the earth, horribly anxious and wretched, because no one will murder him. Judas has succeeded to a large property, and would not be tempted to betray him by three hundred pieces of silver; the chief priests and elders think him insane, and, therefore, as Orientals, hold him in a certain reverence; Pilate is henpecked and superstitious, accounts the wife's dreams oracular, and will have nothing to do with him; even Peter won't deny him, although he has restored Peter's mother-in-law to life. The situation is desperate; he has again and again prayed his Father to despatch a special murderer to despatch him, yet none appears: shall he have to perish by old age or disease? may he be compelled to commit suicide? must he go back to Heaven unsacrificed, foiled for want of an assassin?
Benjamin Disraeli attained the cynical sublime when he suggested a monument of gratitude to Judas. In fact, Christendom ought to have erected hundreds of years ago three grand monuments to the sub-trinity of Christianity, to the three men without whose devoted assistance the heavenly trinity would not have triumphed in the scheme of Salvation by Atonement; Judas, Caiaphas and Pilate; and as these three men could not have done what they did in furtherance of the glorious work without a well-known inspiration, a fourth memorial—the grandest of all—should have been erected to the Devil. But the world, even the religious world, has always been ungrateful to its most generous benefactors.
Is it not the worst of sacrilege, a foul profanation of our human nature, which for us, at least, should be holy and awful, when the heroic and saintly martyrdom of a true Man is thus falsified into the self-schemed sham sacrifice, ineffectual, of a God? The people who profess belief in this are shocked at the outrage offered to our humanity by the Development Theory, while they themselves commit this outrage more flagitious. Little matters whence we sprang; we are what we are. But much matters to what we may attain. If the Develop-
