.

This was not strictly legal, however, because the letter of the law did
not allow this court to meet by night. On this account, although the
proceedings were complete and the sentence agreed upon during the
night, it was considered necessary to hold another sitting at daybreak.
This was the third stage of the trial; but it was merely a brief
rehearsal, for form's sake, of what had been already done.[4]
Therefore, we must return to the proceedings during the night, which
contain the kernel of the matter.

Imagine, then, a large room forming one side of the court of an
Oriental house, from which it is separated only by a row of pillars, so
that what is going on in the lighted interior is visible to those
outside. The room is semicircular. Round the arc of the semicircle
the half-hundred or more[5] members sit on a divan. Caiaphas, the
president, occupies a kind of throne in the centre of the opposite
wall. In front stands the Accused, facing him, with the jailers on the
one side and the witnesses on the other.

How ought any trial to commence? Surely with a clear statement of the
crime alleged and with the production of witnesses to support the
charge. But, instead of beginning in this way, "the high priest asked
Jesus of His disciples and of His doctrine."

The insinuation was that He was multiplying disciples for some secret
design and teaching them a secret doctrine, which might be construed
into a project of revolution. Jesus, still throbbing with the
indignity of being arrested under cloud of night, as if He were anxious
to escape, and by a force so large as to suggest that He was the head
of a revolutionary band, replied, with lofty self-consciousness, "Why
askest thou Me? Ask them that heard Me what I have said unto them;
behold, they know what I said." Why had they arrested Him if they had
yet to learn what He had said and done? They were trying to make Him
out to be an underground schemer; but they, with their arrests in
secrecy and their midnight trials, were themselves the sons of darkness.

Such simple and courageous speech was alien to that place, which knew
only the whining of suppliants, the smooth flatteries of sycophants,
and the diplomatic phrases of advocates; and a jailer, perhaps seeing
the indignant blush mount into the face of the high priest, clenched
his fist and struck Jesus on the mouth, asking, "Answerest Thou the
high priest so?" Poor hireling! better for him that his hand