The disciples steadily remained the diligent and constant attendants of
their heavenly teacher, in his long and frequent seasons of instruction
in the temple, where he boldly met the often renewed attacks of his
various adversaries, whether Herodians, scribes, Pharisees or Sadducees,
and in spite of their long-trained subtleties, beat them out and out,
with the very weapons at which they thought themselves so handy. The
display of genius, of taste, of learning, of ready and sarcastic wit,
and of heart-searching acuteness, was so amazing and super-human, that
these few days of open discussion established his divinely intellectual
superiority over all the elaborate science of his accomplished
opponents, and at the same time secured the fulfilment of his destiny,
by the spite and hatred which their repeated public defeats excited in
them. Imagine their rage. Exposed thus before the people, by whom they
had hitherto been regarded as the sole depositaries of learning, and
adored as the fountains of right, they saw all their honors and power,
to which they had devoted the intense study of their whole lives,
snatched coolly and easily from them, by a nameless, untaught pretender,
who was able to hold them up, baffled and disgraced, for the amusement
of the jeering multitude. Here was ground enough for hatred;――the
hatred of conceited and intolerant false learning, against the
discerning soul that had stripped and humbled it;――the hatred of
confident ambition against the heroic energy which had discomfited it,
and was doing much to free a long enslaved people from the yoke which
formal hypocrisy and empty parade had long laid on them. And again,
the intolerable thought that all this heavy disgrace had been brought
on the learned body of Judaism by a Galilean! a mere carpenter of
the lowest orders, who had come up to Jerusalem followed by a select
train of rude fishermen and outcast publicans;――and who, not being
able to command a single night’s lodging in the city, was in the
habit of boarding and lodging in a paltry suburb, on the charity of
some personal friends, from which place he quietly walked in for the
distance of two miles every morning, to triumph over the palace-lodged
heads of the Jewish faith. From such a man, thus humbly and even
pitiably circumstanced, such an invasion and overthrow could not
be endured; and his ruin was rendered doubly easy by his very
insignificance, which now constituted the chief disgrace of their
defeat. Never was cause more closely followed by its effect, than this
insulted dignity was by its cruel vengeance.