any service open to Judas would have been preposterously overpaid by thirty talents, a sum which exceeded five thousand pounds sterling. And since this particular sum had originally rested on the authority of a prophet, cited by one of the evangelists,[Footnote: Viz., St. Matthew. Upon which the bishop notices the error which had crept into the prevailing text of Jeremias instead of Zecharias. But in the fourth century, some copies had already corrected this reading; which, besides, had a traditional excuse in the proverbial saying that the spirit of Jeremiah had settled and found a resting-place in Zecharias.] 'it is probable,' proceeds the bishop, 'that the price at which Judas sold his lord was thirty pounds weight of silver [that is, about ninety guineas sterling in English money]--a goodly price for the Saviour of the world to be prized at by his undiscerning and unworthy countrymen.' Where, however, the learned writer makes a slight oversight in logic, since it was not precisely Christ that was so valued--this prisoner as against the certain loss of this prisoner--but simply this particular mode of contending with the difficulty attached to his apprehension, so that, in the worst case, this opportunity lost might be replaced by other opportunities; and the price, therefore, was not calculated as it would have been under one solitary chance. The bishop then proceeds with the rehearsal of all the circumstances connected with the pretended trial of Christ; and coming in the process of his narrative to the conduct of Judas on learning the dreadful turn which things were taking (conduct which surely argues that he had anticipated a most opposite catastrophe), he winds up the case of the Iscariot in the following passage--'When Judas heard that they had passed the final and decretory sentence of death upon his Lord, he, who thought not it would have gone so far, repented him to have been an instrument of so damnable a machination, and came and brought the silver which they gave him for hire, threw it in amongst them, and said, 'I have sinned in betraying the innocent blood.' But they, incurious of those hell-torments Judas felt within him, because their own fires burned not yet, dismissed him.' I pause for a moment to observe that, in the expression, 'repented him to have been an instrument,' the context shows the bishop intending to represent Judas as recoiling from the issue of his own acts, and from so damnable a machination, not because his better feelings were evoked, as the prospect of ruin to his Master drew near, and that he shrank from that same thing when taking a definite shape of fulfilment, which he had faced cheerfully when at a distance--not at all: the bishop's meaning is--that Judas recoiled from his own acts at the very instant when he began to understand their real consequences now solemnly opening upon his horror-stricken understanding. He had hoped, probably, much from