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On Friday, the 3rd of April, at day-break, Jesus, surrounded by a bloodthirsty crowd, was dragged to the palace of Pilate, which is the fourth station. He walked in silence amid the throng, headed by the high-priest, the doctors, and the elders of Judah. They went back along the foot of Mount Sion, entered Jerusalem by the Sterquilinian gate, and, passing the Temple, arrived at the Pretorium.

"They would not enter it," says the evangelist, "lest they should be defiled, and prevented from eating the passover."

Thus have there been frequently seen, thus have we ourselves but too often seen wicked men, men athirst for blood, or already stained with it, mingling with their cruelties and their injustice vain scruples not adverse either to rapacity or pride, affecting a sort of tenderness of conscience, and seducing the simple by an appearance of religion.

These chief-priests, these senators, fearful of defiling themselves by entering the abode of a heathen magistrate, but who had no fears of defiling themselves when they bought of Judas the prisoner whom they have condemned, and on whose death they are bent-they, who presently will not be afraid to defile themselves with lies and calumnies, in order to wreak their revenge, stop, from religious scruples, at the door of Pilate, who is obliged to go out to give them audience. They denounced to him Jesus as a malefactor: they accused him of exciting the people to rebel, of forbidding the payment of tribute to Cæsar, of calling himself the Christ, of usurping the rights as well as the title of a king; and they had no

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doubt that, on their report, Pilate would without farther examination become their accomplice, and immediately pronounce sentence of condemnation. They were disappointed a feeling of natural equity, very rarely met with, on similar occasions, in a magistrate guided solely by human prudence, at first impelled Pilate to do his duty. He was desirous of learning the motives on which such heavy charges were founded: he went back into the Pretorium, ordered Jesus to be brought before him, questioned him, was told by him that he really called himself a king, but the king of a kingdom which is not of this world: and comprehending, though a gentile, much better than many Christians since his time have comprehended, that such royalty has nothing in common with the royalty of the princes of the world, that it could excite no just alarm for the Cæsars and their throne, he returned, accompanied by Jesus, to his accusers, and solemnly declared that he found no fault at all in him.

But at this moment there was a burst of complaints, murmurs, shouts, fury; and here began to be betrayed that weakness which was soon to lead to the consummation of the iniquity on the part of the Roman governor, and to the death of the innocent victim. Amidst the tumult, the chief priests cried out that Judea and Galilee were excited to revolt by the seditious discourses of Jesus. At the word Galilee, Pilate, already alarmed by the uproar, and apprehensive of the consequences, recollected that this country was under the jurisdiction of Herod, and thenceforward he was anxious only to get rid both of the accused and the accusers. He sent them, therefore, to the tribunal of the tetrarch, thus

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timidly referring to his decision charges submitted to his authority, charges which he had consented to examine, the falsehood of which he had himself ascertained, and on which he had definitively pronounced.

The Pretorium, as I have already had occasion to remark, is now nothing but ruins. The existing buildings are occupied by the Turkish governor. There is still to be seen the porch of red marble, which served for the entrance: it is in good preservation. One can no longer pass through it, because it has been walled up; but its colour renders it perfectly distinguishable.

The staircase by which our Saviour ascended has been removed to Rome, where it is an object of reverence, under the name of Scala santa.

You ascend, at the present day, by a way which leads to a spacious court, on the right of which are two long vaults conducting to the gallery, then called Xistum or Xistus. The distance from the preceding station to this is at least thirteen hundred paces.

The fifth station is at the palace of Herod. "And when Herod saw Jesus," says the evangelist, "he was exceeding glad, for he had desired to see him of a long season .... Then he questioned with him in many words, but he answered him nothing."

Jesus did not even tell him why he would not answer him; thus punishing, by absolute silence, the pride of him who thought to subject divine wisdom to the caprices of his vain curiosity. But the prince, blind as all those who will not comprehend the things of God, saw nothing but idiocy in a silence which was the chastisement of the hypocrisy with which he strove in some

measure to put to the test the knowledge and the power of the incarnate God; and, passing from curiosity to a not less impious scorn, he ordered him to be arrayed in a white robe, exposed him in this garb of derision to the insults and mockery of the populace, and sent him back to Pilate.

Of the palace where these sacrilegious scenes took place nothing is left but ruins, upon which now stand a few houses inhabited by Turks.

The last station of the Way of the Captivity is, like the first, at the Pretorium, whither Jesus was led back. The Roman governor, who, by his first compliances, had emboldened the calumniators, was affrighted at their audacity, and took a fresh step in iniquity. He knew that the "just man," whose fate was in his hands, had been delivered up to him out of envy alone. He still wished to save him from death; but, despairing of gaining a complete triumph for his innocence, he pronounced one of those decisions which violence never extorted but from fear; one of those decisions which have the inevitable effect of thenceforward laying the magistrate at the mercy of the wicked, and of hurrying him irrevocably into a first double dealing, the mere idea of which, at the outset, would have filled him with horror.

"I will chastise him," said Pilate, "and let him go:" and he ordered Jesus to be scourged. Ferocious soldiers lacerate with rods or with leathern thongs the body of him in whom the judge had just before publicly declared that he could find no fault at all. The blood starts under the repeated strokes; they throw over his mangled shoulders a tattered purple garment, put a reed into his

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hand, place a crown of thorns upon his head, thrust it down with violence, buffet him, spit in his face, and to these cruel outrages they add a mockery still more cruel: they kneel before him and say in horrible derision: "Hail, king of the Jews!"

It was this moment that Pilate chose to show him to the council of the Jews and to the people. He went up to the Lithostrotos, dragging after him Jesus, exhausted with fatigue, anguish, and ill-usage; and there, from a gallery which now bears the name of the arcade of the Ecce-Homo, he presented him to the impatient eyes of the multitude. "Behold the man!" he exclaimed; and the timid governor, who, out of compassion, thought it his duty to appear inhuman, persuaded himself that, at the sight of so strange a crown, purple robe, and sceptre, the royalty of Jesus, far from being a subject of alarm, would but excite scorn, or perhaps pity, flattered himself that the cruelties which he had authorised, and the bleeding image of which he placed before the eyes of the infuriated mob, would prevent the excesses in which it was desirous of indulging!

"Behold the man!" repeated the tigers, athirst for blood. "Crucify him! crucify him! let him be crucified!" and cries of death were raised on all sides. The din of the populace, the increasing tumult, the imprecations, the maledictions, the threats of the wrath of Cæsar, the fear of a general insurrection, agitated, alarmed, disconcerted the magistrate, and gave him a prey to all the torments that can assail a conscience which, out of weakness or fear, hesitates between the duty of saving an innocent man and the crime of

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