nds he must first wash out. The public
prosecutor, or judge is a mere mouthpiece and representative among us of
absolute justice; in him we see not his own private character at all,
but the purity and rectitude of law and order. But these scribes were
acting as private individuals, and came to Jesus professing that they
were so shocked with this woman's sin that they wished the long-disused
punishment of stoning to be revived. And therefore Jesus had not only a
perfect right, as any other man would have had, to say to them, "Thou
that sayest a man should not commit adultery, dost thou commit
adultery?" but also, as the searcher of hearts; as He who knew what is
in man, He could risk the woman's life on the chance of there being a
single man of them who was really as shocked as he pretended to be, who
was prepared to say he had in his own soul no taint of the sin he was
loudly professing his abhorrence of, who was prepared to say, Death is
due to this sin, and then to accept such proportionate punishment as
would fall to his own share.

Having given His answer His eye again falls, His former stooping
attitude is resumed. He does not mean to awe them by a defiant look; He
lets their own conscience do the work. But that their conscience should
have produced such a result deserves our attention. The woman, when she
heard His answer, may for a moment have trembled and shrunk together,
expecting the crashing blow of the first stone. Could she expect that
these Pharisees, some of them at least good men, were all involved
somehow in her sin, tainted in heart with the pollution that had wrought
such destruction in herself, or supposing they were so tainted, did they
know it; or supposing they knew it, would they not be ashamed to own it
in the face of the surrounding crowd; would they not sacrifice her life
rather than their own character? But every man waited for some other to
lift the first stone; every man thought that some one of their number
would be pure enough and bold enough, if not to throw the first stone,
at least to assert that he fulfilled the condition of doing so that
Jesus had laid down. None was willing to put himself forward to be
searched by the eyes of the crowd, and to be exposed to the still more
trying judgment of Jesus, and to risk the possibility of His, in some
more definite way, revealing his past life. And so they edged their way
out through the crowd from before Him, each desiring to have no more to