274 THE OLIVE LEAF. CHAP. 



One can therefore easily understand, how, associated 

 as this place was with the consummation of man's 

 wickedness on the one hand, and of God's judgments 

 on the other, it should have received from the Jews the 

 infamous name of Ge-Hinnom or Gehenna, and be re- 

 garded as the appropriate earthly type of the place of 

 eternal misery an awful symbolism to which our Lord, 

 adopting on this point the current language of the time, 

 attached the seal of His authority. All these associa- 

 tions could not fail to make Jeremiah's dramatic sermon 

 in the Potter's Field one of the most solemn and 

 impressive ever preached. There was surely, too, a 

 singular appropriateness in the death of the arch-traitor 

 in such a place of sinister memories. His tragical fate 

 was an individual, but a most startling, illustration of the 

 doom which the prophet foretold concerning the whole 

 nation. Like a potter's vessel he was broken to pieces 

 in the very field which had been purchased with the 

 reward of his iniquity. And not long afterwards the 

 inhabitants of the city, sharing in his guilt, were put to 

 death by the Romans in the same way in the same place, 

 until there was no room for the crosses on which they 

 were crucified, and no wood to make them with. 



Our Lord, in His parable of the wicked husbandmen, 

 referred to the same striking image. He said, " Did ye 

 never read in the Scriptures, The stone which the 

 builders rejected, the same has become the head of the 

 corner ? Whosoever shall fall on this stone shall be 

 broken ; but on whomsoever it shall fall it shall grind 

 him to powder." The stone here alluded to was 



