Page:Lives of the apostles of Jesus Christ (1836).djvu/214

 Yet what avails the bright array of happily conspiring circumstances, to prince or people, against the awful majesty of divine truth, or the pure, simple energy of human devotion? Within the obscurer corners of his vast territories, creeping for room under the outermost colonnades of that mighty temple whose glories he had pledged himself to renew,—wandering like outcasts from place to place,—seeking supporters only among the unintellectual mass of the people,—were a set of men of whom he probably had not heard until he entered his own dominions. They were now suggested to his notice for the first time, by the decided voice of censure from the devout and learned guardians of the purity of the law of God, who invoked the aid of his sovran power, to check and utterly uproot this heresy, which the unseasonable tolerance of Roman government had too long shielded from the just visitations of judicial vengeance. Nor did the royal Agrippa hesitate to gratify, in this slight and reasonable matter, the express wishes of the reverend heads of the Jewish faith and law. Ah! how little did he think, that in that trifling movement was bound up the destiny of ages, and that its results would send his name—though then so loved and honored—like Pharaoh's, down to all time, a theme of religious horror and holy hatred, to the unnumbered millions of a thousand races, and lands then unknown;—an awful doom, from which one act of benign protection, or of prudent kindness, to that feeble band of hated, outcast innovators, might have retrieved his fame, and canonized it in the faithful memory of the just, till the glory of the old patriarchs and prophets should grow dim. But, without one thought of consequences, a prophetic revelation of which would so have appalled him, he unhesitatingly stretched out his arm in vindictive cruelty over the church of Christ, for the gratification of those whose praise was to him more than the favor of God. Singling out first the person whom momentary circumstances might render most prominent or obnoxious to censure, he at once doomed to a bloody death the elder son of Zebedee, the second of the great apostolic. No sooner was this cruel sentence executed, than, with a most remarkable steadiness in the execution of his bloody plan, he followed up this action, so pleasing to the Jews, by another similar movement. Peter, the active leader of the heretical host, ever foremost in braving the authority of the constituted teachers of the law, and in exciting commotion and dissatisfaction among the commonalty, was now seized by a military force, too strong to