The Prophet Is
Stripped And Scourged At The Pillar Until He Drops From Exhaustion.
He
is dragged anew before Pilate and examined, but his only word is, "Thou
hast said." The scene lasts nearly an hour.
The theatre was full of
sobbing women and children. At every fresh brutality I could hear the
weeping spectators say, "Pobre Jesus!" "How wicked they are!" The bulk
of the audience was of people who do not often go to theatres. 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.
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