Jeremy Taylor says that Herod slew Zacharias between the Temple and the altar "because he refused to betray his son to the fury of that rabid bear,--though some persons, very eminent amongst the stars of the primitive Church, report a tradition that, a place being separated in the Temple for virgins, Zacharias suffered the mother of our Lord to abide there after the birth of her Holy Son, affirming her still to be a virgin; and that for this reason, not Herod, but the scribes and Pharisees, did kill Zacharias. Tertullian reports that the blood of Zacharias had so besmeared the stones of the pavement, which was the altar on which the good old priest was sacrificed, that no art or industry could wash the tincture out, the dye and guilt being both indelible; as if, because God did intend to exact of that nation 'all the blood of righteous persons, from Abel to Zacharias,' who was the last of the martyrs of the synagogue, He would leave a character of their guilt in their eyes to upbraid their irreligion, cruelty, and infidelity. Some there are who affirm these words of our Saviour not to relate to any Zacharias who had been already slain, but to be a prophecy of the last of all the martyrs of the Jews who should be slain immediately before the destruction of the last Temple and the dissolution of the nation. Certain it is that such a Zacharias, the son of Baruch (if we may believe Josephus), was slain in the middle of the Temple a little before it was destroyed; and it is agreeable to the nature of the prophecy and reproof here made by our Saviour that 'from Abel to Zacharias' should take in 'all the righteous blood' from first to last till the iniquity was complete, and it is not imaginable that the blood of our Lord and of St. James their bishop (for whose death many of themselves thought God destroyed their city) should be left out of the account, which certainly would be if any other Zacharias should be meant. In reference to this, Cyprian de Valera expounds that which we read in the past tense to signify the future: 'Ye slew'--_i.e._, shall slay." CHILDHOOD OF JOHN THE BAPTIST. Elizabeth fled with her son John the Baptist when he was about eighteen months old into the wilderness, where after forty days she died. His father Zacharias, at the time of his ministration, which happened about this time, was killed in the court of the Temple. According to the tradition of the Greeks, God deputed an angel to be his guardian and nourisher, as he had formerly done to Ishmael and Elias. DEATH OF JOHN THE BAPTIST.