The time of the gathering of figs was near, but had not yet arrived: upon any fruitful tree one might hope to find a few ripe figs, and more that were eatable. The Lord was hungry as he went to Jerusalem from Bethany, and saw on the way a tree with all the promise that a perfect foliage could give. He went up to it, "if haply he might find anything thereon." The leaves were all; fruit there was none in any stage; the tree was a pretence; it fulfilled not that for which it was sent. Here was an opportunity in their very path of enforcing, by a visible sign proceeding from himself, one of the most important truths he had striven to teach them. What he had been saying was in him a living truth: he condemned the tree to become in appearance that which it was in fact--a useless thing: when they passed the following morning, it had withered away, was dried up from the roots. He did not urge in words the lesson of the miracle-parable; he left that to work when the fate of fruitless Jerusalem should also have become fact. For the present the marvel of it possessed them too much for the reading of its lesson; therefore, perhaps, our Lord makes little of the marvel and much of the power of faith; assuring them of answers to their prayers, but adding, according to St Mark, that forgiveness of others is the indispensable condition of their own acceptance --fit lesson surely to hang on that withered tree. After all, the thing destroyed was only a tree. In respect of humanity there is but one distant, and how distant approach to anything similar! In the pseudo-evangels there are several tales of vengeance--not one in these books. The fact to which I refer is recorded by St John alone. It is, that when the "band of men and officers from the chief priests and Pharisees" came to take him, and "Jesus went forth and said unto them, Whom seek ye?" and in reply to theirs, had said "I am he, they went backward and fell to the ground." There are one or two facts in connection with the record of this incident, which although not belonging quite immediately to my present design, I would yet note, with the questions they suggest. The synoptical Gospels record the Judas-kiss: St John does not. St John alone records the going backward and falling to the ground--prefacing the fact with the words, "And Judas also, which betrayed him, stood with them."