"later days are the wisest and the surest witnesses."*

Posterity is not a respecter of persons. Having no bias from hope or fear, the historian will throw into the shade of oblivion those blazoned excellencies, which had no existence; and he will exhibit in their full deformity the excesses of the libertine, and the outrages of the oppressor.

When Herod commanded John to be destroyed, he was under no apprehension from the visitation of laws, or the censures of his subjects. He forgot that his crime would be read with indignation in distant ages, and distant countries; he little imagined that the panic, which seized him, when he supposed John to have risen from the dead, would be employed to "point a moral in the sanctuary," or to "adorn a tale" for the theatre, it may be, or for the closet. But, if the disgrace which awaited his memory had occurred to him, it might have rescued him from guilt; or, at least, it might have made him deeply sensible of his wickedness, without the concurrent aid of a persuasion that John had risen from the dead. The fear of men unseen might sooner have led to the fear of an unseen God.

Lord Bacon, with his wonted sagacity, informs us that the most extravagant and chimerical fear of lucky or unlucky omens have sometimes been experienced by the doughty champions of atheism. In the instances produced by him, there are weak

* 'Αμέραιδ ̓ ἐπίλοιποι

Μάρτυρες σοφώτατοι,-PINDAR.

nesses and puerilities of which a rational Theist is utterly incapable, and upon which he would look with pity rather than scorn in the most ignorant, and, therefore, the most credulous of his fellow

creatures.

Of this glaring and deplorable inconsistency in the human mind we have another example in Herod, when he passed so quickly from the gaiety of infidelity to the gloom of superstition. In his early and confirmed habits of thought and conversation he had set at naught every argument for a future state of retribution; yet by the tumultuous agitation of a soul polluted with blood he was driven from one extreme to the other. Yesterday, he exclaimed, "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." "Surely that which befalleth beasts befalleth the sons of men, even one and the same thing befalleth them, as die the one, so the other die; yea, they have all one breath, so that a man hath no pre-eminence above a beast; for all is vanity." But to-day, what is the language of our heroic boaster-" John is risen from the dead."

The conduct of Herodias has, in some points, a strong resemblance to the cruelty of Parysatis; and therefore I may, without impropriety, lay before you two or three particulars.

Mesabates, an eunuch of the king of Persia, was supposed to have cut off the head and hands of Cyrus, a favourite son of Parysatis, and by this act he must have intended to ingratiate himself with

* See Ecclesiastes, chap. iii. ver. 19.

Artaxerxes the reigning king and elder brother, who had weighty reasons for jealousy of Cyrus. Mesabates however took care to give no direct offence to the mother of Cyrus; and therefore, in order to wreak her vengeance she had recourse to a stratagem. She was eminently skilful in chess, and would sometimes play with Artaxerxes. She proposed to play with him for a thousand daricks, (£700, because a darick's value is 14 shillings). She pretended to be ill during the game; she voluntarily lost it, and instantaneously paid down the money. Again, she proposed to play on different conditions-that the winner should have at his or her complete disposal any five servants of the conquered, whom the conqueror might choose. Not discerning her remoter views, Artaxerxes consented; he lost the game; he gave up to Parysatis five of his eunuchs; and among them was Mesabates, distinguished for his fidelity. Upon discovering that Parysatis had put the unhappy man to death, his conscience took the alarm, and severely did he blame himself for his want of caution, and his want of firmness. When the queen, in answer to his reproaches, insultingly said to him, "If I, a queen, care not for the loss of a thousand daricks, how can you who are a king, feel any concern for the life of an old eunuch." His wrath became fiercer from the bitter and barbarous taunt, and he was struck dumb with amazement and horror. Crime, heaped upon crime, at last opened to him the cunning and the malice of his mother in the darkest, but the truest colours. He seized Gigis, the accomplice of Pary

satis, and commanded her to be executed, even when she had been acquitted upon her trial. He could not indeed persuade himself to sign a fatal sentence against a mother and a queen, but he banished her to Babylon for life, and declared that while she continued there, he would not visit the hated spot. This declaration was extorted from him by the power of conscience, when reproving him for suffering himself to be the instrument of female craft, and female vengeance.

Now, Parysatis, like Herodias, was vindictive. But in satiating her rage, Herodias was less cunning, and less malignant. She desired Salome to ask openly for the head of John; but Parysatis covered her detestable purpose under a general stipulation, in which there was no hint of severity to the slaves, who were to be made over to her. Herodias was content to destroy John by a short process of decapitation; Parysatis commanded Mesobates to suffer the acute and protracted pains of death, for his skin was first torn off from his flesh, and then the mangled carcase was stretched upon three transverse crosses.

- From the sacred historians we do not learn, whether or not Herodias was struck with the terror, which overtook Herod. But we find, that Parysatis did not entirely escape punishment; and, when controlled in the exercise of mischief, severed from the minions and flatterers of a court, and confined by a rigorous sentence to one place, where regal dignity was obscured, must not her wounded pride have been at last attended by a wounded conscience? Must not her days have passed without.

one cheering reflection; and in the night must not her imagination have been visited by the spectres of victims weltering in blood, and calling down upon their murderer vengeance from the offended gods? Happily, the sacred historian has recorded the power of conscience upon the mind of Herod.

You cannot forget what I some months ago told. you of Herod-that the prostrations of vassalsthat the flattery of dependents-that the dainties of the banquet-that the pageantry of a court—that the full possession of power-that the recent, the unblamed, perhaps the applauded, exercise of that. power in the destruction of an innocent man, could not ultimately protect Herod from self-reproachthat, in the murdered John, he saw, not merely a blameless man, but that, to his disordered imagination, the guiltless, the once friendless and helpless sufferer had actually risen from the dead; and that the great and sole purpose of his resolution was the infliction of condign punishment upon his barbarous destroyer. Such are the multiplied scenes of woe which rushed upon the mind of Herod when, unexpectedly, he was roused to a sense of his own aggravated crime. He could not look over it-he could not deny it—he did not appeal to his nobles for excuses, nor to his wife and corrupter for consolation-he did not dare to justify the atrocious outrage on the ground of personal indignity, because, forsooth, an obscure, austere, fanatical ascetic, who wore camel's hair, and fed on locusts and wild. honey in the wilderness, had presumed to arraign the moral character of a sovereign, and his royal consort.