ill-gotten wealth! Thou hadst scarcely grasped the price of blood, ere thou didst cast it from thee; before even the victim of thy treachery was crucified, thou didst cut short thy race on earth, and madly rush on the thick bosses of Jehovah's buckler; thou didst terminate thy wretched course of sin here, to enter on thine awful state of everlasting wo. Matthew the Evangelist informs us that Judas hung himself, but in the Acts of the Apostles we read, that he fell head-long, and all his bowels gushed out. These seeming contradictions are easily reconciled, if we suppose, which is not improbable, that he fell from the place whence he hung himself; and thus a double mark of infamy was affixed to his body. What a remarkable fulfilment of prophecy, in the purchase of Aceldama, that potter's field of blood. Indeed, these verses of Zechariah look more like the descriptions of a contemporary, than the predictions of one who lived at least five hundred and eighty years before the events narrated actually took place. [65] John vi. 70. By the Mosaic law, if a servant was goaded by an ox, the owner of the ox was to pay the master of that servant thirty pieces of silver:[66] and for that trifling sum it was the blessed Jesus was basely sold; he, whose price is far above rubies, and to whom all the good things thou canst desire are not to be compared. But, while we detest the treachery of Judas, let us be careful that we do not commit the like act. Let us not salute Jesus with the kiss of profession, while we are secretly in league with his worst enemy, sin: which, of old, nailed Jesus to the cross. No wounds are considered by him so severe, as those wherewith he is wounded in the house of his friends.[67] [66] Exodus xxi. 34. [67] Psalm lv. 12. CHAPTER XXXV. When the wicked, even mine enemies and my foes, came upon me to eat up my flesh, they stumbled and fell.--Psalm xxvii. 2.