It is evidently on account of this new proof of daring that the people now again begin to rally around him. “Behold, he speaketh boldly. Do our rulers know that this is Christ?” is the talk which fills the air, and induces the scribes and Pharisees, for the first time, to attempt his arrest by their officers. The officers return without him, and their masters are, for the moment, powerless before the simple word of him who, as their own servants testify, “speaks as never man spake.” But if they cannot arrest and execute, they may entangle him further, and prepare for their day, which is surely and swiftly coming. So they bring to him the woman taken in adultery, and draw from him the discourse in which he tells them that the truth will make them free—the truth which he has come to tell them, but which they will not hear, because they are of their father the devil. He ends with asserting his claim to the name which every Jew held sacred, “before Abraham was, I am.” The narrative of the seventh and eighth chapters of St. John, which record these scenes at the Feast of Tabernacles, have, I believe, done more to make men courageous and truly manly than all the stirring accounts of bold deeds which ever were written elsewhere. CXXXIX. All that was best and worst in the Jewish character and history combined to render the Roman yoke intolerably galling to the nation. The peculiar position of Jerusalem—a sort of Mecca to the tribes acknowledging the Mosaic law—made Syria the most dangerous of all the Roman provinces. To that city enormous crowds of pilgrims of the most stiff-necked and fanatical of all races flocked, three times at least in every year, bringing with them offerings and tribute for the temple and its guardians, on a scale which must have made the hierarchy at Jerusalem formidable even to the world’s master, by their mere command of wealth. But this would be the least of the causes of anxiety to the Roman governor, as he spent year after year face to face with these terrible leaders of a terrible people. These high priests and rulers of the Jews were indeed quite another kind of adversaries from the leaders, secular or religious, of any of those conquered countries which the Romans were wont to treat with contemptuous toleration. They still represented living traditions of the glory and sanctity of their nation, and of Jerusalem, and exercised still a power over that nation which the most resolute and ruthless of Roman procurators did not care wantonly to brave.