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IV

COMRADES

On that darkest night that the world has ever known, the night of the great betrayal, there was one man even more wretched than Judas Iscariot. When the traitor rose from the supper-table, and went out into the night, this man kept his seat. He remained in the room, and, although his soul was too storm-swept to permit of his paying much heed to the gracious words that poured from the Master’s lips, every syllable of that last tender speech fell at least upon his outward ear. To all appearances he was among the faithful few. And yet, as he sat there that night, he almost envied Judas. If Judas was a traitor, he was at least a traitor branded and exposed; whilst this man felt like a traitor within the camp, a spy being solemnly entrusted with the custody of the most sacred secrets. Yet even a spy has this to plead, that he was snared into duplicity by love of gold. Judas was a traitor, but he could at least show thirty pieces of silver in extenuation of his guilt. He had sinned, but not altogether for the sake of sinning. This man, however, remaining among the Eleven, felt that his treachery had been gratuitous. He had not been lured to it by lust of gain. There he sat in the light within; but, even as he sat there, he thought wistfully of Judas in the darkness without. For Judas had betrayed Jesus; but would Judas have betrayed his Lord if somebody had not first betrayed Judas? And the man of whom I now write felt that upon him rested that grave initial guilt. He was the betrayer of the betrayer. I do not know his name. The Bible is a book of most considerate reticences, most exquisite chivalries, and most noble delicacies; it does not needlessly pillory the offender. This man’s identity is never disclosed. But there he is! 

II

I need scarcely say that I refer to the disciple who was paired with Judas when ‘He sent them forth two and two.’ We have all admired the wondrous wisdom of that shrewd, sagacious plan. There is no evidence that Jesus relied much upon conferences, conventions, congresses, and the like. As a permanent factor in character-building He trusted to the influence of a companion rather than to the inspiration of a crowd. He was a great believer in those walks, side by side, along the winding Galilean highways. He attached extraordinary value to those heart-to-heart talks beneath the overarching branches, when the tired comrades camped together at the close of the long and trying day. He staked everything, that is to say, upon the virtue of friendship. He trusted implicitly in the impress of character upon character. And so, all through the ages, He has been pairing us off. He began it when He sent them forth, two this way, and two that way, along the dusty lanes of Palestine. And He kept it up. Here you have Peter and John ; there you have Paul and Silas ; yonder you have Barnabas and Mark. Later on you have the stories of Luther and Melancthon ; of Latimer and Ridley ; of John and Charles Wesley; and of a host of similarly felicitous couplings. The Franciscan friars, the Dominican monks, the Lollard preachers, the travelling pairs of evangelists, all furnish corroborative evidence of the wisdom of the sacred scheme. The Pope and General Booth had little in common ; but they both saw the advantage of sending out their emissaries two by two. The sisters may wear convent garb or coal-scuttle bonnets ; it does not matter: the principle is the same. There is no need to limit to a narrow domestic significance the great primal affirmation that it is not good that a man should be alone. 

III

And yet — who knows? — it might have been better for Judas had he been alone. I do not like to say so, but, really, it could not have been much worse. I do not know with which of the disciples Judas was paired; but, whoever it was, Judas had nothing to thank him for. Judas would have managed the great business of living — and dying — at least as well if he and that man — whoever he was — had never met. One summer evening the pair of them sat talking together beneath the shade of a great myrtle-tree in a certain fragrant field. Judas admired the great protecting tree, and took a singular fancy to the flowery field. When he had money enough, he said, he would buy it. Did that other disciple — whoever he was — ever revisit that field years afterwards ? Could he bear again to sit under that tree and think? For that field was afterwards known as The Field of Blood. Judas bought it, as he that summer evening planned to do. But he bought it with the thirty pieces of silver. And on the tree — the tree beneath whose restful shade they sat together — he ultimately hanged himself. Did that other disciple — whoever he was — ever revisit that field ? If so, he must have noticed that the myrtle is blasted and dead ; that the grass is tall and rank; and that the stones thrown in contempt by passers-by mark the lonely and dis- honoured grave. And as he stood gazing upon that desolate, unhallowed spot, the wind, as it sighed through the withered branches of the dead tree, must have whispered some ugly thoughts to him. 

IV

If the Crucifixion had been made the subject of a judicial inquiry, and if I had been retained by the relatives of Judas Iscariot, I should at once have demanded the name of the disciple with whom, in the old two-and-two days, Judas was paired. And I should have subjected that disciple to a severe and searching examination. I should have asked questions such as these: 

1. Is it not a fact that all the disciples were voluntary workers, who left fathers and mothers and houses and land, and laid aside all their possessions, that they might follow the Messiah? 

2. That being so, may we not take it that, when you first met Judas Iscariot, he was an enthusiast, an idealist, passionately devoted to his Master, capable of splendid sacrifices, and animated by the purest and loftiest ambitions? 

3. Is it not a fact that, when the Master paired off His disciples, sending them forth two and two, you were coupled with Judas? Is it not probable that there was some divine purpose, some design for your mutual good, in the linking of your lives? And did not that comradeship continue unbroken from that opening act of consecration until the night of the great betrayal? 

4. How do you account for the fact that, during those years of closest intimacy and constant intercourse with yourself, the motives of Judas, from being spiritual, became sordid, whilst his whole character changed so much for the worse? 

5. You have admitted that, at the opening of your friendship, Judas was capable of the most splendid devotion, the most unselfish dedication; you. have also admitted that, at the close of your friendship, Judas descended to the most ignoble theft, to the basest treachery, to a murderer’s guilt, and to a suicide’s grave. Does not that seem to indicate that your influence, so far from helping and inspiring him, was positively harmful and injurious? Does it not appear, on the face of it, that you cast a kind of malignant spell over him? Is it not reasonable to assume that he would probably have been a better man if he had never seen you? I do not know how that disciple — whoever he was — would have answered these questions, I should very much like to know. 

V

I should like to know because the matter is of vital interest to me. To be perfectly candid, I am not altogether disinterested. Like this man — whoever he was — I have friends with whom I daily walk and talk. There are flowery fields in which we wander familiarly together, trees beneath whose sheltering shade we love to sit. I do not wish these fields to be as that field, these trees as that one. I am sure that this disciple — whoever he was — no more desired to destroy Judas by his companionship than I desire to blight by my friendship these dear intimates of mine. 

It is so easy to drift along on the stream of an irresponsible conversation. It is so easy to talk as my friend talks; to echo his thoughts; to endorse, approve, confirm. It is so much more difficult to challenge his doubt, to combat his cynicism, to rally his despair. But, by the memory of that Field of Blood, with its blasted tree and its stony mound, I must import a tang of honesty into our friendship. I must sometimes cut right athwart the current of his thought. I must be prepared on occasions to rouse, to reprove, and even to rebuke him. When that other disciple — whoever he was — saw the field with its rank grass, its heap of stones, and its dead and withered tree, he thought remorsefully of the way in which he had consented to the opinions of Judas when, in the old days, they sat beneath those leafy boughs together. And the memory of those earlier conversations was a torture to his soul. 

David Hume saw his mother, in her old age, utterly disconsolate. He remembered that, in the days of his boyhood, that same mother had told him the story of Jesus, and taught his infant lips to pray. He knew it was the doubts that he had uttered that had wrecked his mother’s faith. He had ruthlessly destroyed the shrine before which she worshipped. He saw her bow her grey head in anguish, and he bowed his in an agony of remorse. He would have laid down his life that day to have been able to unsay all that he had said. But the fatal poison had penetrated his mother’s very heart. She had once believed; her son had flippantly destroyed her faith. There are no back moves in the greatest game of all. The past is irrevocable. The tender grace of a day that is dead can never come back to me. Poor David Hume was revisiting those lovely fields — the sweetest in which our feet ever wander — the fields in which, in the days of auld lang syne, he and his mother had wandered hand in hand. But lo! the bluebells and the buttercups had all gone; the tree beneath which they sat together, she weaving daisy-chains for his boyish brow, was blasted and bare. And when next he revisited the scene, the field contained a mound! I am glad I did not see that other disciple — whoever he was — when he visited, in the field in which they once rested together, the stony grave of Judas. I am glad I did not stand with David Hume beside his mother’s mound. But I am glad that I have heard of their terrible and bitter experiences. Their sadness may yet sanctify my own companionship and save me from similar disaster. 

VI

I said that I did not know how that other disciple — whoever he was — would answer my penetrating questions. But I do. He would have replied that he was afterwards converted. John, Peter, James, and the other disciples were all new men after Pentecost. That is excellent, most excellent, so far as it goes. But I wonder if it would have satisfied the mother of Judas as she stood beside that stone-littered grave! I wonder how it would have affected his sister, sitting there, convulsed in a passion of weeping, beneath the tree under which her brother once sat! I wonder what his father or his brother would have said in answer to that specious plea! Tell a man whose daughter has been ruined that her betrayer has since been converted, and mark the curl upon his lip! Tell a woman whose boy languishes in a felon’s cell that the man who compassed his downfall is now a pillar in a Christian Church, and see the eloquence of her indignant eyes! It is a great thing, a very great thing, for a sinful man to be forgiven, to be converted, to be admitted to the sacred fellowship of the Church which the Saviour purchased with His own blood. But every converted man who, like that other disciple, has stood beneath a withered myrtle, and seen through his tears the stony mound amidst the long rank grass, knows to his endless shame that there is such a thing as being converted too late. 

VII

Caius Martius, one of the commissioners appointed in the days of Trajan to levy taxes on the land-owners of the Syrian provinces, found in the fourth subdivision of Jerusalem a certain field that could not be taxed because nobody would admit ownership. It was No Man’s Land. It could not be bought or sold. It contained nothing but the broken stump of a withered myrtle-tree and, just beside it, two mounds. Two!

When Doctor Johnson was a small boy he one day refused point-blank to accompany his father to Uttoxeter market. The incident passed. But nearly seventy years afterwards the memory of it filled the great doctor with remorse. But what could he do? His father had been many years dead. 

And so, as all the world knows, the old doctor went, at the height of his fame, to Uttoxeter market, stood bare-headed in the pouring rain for some time on the very spot which his father’s stall formerly occupied, and hoped that this act of contrition would prove expiatory. Does not a statue representing the doctor’s public penance mark the spot to this very day?

When Michael Hebblethwaite was an old man, honoured and revered, he was tortured by the recollection that his younger brother had, years ago, paid on the gallows the last penalty of his guilt. A conviction fastened itself upon the old man’s mind that, had his influence on his younger brother been as helpful as an elder brother’s influence should have been, it would have saved the younger brother from dark deeds of guilt and shame. Michael Hebblethwaite thereupon petitioned the authorities to be granted the privilege of burial in the gloomy prison-yard in which his brother’s dishonoured bones had for so many years reposed. 

When, at the long last, Arthur Dimmesdale’s conscience fully asserted itself, he went to the public pillory and stood beside Hester Prynne as the partner of her shame, and shared with her the bitter reproaches of her Puritan accusers. 

When that other disciple — whoever he was — turned sorrowfully away from the field of blood that was once the field of brotherhood, did he ordain that, when his time should come, his bones should be laid beside the bones of Judas, under the myrtle-tree, beneath whose friendly shade they once sat and talked together? 

-F.W. Boreham