buy and bribe the traitor. You suborned witnesses, whose testimony
they resent it, that they seek to imprison or put to death those who make it.
Why this sudden change of feeling? Why this sensitiveness to the charge of blood-guiltiness? It cannot be from dread of the men who bring it forward. They are few in number, and have no power to injure. The charge which they make is accompanied with no threat; nor does it bring with it any temporal evil or danger. It can issue in nothing disastrous or fatal, so far as man and time and the laws are concerned. Why then this nervous irritability under the charge brought against them by these unoffending men,—these fishermen of Galilee?
Conscience had made them cowards. Its murmurs were irrepressible and unwearied. It tormented them before the time. Their attempts to smother and silence it only turned its course and sent it inward, to work the disease into the whole frame, thereby producing that singular revulsion of feeling which has been noticed, and occasioning that wrathful sensitiveness which they so often exhibited under the preaching of the apostles. Bold enough before the deed was done, now they are full of continual alarms, as if haunted by a spectre, or beset with weapons which they feared might every moment pierce them, and avenge the blood which they had shed.
Conscience said,
1. His blood is upon you; and you know it. You shed it, and you cannot deny the deed. You thirsted for the shedding of it. You gloried in the deed.
2. It was innocent blood, and you knew it. It was the blood of one who had never wronged you, who had done evil to none, but good to all; against whom no charge of sin had been proved.
3. It was blood shed by means of treachery and falsehood. You had to buy and bribe the traitor. You suborned witnesses, whose testimony