He enters into the Court of the Gentiles, the most spacious and most densely crowded of all. The great, sunny, well-paved terrace is not the atrium of a sanctuary, but a dirty market-place. An immense, roaring din rises up from the vermin-like crowd of bankers, of buyers and sellers, of money-changers who give and take money. There are herdsmen with their oxen and their flocks of sheep; vendors of pigeons and turtle doves, standing by the long lines of their coops; bird-sellers, with cages of chirping sparrows; benches for money-changers, with bowls overflowing with copper and silver. Merchants, their feet in the fresh-dropped dung, handle the flanks of the animals destined for sacrifice; or call with monotonous iteration women who have come there after child-birth, pilgrims who have come to offer a rich sacrifice, lepers who offer living birds for their cure, obtained or hoped for. Money-changers, with a coin hung at their ears as a mark of their trade, gloatingly plunge their greedy talons into gleaming piles; the go-betweens run about in the swarm of the gossiping groups; niggardly, wary provincials hold excited conferences before loosening the purse strings to change their cash for a votive offering, and from time to time a restless ox drowns out with his deep bellow the thin bleating of the lambs, the thrill voices of the women, the clinking of drachma and shekels. Christ was familiar with the spectacle. He knew that the house of God had been turned into the house of Mammon, and that, instead of silently invoking the Spirit, material-minded men trafficked there in the filth of the Demon, with the priests as their accomplices. But this time He did not restrain His scorn and His repugnance. To destroy the Temple, He commenced with the destruction of the market-place. The Eternal Mendicant, the poor man, accompanied by his poor friends, flung Himself against the servitors of money. He had in His hand a length of rope, which He knotted together like a whip, and with it He opened a passage-way through the astonished people. The benches of the money-changers crashed down at the first shock. The coins were scattered on the ground amid yells of astonishment and wrath; the seats of the bird-sellers were overturned beside their scattered pigeons. The herdsmen began to urge towards the doors the oxen and the sheep. The sparrow-sellers took their cages under their arms and disappeared. Cries rose to Heaven, some scandalized, some approving; from the other court-yards other people came running towards the disturbance. Jesus, surrounded by the boldest of His friends, was brandishing His whip on high, and driving the money-changers towards the door. And He repeated in a loud voice, “My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves!” And the last money-handlers disappeared from the courts like rubbish scattered by the wind. BUSINESS THE GOD