The degeneration was rapid indeed: in the twinkling of an eye. Christ was _not_ allowed to escape with his life: 'the high tragedy of the ancient ceremony' existed in his case. But instantly 'the high tragedy' was forgotten! Barabbas, Christ's counterpart, in Mr. Frazer's theory, 'may very well ... have been going about the streets, rigged out in tawdry splendour, with a tinsel crown on his head, and a sham sceptre in his hand, preceded and followed by all the tag-rag and bobtail of the town, hooting, jeering, and breaking coarse jests at his expense, while some pretended to salute his mock majesty, and others belaboured the donkey on which he rode. It was in this fashion, probably, that in Persia the beardless and one-eyed man made his undignified progress through the town, to the delight of ragamuffins and the terror of shopkeepers whose goods he confiscated if they did not hasten to lay their peace-offerings at his feet.'[3] All this as to Barabbas implies that the 'high tragedy' of the Sacæa was already lost in the 'farce' of the 'degenerate copy,' the ride of the beardless. If so, why did Christ lose his life? If _He_ died solemnly as a recognised god (which Mr. Frazer seems to me to deny in iii. 120 and asserts in iii. 194-197), why is his no less sacred counterpart, Barabbas, also and simultaneously a counterpart of the beardless buffoon? Either the whole affair was solemn and tragic, the Haman (Christ) and the Mordecai (Barabbas) being recognised as divine, or the whole affair was farce, and in neither Christ nor Barabbas was there any recognised divinity. Mr. Frazer makes the belief in the divinity of Christ depend on the contemporary recognition of the godhead of the Sacæan victim, whose male issue was also perhaps recognised as divine.[4] But he also assures us that the divinity of the Sacæan victim must have been 'forgotten.'[5] In the same way Christ, as victim, was recognised as divine, and so, necessarily, was his counterpart, Barabbas; 'whether in sober fact, or pious fiction, the Barabbas or Son of that Divine Father who generously gave his own Son to die for the world.'[6] Yet this Son of the Divine Father was so remote from sacred that, just three pages before his Sonhood is asserted, we have a picture of him riding about on a donkey among the jeers of the 'tag-rag and bobtail.'[7] It is difficult to accept both of the theories (not very self-consistent in my humble opinion), which Mr. Frazer seems able to hold simultaneously or alternately. If Barabbas rode a donkey amid the jeers of the ragamuffins, then Christ had no triumphal entry into Jerusalem. He, too, had merely a burlesque ride, if Barabbas had a burlesque ride, as Mr. Frazer thinks probable. By the essence of his theory, Christ and Barabbas were counterparts, both were divine, or neither was divine, in general opinion. If Barabbas was a personage in a low farce (as Mr. Frazer supposes), so was Christ, and no halo of