The disciples steadily remained the diligent and constant attendants of their heavenly teacher, in his long and frequent seasons of instruction in the temple, where he boldly met the often renewed attacks of his various adversaries, whether Herodians, scribes, Pharisees or Sadducees, and in spite of their long-trained subtleties, beat them out and out, with the very weapons at which they thought themselves so handy. The display of genius, of taste, of learning, of ready and sarcastic wit, and of heart-searching acuteness, was so amazing and super-human, that these few days of open discussion established his divinely intellectual superiority over all the elaborate science of his accomplished opponents, and at the same time secured the fulfilment of his destiny, by the spite and hatred which their repeated public defeats excited in them. Imagine their rage. Exposed thus before the people, by whom they had hitherto been regarded as the sole depositaries of learning, and adored as the fountains of right, they saw all their honors and power, to which they had devoted the intense study of their whole lives, snatched coolly and easily from them, by a nameless, untaught pretender, who was able to hold them up, baffled and disgraced, for the amusement of the jeering multitude. Here was ground enough for hatred;――the hatred of conceited and intolerant false learning, against the discerning soul that had stripped and humbled it;――the hatred of confident ambition against the heroic energy which had discomfited it, and was doing much to free a long enslaved people from the yoke which formal hypocrisy and empty parade had long laid on them. And again, the intolerable thought that all this heavy disgrace had been brought on the learned body of Judaism by a Galilean! a mere carpenter of the lowest orders, who had come up to Jerusalem followed by a select train of rude fishermen and outcast publicans;――and who, not being able to command a single night’s lodging in the city, was in the habit of boarding and lodging in a paltry suburb, on the charity of some personal friends, from which place he quietly walked in for the distance of two miles every morning, to triumph over the palace-lodged heads of the Jewish faith. From such a man, thus humbly and even pitiably circumstanced, such an invasion and overthrow could not be endured; and his ruin was rendered doubly easy by his very insignificance, which now constituted the chief disgrace of their defeat. Never was cause more closely followed by its effect, than this insulted dignity was by its cruel vengeance. THE PROPHECY OF THE TEMPLE’S RUIN.