Him, was still lifting his voice to proclaim the near Kingdom. But the people had turned

after Jesus, and He swayed them. And, oh! what power was there in His Face and

Word, and His look and deed. And Judas, also, had been one of them who, on their

early Mission, had temporarily had power given Him, so that the very devils had been

subject to them. But, step by step, had come the disappointment. John was beheaded,

and not avenged; on the contrary, Jesus withdrew Himself. This constant withdrawing,

whether from enemies or from success - almost amounting to flight - even when they

would have made Him a King; this refusal to show Himself openly, either at Jerusalem,

as His own brethren had taunted Him, or, indeed, anywhere else; this uniform preaching

of discouragement to them, when they came to Him elated and hopeful at some

success; this gathering enmity of Israel's leaders, and His marked avoidance of, or, as

some might have put it, His failure in taking up the repeated public challenge of the

Pharisees to show a sign from heaven; last, and chief of all, this constant and growing

reference to shame, disaster, and death - what did it all mean, if not disappointment of

all those hopes and expectations which had made Judas at the first a disciple of Jesus?

He that so knew Jesus, not only in His Words and Deeds, but in His inmost Thoughts,

even to His night -long communing with God on the hill-side, could not have seriously

believed in the coarse Pharisaic charge of Satanic agency as the explanation of all. Yet,

from the then Jewish standpoint, he could scarcely have found it impossible to suggest

some other explanation of His miraculous power. But, as increasingly the moral and

spiritual aspect of Christ's Kingdom must have become apparent to even the dullest

intellect, the bitter disappointment of his Messianic thoughts and hopes must have gone

on, increasing in proportion as, side by side with it, the process of moral alienation,

unavoidably connected with his resistance to such spiritual manifestation, continued and

increased. And so the mental and the moral alienation went on together, affected by

and affecting each other. As if we were pressed to name a definite moment when the

process of disintegration, at least sensibly, began, we would point to that Sabbath-

morning at Capernaum, when Chri st had preached about His Flesh as the Food of the

World, and so many of His adherents ceased to follow after Him; nay, when the leaven

so worked even in His disciples, that He turned to them with the searching question -

intended to show them the full import of the crisis - whether they also would leave Him?

Peter conquered by grasping the moral element, because it was germane to him and to

the other true disciples: 'To whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life.' But

this moral element was the very cliff on which Judas made shipwreck. After this, all was

wrong, and increasingly so. We see disappointment in his face when not climbing the

Mount of Transfiguration, and disappointment in the failure to heal the lunatick child. In

the disputes by the way, in the quarrels who was greatest among them, in all the

pettiness of misunderstandings and realistic folly of their questions or answers, we

seem to hear the echo of his voice, to see the result of his influence, the leaven of his

presence. And in it all we mark the downward hastening of his course, even to the

moment when, in contrast to the deep love of a Mary, he first stands before us

unmasked, as heartless, hypocritical, full of hatred - disappointed ambition having

broken down into selfishness, and selfishness slid into covetousness, even to the crime

of stealing that which was destined for the poor.