re. Many a man becomes a murderer,
not by premeditation, but having struck a first blow and seeing his
victim in agony he cannot bear that that eye should live to reproach him
and that tongue to upbraid him with his cruelty. So it was here. The
people were infuriated by the sight of the innocent, unmurmuring
Sufferer whom they had thus mangled. They cannot bear that such an
object be left to remind them of their barbarity, and with one fierce
yell of fury they cry, "Crucify Him, crucify Him."[25]

A third time Pilate refused to be the instrument of their inhuman and
unjust rage, and flung the Prisoner on their hands: "Take Him
yourselves, and crucify Him: for I find no crime in Him." But when the
Jews answered that by their law He ought to die, because "He made
Himself the Son of God," Pilate was again seized with dread, and
withdrew his Prisoner for the fourth time into the palace. Already he
had remarked in His demeanour a calm superiority which made it seem
quite possible that this extraordinary claim might be true. The books he
had read at school and the poems he had heard since he grew up had told
stories of how the gods had sometimes come down and dwelt with men. He
had long since discarded such beliefs as mere fictions. Still, there was
something in the bearing of this Prisoner before him that awakened the
old impression, that possibly this single planet with its visible
population was not the whole universe, that there might be some other
unseen region out of which Divine beings looked down upon earth with
pity, and from which they might come and visit us on some errand of
love. With anxiety written on his face and heard in his tone he asks,
"Whence art Thou?" How near does this man always seem to be to breaking
through the thin veil and entering with illumined vision into the
spiritual world, the world of truth and right and God! Would not a word
now from Jesus have given him entrance? Would not the repetition of the
solemn affirmation of His divinity which He had given to the Sanhedrim
have been the one thing wanted in Pilate's case, the one thing to turn
the scale in the favour of Jesus? At first sight it might seem so; but
so it seemed not to the Lord. He preserves an unbroken silence to the
question on which Pilate seems to hang in an earnest suspense. And
certainly this silence is by no means easy to account for. Shall we say
that He was acting out His own precept, "Give not that which is holy to
dogs"? Sh