siege of more than six months was taken. Antigonus was made a captive. He was one of the Asmonæan or Maccabæan family of kings. While he lived Herod could not therefore feel safe, and so by a great sum of money he persuaded Antony to put him to death. Thus Herod the Great became the actual and reigning king of Judæa, Samaria and Idumæa in the year 37 B.C., and in the thirty-fifth year of his age.

And now began to be revealed more fully the awful wickedness of this man. For while adversity will bring out a man's good qualities and show his greatness of mind, prosperity will his weaknesses and vices and moral deformities.

expose

To be a king as Herod was, is to act as one pleases. This gives full liberty, a kind of unlimited and regal scope to selfishness and revenge and malice and mad ambition. So was it with Herod. He came to the throne through much blood, and by blood alone could he hold it. Though the opposing faction was subdued it was not extinct, and he was constantly tormented with a lively fear that some of them would seek his life in revenge or to restore the old Asmonæan dynasty. So he was daily putting some of them to death. His fears acted as witness, judge and jury against them. The Sanhedrim, who had tried him for his illegal execution of the robbers, he put to death wholly, excepting Pollio and Sameas. Through the entire siege they had counselled the Jews to yield to Herod. Sameas was the one who showed true manliness in accusing Herod when all others were silent and afraid. It would seem as if Herod respected such moral courage and independence, and rewarded it. He also put to death forty-five of the firmest friends of Antigonus. Of these cruelties there were holy witnesses, Zacharius and his wife Elizabeth, Anna the prophetess, and Simon the just, waiting to see our Lord that he might depart in peace.

The extreme selfishness and ambition of Herod are seen in his appointment of a high priest to fill the place of Hyrcanus now in exile. Anxious to keep from such a post of influence any one who could make himself prominent or important, Herod put into it an obscure and inferior man from among the captives at Babylon. This gave great trouble to Herod since it gave great offence to his own household. For he had married Ma

riamne, the grand-daughter of Hyrcanus, and her brother, Aristobulus, by right of succession, was entitled to the priesthood. And Alexandra, the mother of his wife and of the young man, was constantly urging the claims of her son. She even began to enlist the aid of Cleopatra in securing the office for him. And so Herod unable to resist the importunities and intrigues of these women, deposed the Babylonian and installed Aristobulus in the office of high priest. But he was also the legal heir by succession to the crown, and having gained the former point, Alexandra, with a peculiar ambition and pride, set herself to secure the throne of Judæa for her son in place of her son-in-law, Herod.

Aristobulus also by his remarkable nobleness and beauty of personal appearance as a young man of seventeen had gained a dangerous popularity with the people while officiating as high priest. The quick eye of Herod saw that the youth, heir in the true line to both mitre and crown, and the only male member surviving of the Asmonæan family, excepting his grandfather Hyrcanus, endangered his own popularity and even throne. He must be put out of the way. And so, while bathing at Jericho, his companions, as pre-arranged by Herod, dipped and ducked him, as if in sport, till he was drowned. Herod attempted to cover the crime by feigned tears and a splendid funeral and monument. But the vail was transparent to mother and sister and friends.

The mother sought revenge through Cleopatra, who persuaded Antony to call Herod to account for the death of Aristobulus. When Herod left Judæa to meet Antony in Syria he gave his government affairs and the charge of his family into the hands of his uncle Joseph. And doubting how it might fare with him, he charged his uncle to put Mariamne his wife to death, in case death should befall him. And this he did, he said, that no one, and especially the voluptuous Antony, might enjoy so rare a beauty as his wife after his decease.

This bloody command Joseph foolishly revealed to Mariamne. When Herod returned, his sister Salome, the very incarnation of jealousy and strife and domestic feuds, and between whom and his wife and mother-in-law there was perpetual hostility, persuaded him that Mariamne and his uncle had been too inti

mate in his absence, and that she and her mother had been plotting escape from Jerusalem. Herod in his first passion was about to draw a dagger on his wife. But loving her very deeply he refrained, and spent his rage on his uncle and his wife's mother. The former he killed outright, and without hearing a word of defence, and the latter he put in chains and in prison.

But a course of crime and blood has no end except in reformation. Plotting and falsehood always demand one more step, to cover and make sure against the last. The policy of Herod gave him neither safety nor any resting place. Deeper depths opened before him, and crimes more revolting engaged his heart and hand.

The deposed high priest Hyrcanus, the grandfather of his wife Mariamne, still lived. For twenty-four years he filled the sacred office at the head of the Jewish nation. He was now a venerable old man of eighty, fast ripening for the grave. One would not think him a dangerous rival. But a guilty conscience is full of fears. He was the last surviving male member of the Maccabean family. Herod wished to spill all the blood of that race except so much of it as was mingled with his own. And so, on some sham plot, invented for the occasion, he caused the old man to be tried, condemned and executed.

About this time, B.C. 31, Antony and Cæsar Augustus, two rivals for the chief honor of the Roman Commonwealth, came to battle at Actium. Antony was routed and in the year following, his case being hopeless, he voluntarily fell on his sword and so died. Herod, who had been his ally against Augustus, now found it necessary to seek the favor of the latter. It was a dangerous and very doubtful step to show himself to Augustus. Yet with that adroitness and diplomacy, in which few have been his equals, he had the interview and came away with multiplied honors. When he left Judæa on this dangerous errand he left his wife Mariamne and her mother under charge of his treasurer, and confined to a castle, with the express command that if he met his death in this visit they should be immediately put to death. The women bore the imprisonment with great indignation, and when Herod returned, his wife, who had learned his command from her keeper, showed a bitter alienation from him. For more than a year this alienation continued. Mariamne

hated more and more her monster husband, while his sister and his mother, Cyprus, did all they could to inflame his jealousy, and bring him to put her to death. Nor did they labor in vain, and by judges of Herod's own choice, and by his strong personal effort at the trial, she was condemned to death, on a false charge of attempting to poison him.

So died a virtuous and excellent princess, and the ornament of her times. In the beauty and the graces of her person she excelled all the women of her day. Her feelings of estrangement from her husband were natural and excusable. He was building the fortunes of his family on the ruins of hers. He had usurped the crown that belonged to her race. To favor his own purposes and gratify his intense and unscrupulous ambition, he had brought to a violent death her father Alexander, her grandfather Hyrcanus, her brother Aristobulus, and her uncle Antigonus, her father's brother. And twice had he given conditional orders for her own death. Few women, whom the world could honor, would bear all this, and maintain an affection for such a monster, though he were a husband.

But Herod loved Mariamne intensely. Of the ten wives whom he had during his life, she was the noblest and the most beloved by him. It was only in passion and in burning jealousy, inflamed by his sister and mother, that he ordered her execution. So soon as the act was performed, his better sense and his affection for her returned. Then agony, regret, remorse, and every scathing passion preyed on him. He found no rest by day or night. Go where he would, her image haunted him. He plunged into pleasure of various kinds, but in vain. He was nearly delirious, and would in his frenzy, order his servants to call Mariamne. Then there came a pestilence on the land, and he received it as a judgment of God. He forsook Judæa and gave up all the business of his kingdom, and finally had a severe and very lingering sickness.

On his recovery he returned to Judæa, but he never recovered his former good spirits, and was more cruel than ever to the end of his life. In putting her to death he put out his guiding star. After this all was dark to him, and though he lived thirty years yet, his life settled into a deeper and deeper gloom, through more horrid crimes, till it ended in an awful night.

What a family scene have we here presented! It is a royal household, standing at the head of God's ancient and loved people. From it go forth law and example for the wide lands of Judæa, Samaria and Idumæa. Intrigue, bribery and violence have given this Herodian family their exalted position, at the sacrifice of the Maccabean family, who had ruled the Jews for one hundred and twenty-nine years. A crown thus usurped gave an uneasy head to the usurper. If Herod could corrupt men to secure him this place, others could be corrupted to displace him. So anxieties, suspicions and jealousies were the Constant companions of this miserable king. Unscrupulous, unjust and unmerciful himself, he was daily looking to see the same, in kind and measure, meted out to himself. And so, nominally a king, he was really a slave. His fancies and fears were a thousand keepers over him. A sense of his own injustice and of merited punishment led him to look for poison in every cup of cold water, and an assassin at any unguarded corner, in Jerusalem or Jericho, or Samaria, or in the stronghold of Massada, or the rock city of Petra. He had no kingdom. He was a prisoner at large, and his broad liberty to go where he would was his deep danger. In his very bed-chamber he looked to find his servant the hiding of some rival Maccabaan. So he sought to inclose and make himself safe by a fortification of tombs. He encircled himself with the graves of the Sanhedrim, and of the noble patrons of the Asmonæan dynasty. He labored to protect himself from the royal line and the rivals of this line by building their sepulchres about him. If he would flee from care to his home, as to a strong tower, he had no home. This, as everything else that he touched, he had blighted. His shadow had fallen upon it, and it was dark. His breath was strange unto his wife, and she nobly refused his embrace and the hand that had twice drawn her death warrant.

And that God, whose judgments are strange and terrible in both worlds, might leave this man without guide or light to grope out his way of crime over the cliffs and into the awful chasm that awaited him, he suffered him, in a fit of jealousy and passion to put that noble woman to death. An eclipse then came over his sun that never passed off. So when Napoleon so basely disowned the noble Josephine. No battle, not even