the Law.  The Law restricted life to such a degree that it opposed all change, and all amelioration.  The Roman structures, even the most useful ones, were objects of great antipathy on the part of zealous Jews.[3] Two votive escutcheons with inscriptions, which he had set up at his residence near the sacred precincts, provoked a still more violent storm.[4] Pilate at first cared little for these susceptibilities; and he was soon involved in sanguinary suppressions of revolt,[5] which afterward ended in his removal.[6] The experience of so many conflicts had rendered him very prudent in his relations with this intractable people, which avenged itself upon its governors by compelling them to use toward it hateful severities.  The procurator saw himself, with extreme displeasure, led to play a cruel part in this new affair, for the sake of a law he hated.[7] He knew that religious fanaticism, when it has obtained the sanction of civil governments to some act of violence, is afterward the first to throw the responsibility upon the government, and almost accuses them of being the author of it.  Supreme injustice; for the true culprit is, in such cases, the instigator!

[Footnote 1:  Jos., Ant., XVIII. iii. 1, init.]

[Footnote 2:  Jos., Ant., XVIII. ii.-iv.]

[Footnote 3:  Talm. of Bab., Shabbath, 33 b.]

[Footnote 4:  Philo, Leg. ad Caium, Sec. 38.]

[Footnote 5:  Jos., Ant., XVIII. iii. 1 and 2; Luke xiii. 1.]

[Footnote 6:  Jos., Ant., XVIII. iv. 1, 2.]

[Footnote 7:  John xviii. 35.]

Pilate, then, would have liked to save Jesus.  Perhaps the dignified and calm attitude of the accused made an impression upon him.  According to a tradition,[1] Jesus found a supporter in the wife of the procurator himself.  She may have seen the gentle Galilean from some window of the palace, overlooking the courts of the temple.  Perhaps she had seen him again in her dreams; and the idea that the blood of this beautiful young man was about to be spilt, weighed upon her mind.  Certain it is that Jesus found Pilate prepossessed in his favor.  The governor questioned him with kindness, and with the desire to find an excuse for sending him away pardoned.

[Footnote 1:  Matt. xxvii. 19.]

The title of “King of the Jews,” which Jesus had never taken upon himself, but which his enemies represented as the sum and substance of his acts and pretensions, was naturally that by which it was sought to excite the suspicions of the Roman authority.  They accused him on this ground of sedition, and of treason against the government.  Nothing could be more unjust; for Jesus had always recognized the Roman government as the established power.  But conservative religious bodies do not generally shrink from calumny.  Notwithstanding his own explanation, they drew certain conclusions from his teaching; they transformed him into a disciple of Judas the Gaulonite;