Excerpt from The Ecclesiologist, 1858, Vol. 19

It can easily be conceived that, among the crowds who must have been present at that last and most impious scene, there may have been present many of vastly different shades of character and ways of thinking, and whose feelings, with regard to the act itself then being put into execution before their eyes, would also be vastly different. There would be there the energetic, earnest Peter, yet with his energy somewhat tempered and subdued by what had passed between himself and his Loan, and its consequent sorrow and rising mingled with it and struggling 'into existence within his breast, the unwelcome con sciousness of weakness to a certainty there would not be wanting the faithful, loving J ohn - type of a far difl'erent class of mind - conscious only of his own strong, unchanging love, and. In the strength of this. Feeling and owning no weakness which that could not supply to such the scene before them would be an act of the darkest blasphemy, an open defiance of To the earnest, hearty believer in the law, such as S. Paul before his conversion, it would be an act of simple merited justice, a becoming sacrifice to the majesty of the outraged law to the calculating practical Roman, in whose view everything must be sacrificed to the maintenance in its integrity of the Imperial sway, it would be a wise concession to the infuriated passions of the mob, a mere question of words and of their law, to which it was well for a ruler to give way at the cost of a single life, sooner than to risk an outburst among the people: to the soldiers it would be merely obeying their superior cficers, without concern whether He were innocent or guilty of the charge laid against Him; their orders were plain and must be obeyed; they must put Him to death: to the half disciple, the undecided halter between two opinions, who could see much on both sides, and who therefore though not prepared to give up his faith in the law, was yet ready to acknowledge that the teach ing of the Scribes and Pharisees, the accredited leaders of the people, was deficient in spirituality, savoured more of this world than of G01), and who could also see what that was which made the Pharisees so clamorous for His death, it would be an act of murder: lastly, and marking most predominantly the character of the crowd, would be those who would enter heart and soul into what was being done, the bitter and malignant enemies of Cnarsr: but to none of all these, not even to the most instructed of His disciples, would it be what it really was - the closing scene of that which was to be the reconcilia tion of man to Gon.

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