The foxes of the Temple had thought of this difficulty before taking action. They knew very well that Pilate would not be satisfied if they told him that this man attacked the religion of their fathers and announced the Kingdom of God. They were prepared therefore to lie. For a man about to commit a base action, one more accessory and subordinate infamy seems of little consequence. Pilate could be conquered only with his own weapons, by appealing to his loyalty to Rome and to the Emperor and to the basis of his office-holding. It was already agreed that they would give a political color to the accusation. If they told him that Jesus was a false Messiah, Pilate would smile. But if they said that He was a seditious inciter of revolt, that He was trying to rouse the common people against Rome, Pilate could not do less than put Him to death. “We found this fellow perverting the nation, and forbidding to give tribute to Cæsar, saying that he himself is Christ, a King.... He stirreth up all the people, teaching throughout all Jewry, beginning from Galilee to this place.” Every word was a lie. Jesus had commanded men to render unto Cæsar that which was Cæsar’s. He paid no attention whatever to the Romans. He said that He was Christ but not in the coarse, political meaning of a King of the Jews: and He did not stir up the people but wished to make of an unhappy and degraded people a blessed kingdom of saints. However grave these accusations might have seemed to Pilate if they had been true, they only increased his suspicions of the priests. Was it probable that those treacherous vipers who detested him and Rome, and who had tried to overturn him so many times and whose one dream was to sweep away the governing pagans and foreigners, should suddenly be kindled with so much zeal to denounce a rebel of their own nation? Pilate was not convinced and he wished to find out for himself, by questioning the accused man in private. He went back into the palace and commanded that Jesus be brought to him. Disregarding the less important accusations, he went at once to the essential: “Art thou the King of the Jews?” But Jesus did not answer. How could He ever make this Roman understand! This Roman who knew nothing of God’s promises, misinformed by His assassins, a Pyrrhonic atheist, whose only religion was the artificial and diabolical cult of a living man—and of what a man—Tiberius!—how could He ever explain to this freedman, a pupil of the lawyers and rhetoricians of Rome in the most decadent of all the degenerate foulness of that time; how could He explain that He was the King of a Kingdom not yet founded, of a spiritual Kingdom which would abolish all human kingdoms? Jesus read the depths of Pilate’s soul and made no answer, as He had kept silent at first before Annas and before Caiaphas. The Procurator could not understand this silence on the part of a man over whom hung the threat of death. “Hearest thou not how many things they witness against thee?”