1. It is an old and a true saying, that no man ever became utterly base at once. Utter baseness requires a long education; but it is carried on in secret, and so we do not notice it. The heinous, shocking crime first startles us, but it is only the end of a long series. It was so, no doubt, with Judas. He had had, as every man, whether good or bad, has in some form or other, an evil tendency in his heart. Here was his trial; here might have been his moral education. That tendency became his master, and plunged him in headlong ruin.
There was, first of all, the pleasure of fingering the coin; then there was the desire of accumulating; then there was the reluctant hand and the grudging heart in distributing alms; then there was the silent appropriation of some trifling sum, as indemnification for a real or imagined personal loss; then there was the first unmistakable act of petty fraud-and so it went on and on, until the disciple became the thief, the trusted became the traitor the Apostle of Christ the son of perdition.
Was any woman, do you suppose, ever the better for possessing diamonds? but how many have been made base, frivolous, and miserable by desiring them? Was ever man the better for having coffers full of gold? But who shall measure the guilt that is incurred to fill them? Look into the history of any civilized nations; analyse, with reference to this one cause of crime and misery, the lives and thoughts of their nobles, priests, merchants, and men of luxurious life. Every other temptation is at last concentrated into this; pride, and lust, and envy, and anger, all give up their strength to avarice. The sin of the whole world is essentially the sin of Judas. Men do not disbelieve their Christ; but they sell Him.2 [Note: Ruskin, Ethics of the Dust, Lect. i. § 10 (Works, xviii. 217).]
2. There is to our minds an inexpressible meanness in the fact that it was not the prospect of any vast amount of wealth that tempted him. That would not have justified or excused him, but it would have made his conduct more explicable. But that, for a sum less than £4, he should have sold such a Master and such a Friend indicates the depth of wickedness. And apart altogether from what Christ was in Himself, and what He came to do, which have gathered round this deed of Judas a criminality that is unequalled, there was a baseness in the whole character of his act which makes it hideous, and which has made his name synonymous with badness in its worst form.
But the magnitude of any passion in the human soul is altogether independent of the limits of its opportunity for indulgence. Tyranny is as possible in a cottage as on an Eastern throne; though it may have to content itself with more restricted gratification. Envy, pride, sensuality, maliciousness, though they may be gratified on a vast area, and with terrific results to millions, or within the narrowest limits of a very humble lot, are, as passions, in the one case what they are in the other-powers that overshadow and gradually absorb all else in the soul, and give it throughout the impress and colour of their own malignity. Just as there are bodily diseases which, at first unobtrusive and unnoticed and capable of being extirpated if taken in time, will spread and grow until first one and then another limb or organ is weakened or infected by them, so that at last the whole body is but a habitation for the disease which is hurrying it to the grave; so in the moral world one unresisted propensity to known wrong may in time acquire a tyrannical ascendancy that will make almost any crime possible in order to gratify it.
The creed which makes human nature richer and larger makes men at the same time capable of profounder sins; admitted into a holier sanctuary, they are exposed to the temptation of a greater sacrilege; awakened to the sense of new obligations, they sometimes lose their simple respect for the old ones; saints that have resisted the subtlest temptations sometimes begin again, as it were, by yielding without a struggle to the coarsest; hypocrisy has become tenfold more ingenious and better supplied with disguises; in short, human nature has inevitably developed downwards as well as upwards, and if the Christian ages be compared with those of heathenism they are found worse as well as better, and it is possible to make it a question whether mankind has gained on the whole.1 [Note: J. R. Seeley, Eece Homo, chap. xxiv.]
All men who know themselves are conscious that this tendency [degeneration], deep-rooted and active, exists within their nature. Theologically it is described as a gravitation, a bias toward evil. The Bible view is that man is conceived in sin and shapen in iniquity. And experience tells him that he will shape himself into further sin and ever-deepening iniquity without the smallest effort, without in the least intending it, and in the most natural way in the world if he simply let his life run. It is on this principle that, completing the conception, the wicked are said further in the Bible to be lost. They are not really lost as yet, but they are on the sure way to it. The bias of their lives is in full action. There is no drag on anywhere. The natural tendencies are having it all their own way; and although the victims may be quite unconscious that all this is going on, it is patent to every one who considers even the natural bearings of the case that “the end of these things is Death.” When we see a man fall from the top of a five-storey house, we say the man is lost. We say that before he has fallen a foot; for the same principle that made him fall the one foot will undoubtedly make him complete the descent by falling other eighty or ninety feet. So that he is a dead man, or a lost man, from the very first. The gravitation of sin in a human soul acts precisely in the same way. Gradually, with gathering momentum, it sinks a man further and further from God and righteousness, and lands him, by the sheer action of a natural law, in the hell of a neglected life.1 [Note: H. Drummond, Natural Law in the Spiritual World, 101.]
3. When Judas let the character which he had slowly formed go out into his terrible treachery, he felt as if a bridge were broken behind him. In that bewildering night in the garden, he was swept from the side of Christ, and only then did he begin to realize what he had done and what he had lost. He could no more look upon the face of the Master he had sold. The trustful, happy circle of the Twelve was broken, and he, of them all, was left utterly alone. However they might meet in secret, and fearfully, to speak of their past and their future, of the death of their love and hope, he felt that he had no more part or lot among them. There is not any distance in space or time, not any change in circumstances, which will so cut a man off from his fellow-men as one sin will do. But it will generally be found that this sin is the outcome of a secret life which stands discovered by it. It is God's way of letting us see, even now, what final judgment will disclose, the revelation of an utter incompatibility, which makes a man seek no more a fellowship where he never had a true share.
