Page:Lives of the apostles of Jesus Christ (1836).djvu/466

 the truths of the gospel, so were they. If he was an unbeliever in the resurrection of Jesus, so were they; and had he survived till the accomplishment of that prophecy, he could not have been slower in receiving the evidence of the event, than they. As it was, he died in his unbelief; while they lived to feel the glorious removal of all their doubts, the purification of all their gross conceptions, and the effusion of that spirit of truth, through which, by the grace of God alone, they afterwards were what they were. Without a merit, in faith, beyond Judas, they maintained their dim and doubtful adherence to the truth, only by their nearer approximation to moral perfection; and by their nobler freedom from the pollution of sordid and spiteful feeling. Through passion alone he fell, a victim, not to a want of faith merely,—for therein, the rest could hardly claim a superiority,—but to the radical deficiency of true love for Jesus, of that "charity which never faileth," but "endureth to the end." It was their simple, devoted affection, which, through all their ignorance, their grossness of conception, and their faithlessness in his word, made them still cling to his name and his grave, till the full revelations of his resurrection and ascension had displaced their doubts by the most glorious certainties, and given their faith an eternal assurance. The great cause of the awful ruin of Judas Iscariot, then, was the fact, that he did not Jesus. Herein was his grand distinction from all the rest; for though their regard was mingled with so much that was base, there was plainly, in all of them, a solid foundation of true, deep affection. The most ambitious and skeptical of them, gave the most unquestionable proofs of this. Peter, John, both the Jameses, and others, are instances of the mode in which these seemingly opposite feelings were combined. But Judas was without this great refining and elevating principle, which so redeemed the most sordid feelings of his fellows. It was not merely for the love of money that he was led into this horrid crime. The love of four dollars and eighty cents! Who can believe that this was the sole motive? It was rather that his sordidness and selfishness, and ambition, if he had any, lacked this single, purifying emotion, which redeemed their characters. Is there not, in this reflection, a moral which each Christian reader can improve to his own use? For the lack of the love of Jesus alone, Judas fell from his high estate, to an infamy as immortal as their fame. Wherever, through all ages, the high heroic energy of Peter, the ready faith of Andrew, the martyr-fire of James