6 When the chief priests therefore and officers saw him, they cried out, saying, Crucify him, crucify him. Pilate saith unto them, Take ye him, and crucify him: for I find no fault in him.



Ver. 6. Crucify him, crucify him] So afterwards the primitive persecutors cried out, Ad bestias, ad bestias, Christianos ad leones, To the beasts, to the beasts, Christians, to the lions, imputing the cause of all public calamities to them, as Tertullian testifieth. So they cried out at Geneva against Farellus, when the bishop first convented him, In Rhodanum, in Rhodanum, Into the Rhone River, into the Rhone, as the Papists still cry out against the professors of the truth, Ad ignem, ad ignem, to the fire with them, to the fire with them. Tollantur sacrilegi, tollantur. Let the wicked be destroyed, destroyed. Indeed in the form and style of their own sentence condemnatory, they pretend a petition to the secular power, In visceribus Iesu Christi ut rigor iuris mitigetur, atque ut parcatur vita; In the body of Jesus Christ so softened the rigour of the law and so that life was spared, so they will seem outwardly to be lambs, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Witness that chancellor of Salisbury, Dr Jeffery, who was not only contented to give sentence against certain martyrs, but also hunted after the high sheriff, not allowing him to spare them, though he would. So Harpsfield, archdeacon of Canterbury, being at London when Queen Mary lay dying, made all post-haste home to despatch those six whom he had then in his cruel custody; and those were the last that suffered for religion in Queen Mary’s reign.



I find no fault in him] No wonder! For he was (as Peter saith) "A lamb without blemish" (of original sin), "and without spot" (of actual sin), 1Pe_1:18. Neither was it without a sweet providence of God that he should be so often absolved from the desert of death, that thereby we might escape the manifold deaths that we had so well deserved.