The Fury of the Condemned
Repulsive as my recollections were, I spent the greater part of the night in bandaging their wounds and relieving the thirst which scarcely less than their wounds wrung them. There were women, too, among those wrecks of the sword, and now that the frenzy of the day was past, they exhibited a picture of the most heart-breaking dejection. Lying on the ground wounded and with every lineament of their former selves disfigured, they cried from that living grave alternately for vengeance and for mercy. Then tearing their hair and flinging it, as their last mark of hatred and scorn, at the legionaries, they devoted them to ruin in the name of the God of Israel. Then passion gave way to pain, and in floods of tears they called on the names of parent, husband, and child, whom they were to see no more!
It was known that at daybreak the prisoners were to die, and the din of hammers and the creaking of wagons bearing the crosses broke the night with horrid intimation. At length the stillness terribly told that all was prepared. The night, measured by moments, seemed endless, and many a longing was uttered for the dawn that was to put them out of their misery. Yet when the first gray light fell through the casements and the trumpets sounded for the escort to get under arms, nothing could exceed the fury of the crowd. Some rushed upon the spears of the reluctant soldiery; some bounded in mad antics through the hall; others fell on their knees and offered up horrid and shuddering prayers; many flung themselves upon the floor, and in the paroxysm of wrath and fear perished.
Shocked and sickened by this misery, I withdrew from the gate, where the tumult was thickest, as the soldiery were already driving them out, and returned to my old lair, to await the will of fortune. But I found it occupied. A circle of the wounded were standing round a speaker, to whom they listened with singular attention. The voice caught my ear; from the crowd round him I was unable to observe his features, but once drawn within the sound of his words, I shared the general interest in their extraordinary power. He was a teacher of the new religion.
The Teachers of Christianity
In my wanderings through Judea I had often met with those Nazarenes. Their doctrines had a vivid simplicity that might have attracted my attention as a philosopher, but philosophy was cold to their power. The splendor and strength of their preaching realized the boldest traditions of oratory. Yet their triumph was not that of oratory; they disclaimed all pretension to eloquence or learning, declaring that even if they possessed them, they dared not sully by human instruments of success the glory due to Heaven. They carried this self-denial to the singular extent of divulging every circumstance calculated to deprive themselves and their doctrines of popularity. They openly acknowledged that they were of humble birth and occupation, sinners like the rest of mankind, and in some instances guilty of former excesses of blind zeal, persecutors of the new religion, even to blood. Of their Master they spoke with the same openness. They told of His humble origin, His career of rejection, and His death by the punishment of a slave. To the scoffer at their hopes of a kingdom to be given by the sufferer of that ignominious death, they unhesitatingly answered that their hope was founded expressly upon His death, and that they lived and rejoiced in the expectation that they were, like Him, to seal their faith with their blood!
The Strength of the New Religion
I had often seen enthusiasm among my countrymen, but this was a spirit of a distinct and a loftier birth. It had the vigor of enthusiasm without its rashness; the gentleness of infancy, with the wisdom of years; the solemn reverence of the Jew for the divine Will, free from his jealous claims to the sole possession of truth. The Law and the Prophets were perpetually in their hands, and they often embarrassed our haughty doctors and acrid Pharisees with questions and interpretations to which no reply could be returned but a sneer or an anathema. But in the power of conviction, in the master art of striking the heart and understanding with sudden light, like the bolt from heaven, I never heard, I never shall hear, their equals. To call it eloquence was to humiliate this stupendous gift; the most practised skill of the rhetorician gave way before it, like gossamer, like chaff before the whirlwind. It broke its way through sophistry by the mere weight of thought. It had a rapid reality that swept the hearer along. In its disdain of the mere decorations of speech, in the bold and naked nerve of its language, there was an irresistible energy—the energy of the tempest, giving proof in its untamable rushings of its descent from a region beyond the reach of man. I never listened to one of these preachers but with a consciousness that he was the depository of mighty knowledge. He had the whole mystery of the human affections bare to his eye. Among a thousand hearts one word sent conviction at the same instant. All their diversities of feeling, sorrow, and error were shaken at once by that universal language. It talked to the soul!
Of these overwhelming appeals, which often lasted for hours together and to which I listened overwhelmed, nothing is left to posterity but a few fragments, and those letters which the Christians still preserve among their sacred writings—great productions and giving all the impression that it is possible to transmit to the future. But the living voice, the illumined countenance, the frame glowing and instinct with inspiration!—what can transmit them?
“Here,” said I, as I often stood and heard their voices thundering over the multitude, “here is the true power that is to shake the temples of heathenism. Here is a new element come to overthrow or to renovate the world.”