She entered the Hall. By the time her head was bowed in prayer, he had entered, and had taken a seat on the last form, the fourth behind hers. When she first raised her head from her silent prayer, she looked around and backward. In her heart she was hoping he would be there. If he had not been bending in prayer, she must have seen him. After that she turned no more, the service soon occupied all her thoughts.
He too became utterly absorbed by the service, of which the address was the chief feature. It was largely expository, and from the first utterance of the speaker, it riveted Tom Hammond’s attention.
The speaker, himself a converted Jew, took as his text Deut. xxi. 22, 23.
“If a man have committed a sin worthy of death, and is sentenced to death, and thou hang him on a tree, his corpse shall not remain all night upon the tree, but, burying, thou shalt bury him on that day (because he who is hanged is accursed of God).”
“Now, brethren,” the speaker went on, “as far as I have been able to discover, in all the Hebrew records I have been able to consult, and in all the histories of our race, I have not found a single reference to a Hebrew official hanging of a criminal on a tree. To what, then, does this verse refer, and why is it placed on Jehovah’s statute-book?”
For a few moments he appealed to his Jewish hearers on points peculiarly Hebraic. Then presently he said,
“Now let us see if the New Testament will shed any light upon this.”
Turning rapidly the leaves of his Bible, he went on: “There is a book in the Christian Scriptures known as the Epistle to the Galatians which, in the tenth verse of the third chapter, repeats our own word from Deuteronomy:
“‘Cursed is every one that continueth not in all things which are written in the Book of the Law to do them,’ and in the thirteenth verse says, ‘Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us: for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree.’