bsent or did not vote.[5] The frivolity which characterizes old
established aristocracies, did not permit the judges to reflect long
upon the consequences of the sentence they had passed. Human life was
at that time very lightly sacrificed; doubtless the members of the
Sanhedrim did not dream that their sons would have to render account
to an angry posterity for the sentence pronounced with such careless
disdain.

[Footnote 1: Matt. xvi. 57; Mark xiv. 53; Luke xxii. 66.]

[Footnote 2: Matt. xxiii. 16, and following.]

[Footnote 3: Matt. xxvi. 64; Mark xiv. 62; Luke xxii. 69. John knows
nothing of this scene.]

[Footnote 4: _Levit._ xxiv. 14, and following; _Deut._ xiii. 1, and
following.]

[Footnote 5: Luke xxiii. 50, 51.]

The Sanhedrim had not the right to execute a sentence of death.[1] But
in the confusion of powers which then reigned in Judea, Jesus was,
from that moment, none the less condemned. He remained the rest of
the night exposed to the ill-treatment of an infamous pack of
servants, who spared him no indignity.[2]

[Footnote 1: John xviii. 31; Jos., _Ant._, XX. ix. 1.]

[Footnote 2: Matt. xxvi. 67, 68; Mark xiv. 65; Luke xxii. 63-65.]

In the morning the chief priests and the elders again assembled.[1]
The point was, to get Pilate to ratify the condemnation pronounced by
the Sanhedrim, which, since the occupation of the Romans, was no
longer sufficient. The procurator was not invested, like the imperial
legate, with the disposal of life and death. But Jesus was not a Roman
citizen; it only required the authorization of the governor in order
that the sentence pronounced against him should take its course. As
always happens, when a political people subjects a nation in which the
civil and the religious laws are confounded, the Romans had been
brought to give to the Jewish law a sort of official support. The
Roman law did not apply to Jews. The latter remained under the
canonical law which we find recorded in the Talmud, just as the Arabs
in Algeria are still governed by the code of Islamism. Although
neutral in religion, the Romans thus very often sanctioned penalties
inflicted for religious faults. The situation was nearly that of the
sacred cities of India under the English dominion, or rather that
which would be the state of Damascus if Syria were conquered by a
European nation. Josephus asserts, though this may be doubted, that if
a Roman trespassed beyond the pillars which bore inscriptions
f