CONTENTS
| PAGE | ||
| Proem | [v] | |
| CHAPTER | ||
| I. | The Voice of One Crying in the Wilderness | [1] |
| II. | Herod the Tetrarch | [8] |
| III. | The Priests and the Levites | [13] |
| IV. | What Went Ye Down for to See? | [30] |
| An Interlude | [42] | |
| V. | The Beginning of the Works | [52] |
| VI. | The Young Man with Great Possessions | [63] |
| VII. | Among the Romans | [75] |
| VIII. | One of Them Named Caiaphas Being High-Priest That Same Year | [88] |
| IX. | The Man Blind from Birth | [96] |
| X. | A Voice from the Dead | [123] |
| XI. | Nothing But Leaves | [154] |
| XII. | The One Thing We Lack | [171] |
| XIII. | The Shadow of Death | [183] |
| An Interlude | [199] | |
| XIV. | Veritas Divinis, Veritas Mundi | [209] |
| XV. | Judas | [226] |
| XVI. | A Glimpse of Agony | [236] |
| XVII. | The End of the World | [249] |
| XVIII. | The Spirit and the Flesh | [253] |
PROEM
THIS is the story of the scribes, pharisees, priests, and Levites, and of certain Romans. It is intended as a phase of that divine history already told to the world, but now told from another stand-point and translated from the ancient Hebrew habits of life into modern American, so that the reader may more readily understand the circumstances that directed our actions. If it has been told aright, he may see why it was that we crucified the Truth.
We–scribes and pharisees–have been vilified and abused for nineteen hundred years because we acted as the circumstances of our lives compelled us. The fact seems to be overlooked that we were not born publicans and sinners, but upright and virtuous citizens, and that it was out of the question for us to desert our own class and to ally ourselves with those whose only recommendation appeared to lie in the fact that they were poor and lowly, or else that they were social outcasts and sinners. We could hardly be held to have been more worthy of respect if we had violated our traditions of order and of virtue to accept an entirely new code of ethics supported by such advocates; which code, if carried out, meant the overthrow of all that we held most sacred and worthy of preservation.
The integrity of the very Church itself–the foundation of our entire system of social order–was threatened with destruction, and it was only in the extremity of our need and after all other courses of action were closed to us that we resorted to the last and sternest measure to save human society from destruction.
Surely the truth is so unanswerable as to be axiomatic, that it is better that one man should die rather than that the very laws that bind human society together should be annihilated.