Page:Lazarus, a tale of the world's great miracle.djvu/190

178 to, besought and feared, than a humble doorkeeper, perhaps, in the house of the Lord.

In these days Caiaphas rarely read the prophets, lest some text of his own choosing should confound him. The man he least desired to see was Pilate. The man Pilate most desired to see was Caiaphas. No Roman could fail to know that Judæa was ruled by the letter of the law. A legal education was considered the most important in the schools, a strict adherence to the Mosaic ordinances enforced by severest penalty at the earliest age. As enlightenment brought wider range of ideas, so the law of the Sabbath grew more rigid, the noose of the Mosaic Law was drawn the tighter round the people's necks. No one coming from an outside world, and an independent one, like that of Rome, could fail to see that the law of Moses was but wielded as a sceptre of despotism over a lawyer-ridden country. The day would come when Rome itself would take some hints and terrify its own people by the tyranny of an enforced religion that brooked no resistance, that made even argument a sin, that made absolute the dominion of the law.

It was easy to see, thought Pilate, why the chief priests feared the Nazarene, for by His miracles He completed prophecy, and by His actions enforced the commandments of the Mosaic Law; thus confounding the tyranny of perverted argument exercised by the Pharisees and priests for their own ends and crushing out by such fulfilments the slanderous assertions disseminated by His enemies that His doctrines were opposed to the teaching of the Scriptures or the ordinances of the Jewish law.