The writers of the Old Testament who used the glittering lances of wit against the foes of truth and righteousness, had worthy successors in evangelists and apostles, and in Jesus himself. These men were indignant at hypocrisy and wrong-doing; they looked with scorn upon the swelling pretensions of the religious leaders; they expostulated with affectionate earnestness and severity with their own brethren who suffered themselves to be led astray. Indignation is not necessarily wrong or unchristian. The faculty of indignation is an essential part of human nature, and when aroused against evil its operations are beneficent. It in no wise diminishes the reverence we feel for Jesus, that he made a scourge of cords and lashed the traders and money-changers from the temple! Ruskin says, "There is no black horse in the chariot of the soul. One of the driver's worst faults is starving his horses; another is not breaking them early enough; but they are all good. Take, for example, one usually thought of as wholly evil--that of anger, leading to vengeance. I believe it to be quite one of the crowning wickednesses of this age, that we have starved and chilled our faculty of indignation, and neither desire nor dare to punish crimes justly." This faculty of righteous wrath when it takes shape in irony, ridicule, sarcasm, invective, is the mightiest foe of vanity, hypocrisy, pretension, corruption, and vice. By its sword do they perish. The teachers and writers of New Testament times, did not disdain to use in their work every instrument of power known to the human mind. From their own stand-point, at least, they had many false notions and customs to combat; they had the ignorant, prejudiced, officious and fault-finding to deal with; they were harrassed by narrow and persistent opponents; they had to do battle at every step. They might have exclaimed with a modern writer, "Let us be thankful that we have in wit a power before which the pride of wealth, and the insolence of office are abased; which can transfix bigotry and tyranny with arrows of lightning; which can strike its object over thousands of miles of space, across thousands of years of time; and which through its sway over an universal weakness of man, is an everlasting instrument to make the bad tremble and the foolish wince." _The Choice of the Jews._