He was amazed at the new turn which was given to life,
at the reasons assigned for the curses which were dealt to these
Jewish doctors. They were damned for their lack of mercy, judgment,
faith, for their extortion, excess, and because they were full of
hypocrisy and iniquity. They were fools and blind, but not through
defects which would have condemned them in Greece and Rome at that
day, but through failings of which Greece and Rome took small
account. Charmides pondered and pondered, and saw that this Jew had
given a new centre, a new pivot to society. This, then, was the
meaning of the world as nearly as it could be said to have a single
meaning. Read by the light of the twenty-third chapter, the twenty-
fourth chapter was magnificent. 'For as the lightning cometh out of
the east, and shineth even unto the west, so shall the coming of the
Son of Man be.' Was it not intelligible that He to whom right and
wrong were so diverse, to whom their diversity was the one fact for
man, should believe that Heaven would proclaim and enforce it? He
read more and more, until at last the key was given to him to unlock
even that strange mystery, that being justified by faith we have
peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Still it was idle for
him to suppose that he could ever call himself a Christian in the
sense in which those poor creatures whom he had seen were
Christians. Their fantastic delusions, their expectation that any
day the sky might open and their Saviour appear in the body, were
impossible to him; nor could he share their confidence that once for
all their religion alone was capable of regenerating the world.
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