himself a king speaketh against Caesar" (John 19:12) --- and so the inscription fastened to the cross was "Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews" (John 19:19). But the true reason why Jesus was hunted to death was expressed by the scribes, who mocked the sufferer with the words "He trusted in God; let Him deliver him now if He will have him, for he said 'I am the son of God'." (Matt. 27:43)

The teaching of Jesus was the inversion of all that was taught by the official priesthood. Their whole teaching rested on the hypothesis that God and Man are absolutely distinct in nature, thus directly contradicting the earliest statement of their own Scriptures regarding Man, that he is the image and likeness of God. As a consequence of this false assumption, they supposed that the whole Mosaic Law and Ritual was intended to pacify God and make him favourable to the worshipper, and so in their minds the entire system tended only to emphasise the gulf that separated Man from God.

Cause and Effect

What the nexus of cause and effect was by which this system operated to produce the result of reconciling God to the worshipper was a question which they never attempted to face; for had they, after the example of their patriarch, determinedly wrestled with the problem of why their Law was what it was, that Law would have shone forth with a self-illuminating