In these respects other nations, though they may not have rivalled, at least resemble, them. But there are peculiarities in their history which separate them from every other people on the earth. Foremost among these is the question—Are we still to regard them, as our fathers for so many generations regarded them, as lying under the special curse of God, a perpetual monument of His anger? Was the imprecation uttered before Pilate’s tribunal (St. Matt. xxvii. 25), ‘His blood be on us, and on our children!’ ratified, so to speak, by Almighty God? Is the Lord’s blood still upon them? Is that the true explanation of their past miseries and their present condition? Let us consider what the guilt of the Jews, who slew the Lord, really amounted to. They do not, I believe, themselves deny that they are suffering under Divine displeasure, or that that displeasure has been occasioned by their sin. On the contrary, they hold that it is their sin that has delayed, and still delays, the coming of the Messiah. But, far from thinking that sin to have been the murder of Jesus Christ, they do not consider that their fathers were guilty in that matter at all. Their law, so they contend, requires them to put to death blasphemers and setters up of strange gods. The assertion of Jesus, ‘I and My Father are one,’ say they, was both blasphemy and the setting up of a strange god. They would only therefore have obeyed a Divine command if they had put Him to death. But, they add, it was not they, but the Romans, by whose sentence He died, for declaring Himself King of the Jews. This, they say, is sufficiently evident from the manner of His death by crucifixion, which was one never inflicted by Jews, and by the inscription on the cross, ‘This is the King of the Jews.’ It is extremely doubtful, they add, whether their fathers possessed the power of putting Him to death, but at all events they did not exercise it. The Jewish people, according to their view, had nothing to do with the matter. Some of the multitude may have imprecated the blood of Jesus on themselves and their children; but if so, the curse could only come on those few persons on whom it had been invoked. Jost and others even deny that the Sanhedrim was ever legally convened, the meeting that condemned Jesus and delated Him to Pilate being, as they hold, merely a tumultuary assembly of the enemies of Christ.