Page:Lazarus, a tale of the world's great miracle.djvu/313

Rh come? Betrayest thou the Son of man with a kiss?"

It was as though He said: "Thou wast My friend, thou who comest for a crime, canst thou yet kiss Me? Of a truth such treachery is past conception. Ah, surely, 't is only the Son of man thou thinkest to deceive. Thou canst not hope thus to cheat thy God."

But the traitor's work was over, the work that seemed but the spawn of madness now. All that he had undertaken he had accomplished, and he fell back into the darkness; his brain reeled, and his heart seemed to swell within him as though bursting with the sudden revelation of that which he had done.

He had betrayed the Lord, betrayed his Christ, his Friend—for what? For thirty pieces of silver! But thirty thousand could not bring back for him eternal life! Eternal death, that was all that loomed before him. Oh, why, why had they urged him on to perpetrate this awful deed? Of a truth they had been keen in intuition who thus had singled out the vilest, weakest heart in all Judaea to do this thing. Lost, lost, lost, in this world and the next! Through greed and avarice, the leading instinct and the most cursed attribute of the Jews; that love of gain that swamps all noble thoughts, sucking as it were into a whirlpool of fetid water all that is great and good, stifling each exalted aspiration.

Meekly, with that noble gait with which none other could compare, with quiet dignity and with no trace of fear, Jesus stepped forward.

"Whom seek ye?" He asked of the commander