to be singled from the rest, the traitor defies the risk

of exposure and dares to ask in the like form, "Rabbi, is it I?" To whom, as the others sink back unanswered and distressed, the Saviour darts privately the lightning reply, "Thou hast said."

Those words of arch-hypocrisy were the climax of guilt, and the effort to win him back now ceased. The man who could meet such appeal of love and warning with a brazen dissimulation was past feeling and must be finally left-left with this verdict: "The Son of man goeth as it is written of him: but woe unto that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed! it had been good for that man if he had not been born." The hope died out of any possible amendment in Judas. Yet the woe which the Lord "pronounces upon him is a woe from the depths of His soul,-He mourns over the man from his very birth. He is so absorbed in the woe of this man, for time and for eternity, that He can, in contemplating it, forget His own, which the object of His concern is preparing for Him."

I

The utterance of this sentence must have deepened the grief and confusion of the apostles, and prompted Peter and John to elicit a sign whereby they twain at least might be relieved from the distracting

1 Yet this is the man of whom Dr. Hanna writes: "Let us not think that we have in him a monstrous specimen of almost superhuman wickedness. We should be nearer the truth, I suspect, if we took him as an average specimen of what the passion of avarice, or any like passion, when it once has got the mastery, may lead a man to be and do."-Last Day of our Lord's Passion, p. 13. The laudable desire to render this story more available as a beacon of warning to us all" seems to have led many writers to an inadequate reading of the evangelic narrative.