Pilate, after ten years of service, was disgraced and called to Rome. One of that cloud of false witnesses who sprang up every year told the people of Samaria that he knew where the sacred vessels lay hid, and fixed a day when they should meet him in thousands on Gerizim to dig them up. Hearing of this movement, Pilate sent troops into the highways and villages round Shechem; and these soldiers, setting upon the people, slew the innocent with the guilty, and put the whole body of Samaritans to flight. A great cry for vengeance arose in Samaria; the Senate sent an embassy to Antioch; and Vitellius, a man of craft and policy, wishing to stand well with the Jews, put the government of Samaria and Judæa into fresh hands, and commanded Pilate to report himself in Rome. Here we lose sight of him. Legends make him a suicide--some in a Roman prison, others in Gaul, and others again near the Lake of Lucerne, on the summit of the mountain which bears the name of Mount Pilatus. THE DOINGS OF HEROD THE GREAT. About sixty years B.C., Herod, misnamed the Great, had partly by bribery prevailed on Antony and Augustus to make him king of the Jews, and Josephus describes his visit to Rome on that appointment. Herod has always been a monster of cruelty. He married a beautiful woman named Mariamne, whom he put to death after being the mother of several of his children. Then he had a fit of remorse, and frantically called her by name, and ordered his servants to do so. Then he next slew the grandfather and brother of Mariamne, the latter being ordered to be suffocated while his servants were engaged in a bathing frolic. In his old age he was seized with a sudden suspicion against two sons, whom he accused of a plot against him, and after some wavering caused them to be strangled, and some three hundred who sympathised with them to be stoned to death. After these symptoms of madness, a year before his death, being alarmed by the reports of the visits of the Magi, and the prophecies of the birth of Christ, he ordered the massacre of the innocents. He died a year after, at the age of seventy-one, of a disgusting disease, accompanied with horrible tortures, having reigned thirty-five years. In order that he should not die without being lamented, he had ordered a large number of the chief inhabitants of Jerusalem, as soon as he was dead, to be slain by his soldiers. He died enormously rich, and even Horace refers to his vast palm groves. There was a lengthened litigation and appeal to Rome about the division of his estates and governments. The son who succeeded him so misconducted himself that after nine years he was banished by Augustus and his wealth confiscated. MARY MAGDALENE.