the inquiry, we may suppose, with a smile on his lips, “Art thou a king, then?” he asked.  There is no ambiguity in his Prisoner’s reply.  He is a king.  This strange kingdom, not resting on any basis of earthly power, dispensing with fighting, with all that an army suggests, with force, is the very opposite to Pilate’s idea of a state.  Rome was materialistic to the core.  Her rule rested on brute force.  The Empire, the Imperium, was the dominion of the Imperator, that is to say, of the commander-in-chief of the army.  It was a military despotism.  Nominally the government was still republican, and the older and more peaceable provinces were administered by proconsuls, whose appointment rested with the senate, or was supposed by a legal fiction to rest with that body.  But the newer and more troublesome provinces were governed as conquered territory directly by the emperor as the head of the army.  Now Judaea came in this latter division.  Pontius Pilate and his superior, the Legate of Syria, were both directly responsible to Tiberius Caesar.  Pilate was Caesar’s officer under military direction.  Military methods characterised the procurator’s rule.  To a man placed as Pilate, the notion of a ruler independent of fighting supporters, and that in territory held down by force of arms, was simply absurd.

Our Lord’s further explanation seems to Pilate still more out of keeping with the notion of royalty.  Jesus says He was born to be a king in order that He might bear witness to the truth.  A king—­truth—­what have these two words in common, the one referring to the most real region, the other to the most ideal?  To Pilate, the conjunction is absolutely incongruous. “What is truth?” he asks, as he turns away, too contemptuous to wait for an answer.  This famous utterance has been quoted as a text for the anxious inquirer, and preachers have gravely set themselves to answer it.  Jesus did nothing of the kind.  Evidently it was not a serious inquiry.  Pilate flung off the very idea of truth—­a mere abstraction, nothing to a practical Roman.  Still, though he was not seeking any answer to his question, by the very tone of it he suggested that he did not possess that gem which those who hold it prize above all things.  “The Scepticism of Pilate” is the title of one of Robertson’s greatest sermons.  The preacher traces it to four sources:  indecision; falseness to his own convictions; the taint of the worldly temper of his day; and that priestly bigotry which forbids inquiry, and makes doubt a crime.  Pilate is the typical sceptic, who is worlds removed from the “honest” doubter.  Serious doubt, which is pained and anxious in the search of truth, is in essence belief, for it believes in the value of truth, if only truth can be discovered; but typical scepticism not only does not credit what the believer takes for truth, but despises it as not worth seeking.  That is the fatal doubt, a doubt that eats into the soul as a moral canker.