re Herod's mercenaries, or real gallant Roman soldiers, we are not
told. Either had unlimited power under a military despotism, in an
anarchic and half-enslaved country; but whichever they were, he has the
same answer to them of common morality. You are what you are; you are
where you are. Do it as well as you can. Do no violence to any man,
neither accuse any man falsely, and be content with your wages.

Ah, wise politician, ah, clear and rational spirit, who knows and tells
others to do the duty which lies nearest them; who sees (as old Greek
Hesiod says), how much bigger the half is than the whole; who, in the
hour of his country's deepest degradation, had divine courage to say, our
deliverance lies, not in rebellion, but in doing right. But he has
sterner words. Pharisees, the separatists, the religious men, who think
themselves holier than any one else; and Sadducees, materialist men of
the world, who sneer at the unseen, the unknown, the heroic, come to him.
And for Pharisee and Sadducee--for the man who prides himself on
believing more than his neighbours, and for the man who prides himself on
believing less--he has the same answer. Both are exclusives, inhuman,
while they are pretending to be more than human. He knew them well, for
he was born and bred among them, and he forestalls our Lord's words to
them, "O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath
to come?"

At last his preaching of common morality is put to the highest test. The
king--the tyrant as we should call him--the Herod of the day, an usurper,
neither a son of David, nor a king chosen by the people, tries to
patronize him. The old spirit of his forefather Aaron, of his forefather
Phineas, the spirit of Levi, which (rightly understood), is the Spirit of
God, flashes up in the young priestly prophet, in the old form of common
morality. "It is not lawful for thee to have thy brother's wife." We
know the rest; how, at the request of Herodias' daughter, Herod sent and
beheaded John in prison, and how she took his head in a charger and
brought it to her mother. Great painters have shown us again and again
the last act--outwardly hideous, but really beautiful--of St John's
heroic drama, in a picture of the lovely dancing girl with the prophet's
head in a charger--a dreadful picture; and yet one which needed to be
painted, for it was a terrible fact, and is still, and will be till this
wi