And yet poor Judas was driven by remorse to a suicide's grave, and according to the doctrines of the Church, for these nineteen hundred years has been justly writhing, frying and burning in the bottomless pit of eternal torments, and will continue so to suffer forever,--and for what? For faithfully performing and fulfilling that part in the scheme of redemption which he was, by the eternal decrees of God, foreordained and predestinated from before the foundation of the world to perform; and which he could neither escape nor avoid, without breaking the chain, and thus defeating the eternal purposes of God in the redemption of mankind! For nineteen hundred years the Church has thus execrated and anathematised Judas Iscariot, Pontius Pilate, the High Priests, the whole Jewish nation and the Roman Empire, and consigned them to eternal perdition, the tormenting flames of an eternal hell, and scattered the Jews to the four quarters of the earth, never ceasing its horrid persecutions, in many places even to this day; and all for what? For crucifying Christ; for carrying out the divine purpose planned from before the foundation of the world; for obeying the Eternal Will; for doing only what they were _compelled_ by the eternal fates to do in order that mankind might be saved from the eternal burning! Our author that I had been studying says on page 257, "No man can read the Bible with any faith in its teachings, and deny that this terrible calamity (the destruction of Jerusalem and the Jewish nation) overtook the Jews on account of their great sins, _especially their rejection of the Son of God_." (Italics mine.) Suppose they had not rejected him. Suppose they had accepted him as the Messiah of prophecy, as the Church insists he was, and had set about to make him their king and succeeded; and he had lived on a normal life and died a natural death, what would have become of the "scheme of redemption" by vicarious atonement? What about the "plan of salvation," the remission of sins only thru the "power of the blood"? "Apart from the shedding of blood there is no remission." Then if the Jews _had not_ rejected Jesus and thereby caused his blood to be shed, what would have been the eternal destiny of the whole human race? According to orthodox Christianity, the whole plan would have failed, and the whole human race would have been irretrievably lost and plunged forever and ever into eternal torments, "where the worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched"!