echless? How do your cheeks dare
to be red, John, when His are pale? How can you dare to shout, Peter,
when He is silent? What could you do? You ask Judas? And Judas answers
you, the magnificent, bold Judas Iscariot replies: 'Die!' You ought to
have fallen on the road, to have seized the soldiers by the sword, by
the hands, and drowned them in a sea of your own blood--yes, die, die!
Better had it been, that His Father should have cause to cry out with
horror, when you all enter there!"

Judas ceased with raised head. Suddenly he noticed the remains of a
meal upon the table. With strange surprise, curiously, as though for
the first time in his life he looked on food, he examined it, and slowly
asked:

"What is this? You have been eating? Perhaps you have also been
sleeping?"

Peter, who had begun to feel Judas to be some one, who could command
obedience, drooping his head, tersely replied: "I slept, I slept and
ate!"

Thomas said, resolutely and firmly:

"This is all untrue, Judas. Just consider: if we had all died, who would
have told the story of Jesus? Who would have conveyed His teaching to
mankind if we had all died, Peter and John and I?"

"But what is the truth itself in the mouths of traitors? Does it not
become a lie? Thomas, Thomas, dost thou not understand, that thou art
now only a sentinel at the grave of dead Truth? The sentinel falls
asleep, and the thief cometh and carries away the truth; say, where is
the truth? Cursed be thou, Thomas! Fruitless, and a beggar shalt thou be
throughout the ages, and all you with him, accursed ones!"

"Accursed be thou thyself, Satan!" cried John, and James and Matthew and
all the other disciples repeated his cry; only Peter held his peace.

"I am going to Him," said Judas, stretching his powerful hand on high.
"Who will follow Iscariot to Jesus?"

"I--I also go with thee," cried Peter, rising.

But John and the others stopped him in horror, saying:

"Madman! Thou hast forgotten, that he betrayed the Master into the hands
of His enemies."

Peter began to lament bitterly, striking his breast with his fist:

"Whither, then, shall I go? O Lord! whither shall I go?"

. . . . .. . .

Judas had long ago, during his solitary walks, marked the place where he
intended to make an end of himself after the death of Jesus.

It was upon a hill high above Jerusalem. There stood but one tree, bent
and twisted by the wind, which had torn it on all sides, half