THIS is the story of the scribes, pharisees, priests, and Levites, and
of certain Romans. It is intended as a phase of that divine history
already told to the world, but now told from another stand-point and
translated from the ancient Hebrew habits of life into modern American,
so that the reader may more readily understand the circumstances that
directed our actions. If it has been told aright, he may see why it was
that we crucified the Truth.
We--scribes and pharisees--have been vilified and abused for nineteen
hundred years because we acted as the circumstances of our lives
compelled us. The fact seems to be overlooked that we were not born
publicans and sinners, but upright and virtuous citizens, and that it
was out of the question for us to desert our own class and to ally
ourselves with those whose only recommendation appeared to lie in the
fact that they were poor and lowly, or else that they were social
outcasts and sinners. We could hardly be held to have been more worthy
of respect if we had violated our traditions of order and of virtue
to accept an entirely new code of ethics supported by such advocates;
which code, if carried out, meant the overthrow of all that we held
most sacred and worthy of preservation.
The integrity of the very Church itself--the foundation of our entire
system of social order--was threatened with destruction, and it was
only in the extremity of our need and after all other courses of action
were closed to us that we resorted to the last and sternest measure to
save human society from destruction.
Surely the truth is so unanswerable as to be axiomatic, that it is
better that one man should die rather than that the very laws that bind
human society together should be annihilated.
Yet for nineteen hundred years we have borne the odium of having
wantonly and callously performed a cruel and unjustifiable act.
Everything is in the view-point. The whole aspect of creation depends
upon where the observer stands to look at it.
Heretofore these great events of sacred history have been looked upon
from the point of view of that central and dominant Figure, and the
great plain of the world of mankind has been seen revolving dimly
and remotely around it. Our point of view--the point of view of the
scribes and the pharisees, the priests and the Levites, and certain of
the Romans--has never been considered and weighed in the balance.
This is intended as a history of those affairs as we saw them, and from
that view-point the divine Figure that shaped a new system that was
to dominate all other systems is beheld--when seen at all--not as the
pivot upon which everything swings, but as a single integer of society
at large--a centre of fermentation, very distant from us--disturbing
and dangerous, but remote.
For while we now and then saw Him near by, for the more part He hardly
entered our lives to disturb our daily affairs until towards the last
of His career.
This story that follows is intended by way of a vindication, and
we challenge all scribes and pharisees of this day who read it to
say if they themselves would have acted differently under the same
circumstances.
The world is the world and is a very mixed quantity, being composed
of good and bad in such a manner as to maintain the perfect mundane
balance that God has ordained. If Herod was an unscrupulous politician,
Caiaphas was a good priest; if Pilate, sitting in a high place of
authority, temporized to his own advantage, the young man of great
possessions who sought salvation was an honest and sincere searcher for
the truth--enthusiastic and impractical, perhaps, but sincere. Such
as these are a very few of the integers, good, bad, and indifferent,
that go to make up the sum-total of earthly life. Such as that life is
we do not make it--it is made for us; and we must obey its laws and
fulfil the destiny that Providence has assigned to us. If we were made
virtuous we must under normal conditions be virtuous; if we were made
vicious we must be vicious; and there the matter ends.
The world looks very big to us, and any one who dares to interfere
with the nice adjustment of its affairs him we always crucify, lest he
bring destruction upon us by overturning the elaborate mechanism of our
social order.
In this lies our exculpation. If we crucified the Truth, we did it to
save the world in which we lived.
Bearing this in mind, the reader is invited to here follow our story,
which has been translated into the conditions of modern American life,
and then to decide how far he can blame us for fulfilling the destiny
which God ordained for us.