It was probably about this time that certain persons informed the Lord of a fresh outrage amongst the many that Pilate had committed[391]. On the occasion of the visit of a body of Galilæans, whose turbulent character has been already noted[392], to Jerusalem, the governor for some unrecorded reason had slain them, and mingled their blood with the blood of the slain beasts they were offering on the Altar at the Temple[393]. If men “might have been supposed to be safe anywhere, or at any time, it would have been at the altar of God, and while in the act of offering sacrifices unto Him[394];” their terrible death, therefore, appears to have been urged by the narrators of this outrage as a peculiar evidence of God’s anger against them, and of some unknown awful guilt[395] on their part (Lk. xiii. 1, 2). But such hasty and cruel judgments the Lord instantly rebuked, and declared that the terrible ends of these sufferers no more marked them out as _sinners above all other_ of their fellow-countrymen than certain eighteen persons on whom a tower of Siloam[396] had recently fallen and crushed them beneath its ruins (Lk. xiii. 4). In such swift calamities they were not to trace the evidence of a pre-eminence of guilt on the part of the sufferers[397], but a call to remember their own uncertain tenure of life, and to repentance[398] while as yet the day of grace lasted, which solemn considerations He still further enforced by the appropriate parable of the _Barren Fig-Tree_ (Lk. xiii. 6–9).