CHAPTER VII 82 Jesus goes alone and on foot to Jerusalem, to try and prove Himself. In six months they will kill Him. The rich Capital no place for Socialism. "If thou be Christ, tell us, plainly." He is a fugitive from a city mob. The Raising of Lazarus. Again the people are following Him. The great Sanhedrin is alarmed. "This Man has everybody believing on Him. He will create a Revolution yet." Jerusalem is in political danger, anyway; so is the Roman Empire. Everything seems going to pieces. "This Man has too many Followers; we must kill Him." Judas is hired to betray Him. CHAPTER VIII 94 The last supper. Leonardo's great picture. Betrayal. With a rope around his neck the Savior of mankind is dragged before a Roman Judge. The scene at Pilate's palace. Pilate's wife warns him. The awful murder and the End. A Layman's Life of Jesus CHAPTER I Palestine two thousand years ago. The Little Land of Galilee. An Oriental Village. The Boy Carpenter. One of the beauty spots of the world, a couple of thousand years ago, was the little land of Galilee, in upper Palestine. That was a land for poets and painters. Lonesome, deserted, and little inhabited as it seems now, there was a time when this little paradise of earth had many people and many handsome cities. "In my time," says Josephus, "there were not less than four hundred walled towns in Galilee." Nature, too, was lavish in its gifts to this little land. There were green valleys there, picturesque mountains, clear blue lakes, running brooks, and grassy fields. An Eastern sun shone on the province almost all the time. There was no winter there. Like a diamond in the very heart of this beautiful land sat the town of Nazareth, "The Flower of Galilee." Close by the village were the hills that fenced in the upper end of the plain of beautiful Esdralon. Figs grew there at Nazareth, and oranges, and grapes luscious and bountiful as nowhere else. The flower-lined lanes stretched from the village clear down to the blue lake of Galilee, only a dozen miles or so away. It must have been a delight to live in a climate so delicious, in a land so lovely. It all belonged to Rome then, as did the whole country known as Palestine. The Romans had divided the land into three provinces,--Galilee, Samaria, and Judea, with its splendid city of Jerusalem, then one of the noted capitals of the world. Governors or kings were appointed for these three provinces by the emperors at Rome; they were usually Orientals. Just now two sons of Herod the Great, oftener known as "the splendid Arab," are ruling there. The one named Herod is at Jerusalem; his brother Antipater, or Herod Antipas, is governing little Galilee in the north end of Palestine. Like many another Oriental king he is an idle, luxurious, dissipated, and corrupt ruler.