“Whose is this image?” asks Jesus when they put the Roman money before his eyes. He knows that face, He knows, as they all do, that Octavius by a sequence of extraordinary good luck became the monarch of the world with the adulatory surname of Augustus. He knows that falsely youthful profile, that head of clustering curls, the great nose that juts forward as if to hide the cruelty of the small mouth, the lips rigorously closed. It is a head, like those of all kings, cut off from the body, cut off below the neck; sinister image of a voluntary and eternal decapitation. Cæsar is the king of the past, the head of the armies, the coiner of silver and gold, fallible administrator of insufficient justice. Jesus is the King of the future, the liberator of servants, the abdicator of wealth, the master of love. There is nothing in common between them. Jesus has come to overthrow the domination of Cæsar, to undo the Roman Empire and every earthly empire, but not to put Himself in Cæsar’s place. If men will listen to Him there will never be any Cæsar again. Jesus is not the heir who conspires against the sovereign to take his place. He has come peaceably to remove all rulers. Cæsar is the strongest and most famous of His rivals, but also the most remote, because his force lies in the slothfulness of men, in the weakness of peoples. But One has come who will awaken the sleeping, open the eyes of the blind, give back strength to the weak. When everything is fulfilled and the Kingdom is founded—a Kingdom which needs no soldiers nor judges nor slaves nor money, but only renewed and living souls—Cæsar’s empire will vanish like a pile of ashes under the victorious breath of the wind.