t has in
every age made the ordinary business of the market-place a warfare of
falsehood; the bodies of men and the hearts of women have been sold for
gold. Why is it that gigantic wrongs flourish from age to age, and
practices utterly indefensible are continued with the overwhelming
sanction of society? It is because there is money in them. Avarice is
a passion of demonic strength; but it may help us to keep it out of our
hearts to remember that it was the sin of Judas.

III.

The repentance of Judas is alleged as the sign of a superior spirit.
Certainly it is an indication of the goodness which he once possessed,
because it is only by the light of a spark of goodness that the
darkness of sin can be perceived; and the more the conscience has been
enlightened the severer is the reaction when it is outraged. Those who
have in any degree shared the company of Christ can never afterwards be
as if they had not enjoyed this privilege; and religion, if it does not
save, will be the cruellest element in the soul's perdition.

It is not certain at what point the reaction in the mind of Judas set
in.[2] There were many incidents of the trial well calculated to
awaken in him a revulsion of feeling. At length, however, the
retributive powers of conscience were thoroughly aroused--those powers
which in all literature have formed the theme of the deepest tragedy;
which in the Bible are typified by Cain, escaping as a fugitive and a
vagabond from the cry of his brother's blood; which in Greek literature
are shadowed forth by the terrible figures of the Eumenides, with
gorgon faces and blood-dropping eyes, following silently but
remorselessly those upon whose track they have been set; and which in
Shakespeare are represented in the soul-curdling scenes of Macbeth and
Richard III. He was seized with an uncontrollable desire to undo what
he had done. The money, on which his heart had been set, was now like
a spectre to his excited fancy. Every coin seemed to be an eye through
which eternal justice was gazing at his crime or to have a tongue
crying out for vengeance. As the murderer is irresistibly drawn back
to the spot where his victim lies, he returned to the place where his
deed of treachery had been transacted and, confronting those by whom he
had been employed, handed back the money with the passionate
confession, "I have betrayed innocent blood." But he had come to
miserable comforters. With cynical disdain they a