The charge was made, the usual question propounded. The Master had glanced at her but once. He seemed to be looking afar, beyond the Temple and its terraces, beyond the horizon itself. But the accusers were impatient. He bent forward and with a finger wrote on the ground. The letters were illegible, perhaps, yet the symbol of obliteration was in that dust which the morrow would disperse. Again he wrote, but the charge was repeated, louder, more impatiently than before.
Jesus straightened himself. With the weary indulgence of one to whom hearts are as books, he looked about him, then to the dome above.
“Whoever is without sin among you,” he declared, “may cast the first stone.”
When he looked again the crowd had slunk away. Only Ahulah remained, her head bowed on her bare white arm. From the lateral chamber the priest still peered, the carbuncle glistening on his lip.
“Did none condemn you?” the Master asked.
And as she sobbed merely, he added: “Neither do I condemn you. Go, and sin no more.”
To the elders this was very discomforting. They had failed to unmask him as a traitor to God, to Rome even, or yet as a demagogue defying the Law. They did not care to question again. He had worsted them three times. Nor could they without due cause arrest him, for there were the Pharisees. Besides, a religious trial was full of risk, and the [pg 157]coöperation of the procurator not readily to be relied on. It was that coöperation they needed most, for with it such feeling as might be aroused would fall on Rome and not on them. As for Pilate, he could put a sword in front of what he said.
In their enforced inaction they got behind that wall of prejudice where they and their kin feel most secure, and there waited, prepared at the first opportunity to invoke the laws of their ancestors, laws so cumbersome and complex that the Romans, accustomed to the clearest pandects, had laughed and left them, erasing only the right to kill.
At last chance smiled. Into Jerusalem a rumor filtered that the Nazarene they hated so had raised the dead, that the suburbs hailed him as the Messiah, and that he proclaimed himself the Son of God. At once the Sanhedrim reassembled. A political deliverer they might have welcomed, but in a Messiah they had little faith. The very fact of his Messiahship constituted him a claimant to the Jewish throne, and as such a pre[pg 158]tender with whom Pilate could deal. Moreover—and here was the point—to claim divinity was to attack the unity of God. Of impious blasphemy there was no higher form.
It were better, Annas suggested, that a man should die than that a nation should perish—a truism, surely, not to be gainsaid.