=5. Herod as King.=――Disappointed in gaining the affections of his family, Herod was equally unsuccessful in attaching his subjects to him. He made great efforts. He restored the temple at immense cost; he built a great palace for himself to give work to the unemployed; and when a time of pestilence and famine afforded him his chance, he was really helpful and generous to the sufferers. But it was all in vain. He gained at best but a sullen submission. For one thing, he never understood the people. Even when well-intentioned, he made mistakes and jarred on them. He introduced into Jerusalem the Roman fashion of public games and fights with wild beasts. He did it to amuse and please his subjects, but it was a dire offence to Jewish feelings. And his home life was a standing scandal to all the good Jewish husbands and wives who lived happily and respectably with their children. Altogether his kindnesses were distrusted and his motives suspected, and his pleasant relations with Rome were regarded as so many concessions to heathenism. Herod boasted, and not untruly, that Jews in all parts of the great Roman Empire were protected because of him and through his influence. The favour in which the Roman Emperor held him was, in truth, useful to the Jews. But nevertheless, in all his thirty-three years of kinghood, Herod never won one bit of loyal love from any one Jew who was near enough to him to know him. =6. The End of Herod’s Reign.=――He died at last, four years B.C. The long unlovely reign of the Idumean usurper was over. ‘He was not estranged from his desire; and while the meat was yet in his mouth the wrath of God overtook him.’ So miserably conscious was the bad, unhappy king of the rejoicing which his death would cause, that he actually left orders for wholesale executions to take place on the day of his funeral. He longed, with an intensity that is somehow pathetic, in spite of the grotesque wicked form it took, that some sound of mourning should be heard in the city. But his unrighteous will, which in life had been fulfilled from fear, in death was disregarded. He lived, and men and women wept; he died, and they smiled on one another.