They
Looked Upon The Revolting Scene As A Real And Living Fact.
One
hard-featured man near me clenched his fists and cursed the cruel
guards.
A pale, delicate-featured girl who was leaning out of her box,
with her brown eyes, dilated with horror, fixed upon the scene, suddenly
shrieked as a Roman soldier struck the unresisting Saviour, and fell
back fainting in the arms of her friends.
The Nazarene Prophet was condemned at last. Gestas gives evidence
against him, and also delivers Demas to the law, but is himself
denounced, and shares their sentence. The crowd howled with exultation,
and Pilate washed his hands in impotent rage and remorse. The curtain
came down leaving the uncultivated portion of the audience in the frame
of mind in which their ancestors a few centuries earlier would have gone
from the theatre determined to serve God and relieve their feelings by
killing the first Jew they could find. The diversion was all the better,
because safer, if they happened to the good luck of meeting a Hebrew
woman or child.
The Calle de Amargura - the Street of Bitterness - was the next scene.
First came a long procession of official Romans, - lictors and swordsmen,
and the heralds announcing the day's business. Demas appears, dragged
along with vicious jerks to execution. The Saviour follows, and falls
under the weight of the cross before the footlights. Another long and
dreary scene takes place, of brutalities from the Roman soldiers, the
ringleader of whom is a sanguinary Andalusian ingeniously encased in a
tin barrel, a hundred lines of rhymed sorrow from the Madonna, and a
most curious scene of the Wandering Jew. This worthy, who in defiance of
tradition is called Samuel, is sitting in his doorway watching the show,
when the suffering Christ begs permission to rest a moment on his
threshold. He says churlishly, Anda! - "Begone!" "I will go, but thou
shalt go forever until I come." The Jew's feet begin to twitch
convulsively, as if pulled from under him. He struggles for a moment,
and at last is carried off by his legs, which are moved like those of
the walking dolls with the Greek names. This odd tradition, so utterly
in contradiction with the picture the Scriptures give us of the meek
dignity with which the Redeemer forgave all personal injuries, has taken
a singular hold upon the imaginations of all peoples. Under varying
names, - -Ahasuerus, Salathiel, le Juif Errant, der ewige Jude, - his
story is the delight and edification of many lands; and I have met some
worthy people who stoutly insisted that they had read it in the Bible.
The sinister procession moves on. The audience, which had been somewhat
cheered by the prompt and picturesque punishment inflicted upon the
inhospitable Samuel, was still further exhilarated by the spectacle of
the impenitent traitor Gestas, staggering under an enormous cross, his
eyes and teeth glaring with abject fear, with an athletic Roman haling
him up to Calvary with a new hempen halter.
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