The next act brings us before the judgment-seat of Pontius Pilate. This act is almost solely horrible. The Magdalene in her garb of penitence comes in to beg the release of Jesus of Nazareth. Pontius, who is represented as a gallant old gentleman, says he can refuse nothing to a lady. The prisoner is dragged in by two ferocious ruffians, who beat and buffet him with absurd and exaggerated violence. There is nothing more hideous than the awful concreteness of this show,--the naked helplessness of the prisoner, his horrible, cringing, overdone humility, the coarse kicking and cuffing of the deputy sheriffs. The Prophet is stripped and scourged at the pillar until he drops from exhaustion. He is dragged anew before Pilate and examined, but his only word is, "Thou hast said." The scene lasts nearly an hour. The theatre was full of sobbing women and children. At every fresh brutality I could hear the weeping spectators say, "Pobre Jesus!" "How wicked they are!" The bulk of the audience was of people who do not often go to theatres. They looked upon the revolting scene as a real and living fact. One hard-featured man near me clenched his fists and cursed the cruel guards. A pale, delicate-featured girl who was leaning out of her box, with her brown eyes, dilated with horror, fixed upon the scene, suddenly shrieked as a Roman soldier struck the unresisting Saviour, and fell back fainting in the arms of her friends. The Nazarene Prophet was condemned at last. Gestas gives evidence against him, and also delivers Demas to the law, but is himself denounced, and shares their sentence. The crowd howled with exultation, and Pilate washed his hands in impotent rage and remorse. The curtain came down leaving the uncultivated portion of the audience in the frame of mind in which their ancestors a few centuries earlier would have gone from the theatre determined to serve God and relieve their feelings by killing the first Jew they could find. The diversion was all the better, because safer, if they happened to the good luck of meeting a Hebrew woman or child.