own, except that they were overawed by the stern majesty of this
wonderful Galilean. For a brief hour Jesus was master of the
situation; the next day He was arrested. The thing had to be done
secretly and quickly, but those who planned it calculated rightly. No
sooner was Jesus made a prisoner than the populace turned against Him
and clamoured for His destruction. Those who know something of mob
psychology will readily understand this. Human passion easily swings
from adoration to hate, as history has shown over and over again. If a
strong man fails in a conflict of forces in a time of great public
excitement, he is rarely allowed to sink quietly into oblivion; the mob
turns upon him with the savagery of a wild beast. Napoleon was one day
driving through the streets of Paris amid cheering crowds. One of his
suite remarked to him that it must be gratifying to see how his
subjects loved him. "Bah!" said the Emperor, "The same rabble would
cheer just as madly if I were going to the guillotine." He was right.
It was just the same with this Jerusalem crowd. The populace thought
that the Jesus who had seemed so strong was not so strong after all,
and therefore their base fury vented itself upon Him just as priests
and Pharisees had foreseen.

These were the immediate causes of the death of Jesus. His execution
was a judicial murder done to gratify sacerdotal spite and popular
passion, and the men who took part in it were guilty of what has proved
to be the blackest deed in history. The same type of man exists
to-day, as he has existed in every age, and if Jesus came again without
saying who He was, history would repeat itself. I do not suppose His
enemies would nail Him on a wooden cross,--public opinion would forbid
that now, thanks to nineteen centuries of His gospel,--but they would
find some means of making Him suffer, and they would invoke His own
name to justify them in doing it.

+The reason why there was no supernatural interference.+--But is this
all that can be said about the matter? Where does God come in? Why
was a crime of this sort ever permitted? Why has the memory of it
actually become a religious dogma? Other people have been put to death
quite as unjustly, and the results, though great, are not to be
compared with those which have followed from the death of Jesus. Why
is this? As we have already seen, the popular view of the doctrine of
Atonement presumes that this foul deed was in some