Whereupon if she were guilty, she fell under a terrible penalty,--her body testifying visibly to her sin.

If she was innocent, nothing followed.
And now, who sees not that the Holy One dealt with His hypocritical assailants, as if they had been the accused parties?
Into the presence of incarnate Jehovah verily they had been brought: and perhaps when He stooped down and wrote upon the ground, it was a bitter sentence against the adulterer and adulteress which He wrote.

We have but to assume some connexion between the curse which He thus traced 'in the dust of the floor of the tabernacle' and the words which He uttered with His lips, and He may with truth be declared to have 'taken of the dust and put in on the water,' and 'caused them to drink of the bitter water which causeth the curse.' For when, by His Holy Spirit, our great High Priest in His human flesh addressed these adulterers,--what did He but present them with living water[581] 'in an earthen vessel[582]'?
Did He not further charge them with an oath of cursing, saying, 'If ye have not gone aside to uncleanness, be ye free from this bitter water: but if ye be defiled'-- On being presented with which alternative, did they not, self-convicted, go out one by one?
And what else was this but their own acquittal of the sinful woman, for whose condemnation they shewed themselves so impatient?
Surely it was 'the water of conviction' ([Greek: to hydor tou elegmou]) as it is six times called, which _they_ had been compelled to drink; whereupon, 'convicted ([Greek: elegchomenoi]) by their own conscience,' as St.John relates, they had pronounced the other's acquittal.

Finally, note that by Himself declining to 'condemn' the accused woman, our Lord also did in effect blot out those curses which He had already written against her in the dust,--when He made the floor of the sanctuary His 'book.' Whatever may be thought of the foregoing exposition--and I am not concerned to defend it in every detail,--on turning to the opposite contention, we are struck with the slender amount of actual proof with which the assailants of this passage seem to be furnished.

Their evidence is mostly negative--a proceeding which is constantly observed to attend a bad cause: and they are prone to make up for the feebleness of their facts by the strength of their assertions.