"Good gracious, man, what has that subject to do with this?" said the General.
"A good deal, I think, sir. Did you ever ask yourself who it was that betrayed Jesus?"
"Judas Iscariot, I suppose."
"No, sir, Judas was only the catspaw—scorned through all the ages and burnt in a million effigies, but nearly as innocent of the death of his Master as you or I. The real betrayer was the High Priest of the Jews. He was the head of the bad system which Christ came to wipe out, and he saw that if he did not destroy Jesus, Jesus would destroy him. What did he do? He went to the Governor, the Consul-General of the Roman Occupation, and said, 'This man is setting himself up against Cæsar. If you let him go you are not Cæsar's friend.'"
"Well?"
"That's what the High Priest of Islam is doing in Egypt now. As I was going into the Agency yesterday I met the Grand Cadi coming out. You know what he is, sir—the most fanatical supporter of the old dark ways—slavery, divorce, polygamy, all the refuse of bad Mohammedanism."
"Well, well?"
"Well, my father told me the Grand Cadi had said, 'If you let Ishmael Ameer go on it will be death to the rule of England in Egypt.'"
"And what does it all come to?"
"It comes to this, sir—that if the Chancellor of El Azhar has told me the truth—if, I say if—when we take Ishmael Ameer and shut him up in prison for life with nothing but a desert around him, we shall be doing something that bears an ugly resemblance to what the Romans did in Palestine."