For a thousand years no improvement whatever took place in the condition of the people--they had no arts; they lived in mud huts at a period when architecture reached a higher level than it had ever attained to previously.

When the patriot prophets arose, endeavoring to reform them with words of fire--the sacred fire of truth--they killed them.

One chance remained to them.

They were offered a religion that would have purified them, in place of the superstition that had demoralized them, and they cried with one voice, as everyone who had known their history and their social characteristics knew they would cry, "Not this Man, but Barabbas." That was from the earliest period in the history of the race the watchword of the Hebrews.

Not the man, but the robber.