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DIVINITY SCHOOL
TROWBRIDGE LIBRARY

anfctoofcs for Bible Classes
antr ^ribate g>tutr£nis,
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AND

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THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS— JOHN TUM-B^ELST
BY REV. J. FEATH&R

EDINBURGH
T. & T. CLARK, 38 GEORGE STREET
1894

PRINTED DY MORRISON AND GIBB,
FOR
T. & T. CLARK, EDINBURGH.
LONDON: SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTON, KENT, AND CO. LIMITED.
NEW YORK I CHARLES SCRIBNER's SONS.
TORONTO I THE WILLARD TRACT DEPOSITORY.

THE LAST OF THE
PROPHETS
A STUDY OF
THE LIFE, TEACHING, AND CHARACTER
OF
JOHN THE BAPTIST

REV. J. FEATHER

EDINBURGH
T. & T. CLARK, 38 GEORGE STREET

PREFACE

While the rest of the great characters of Scripture have had much
study bestowed on them, and deservedly so, standing as they did
at the turning-points of national history, or holding aloft the word
of life in dark and cloudy days, John the Baptist, who closes the
Old Dispensation and inaugurates the New, has seemed to suffer
a strange neglect. The books upon his life and character are
few, even now. Yet his calm strength and nobleness, like that of
a mountain, which does not shrink as the storm gathers about it
and bursts upon it, the gloom of his environment, and the pathos
of his end, make a picture without a parallel, even among the
noble army of martyrs.
There are two reasons to account for this apparent neglect.
First, his proximity to the greatest world-character of all, to
whom he gave testimony, and in the presence of whom he bowed
himself. John and Jesus — to resume our figure— are peaks in
the same historic mountain-range ; and all eyes, as is natural, are
drawn to the higher, and all feet which have trod this Sinai at all,
have endeavoured, in thought at least, to reach its highest slopes.
In the radiance of the dayspring from on high, all earth-born
fires, however large and bright, are paled. But if we set the
gauge of our intention to John, we shall find him well worth our
climbing, find "moral bracing in the breathing of his difficult
air" ; while, as we bring contemporaneous facts to his light, we
shall see that they yield their meaning and significance.
The second reason is, the meagreness of the. records. A few

8 PREFACE
brief notices in the New Testament, and a few well-known pas
sages of Josephus, afford almost all we know of the external
conditions of his life. It has been my endeavour in the following
pages to expound the bearing and draw out the treasures of
these. But, going behind them, I have tried to reach the springs
of his character, and to exhibit the relations he held to the world
of his own day. However it may have succeeded, there is here
the attempt made to answer those requirements which Carlyle
lays down for true biography : " How did the world and man's
life, from his particular position, represent themselves to his
^mind? How did co-existing circumstances modify him from
without ; how did he modify these from within ? With what
endeavours and what efficacy rule over them ; with what resist
ance and what suffering sink under them ? "
In the course of this " study," I have freely used the various
" Lives of Christ," and available authorities on the different
subjects as they have arisen. To them I am under much obliga
tion, and where they are quoted, I trust they are acknowledged.1
Fortunately, the life of the Baptist does not afford, with one or
two exceptions, a theological battle-ground. It and its import
are rather matters for clear apprehension than for citation of
authorities. And as the character is of much more consequence
than the controversy, I have refrained from introducing the latter,
except where it seemed needful for the removal of obstacles to
apprehension of the former. I would offer this book as a con
tribution to the better understanding of one of the purest and
loftiest lives which have ever blessed the world, and shall be glad
if it accomplishes, in any appreciable degree, that end. J. F.
Croydon, August 1894.
1 More than a word of general acknowledgment is due to the exhaustive
and scholarly work of Dr. Reynolds on "John the Baptist." It is a careful,
candid, and able piece of work.

CONTENTS

 i 
PAGE
INTRODUCTION  II
CHAP. I. — HOME LIFE  21
CHAP. II. — " IN THE DESERTS "  32
CHAP. III. — "THE THOUGHT THAT BREATHES" ... 43
CHAP. IV. — " THE WORD THAT BURNS .... 53
CHAP. V. — "THE WRATH TO COME"  61
CHAP. VI. — "WHAT. THEN MUST WB DO ? " .... 71
CHAP. VII. — " THE BAPTISM OF JOHN "  79
CHAP. VIII. — "COMEST THOU TO ME?"  88
CHAP. IX. — "I SAW AND BARE RECORD" .... 103
(a) TO THE DEPUTATION ..... 104
(/3) TO HIS OWN DISCIPLES ..... 108
(y) THE "SON OF GOD"  Ill
(S) THE BRIDEGROOM . . . . . .119
CHAP. X. — ON THE STEEP SLOPE  122
CHAP. XI. — OVER THE PRECIPICE  134
CHAP. XII. — JESUS ; AND NEMESIS  139
NOTE A — ST. LUKE I. 5 — II. 52  147
NOTE B — "SON OF GOD"  153
0

THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS

INTRODUCTION
By the time at which the New Testament opens, the Mediter
ranean Sea had become a Roman lake. For a couple of centuries
Rome had been steadily advancing her boundaries, subduing and
making tributary the nations, even the strongest, which opposed
her in her fate-like march to universal conquest ; until, at the
death of Augustus (a.d. 14), all the countries which sloped
towards the Great Sea acknowledged her authority. Caesar's
writ ran in all the lands from the Atlantic seaboard on the west
to the Armenian mountains, the river Tigris, and the Arabian
deserts on the east ; from the Great Desert of Africa and the
cataracts of the Nile, up to the Caucasian range of mountains,
the Black Sea, the Danube, and the Rhine, beyond which lay the
impregnable forests and fierce tribes of Germany, to the English
Channel on the north. Only the barriers of nature itself seemed
strong enough to stop the march of this imperial race. A glance
at the map shows that she ruled over all we are accustomed to
regard as the civilised world. Sometimes by direct conquest ;
sometimes by taking advantage of the straitened circumstances
of other peoples, proclaiming a protectorate, then absorbing
those whom it protected, this world-empire had been built up,
until there was no place, and it stood alone in the midst of the
earth. To become the vassals of this conquering people was, to the
11

12 THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
Jews, to enter upon the last act of a long and gloomy tragedy.
Medo- Persian, Greek, Egyptian, and Grasco-Syrian in turn had
ruled over the proud and restless race which inhabited a country
about the size of the principality of Wales. Unfortunately it lay
in the line of march between the growing Western and the
waning Eastern powers ; and behind them all we catch glimpses
now and again of the Roman in his steady, calm oncoming, who
cleared them all out of his path and spread his authority over
the land as he advanced.
From the death of Alexander the Great (B.C. 323), under
whom they had been at peace, there had come a long succession
of dark and cloudy days for the ill-starred Jews. Oppressions,
unbearable in their weight and sickening in their cruelty, bore
them down and broke their spirit. Between the Ptolemies and
Seleucidae they were frequently between the upper and nether
millstones. In the times of comparative quiet which followed
upon their acceptance of the first Ptolemy, the people grew and
multiplied, alike in numbers and in wealth. And again Jeshurun,
having waxed fat, began to kick. Greek manners and morals
began to insinuate themselves into Hebrew society, bringing in
their wake that dry-rot among the foundations, which, in the
nature of things, is ever the result of moral laxity. Additional to
this, in the case of the Jews, was the fact that this development
invaded and weakened the belief which was their very raison
d'Hre as a race, — their separateness to Jehovah as the people for
His own possession,— a belief they had cherished, defined more
clearly and held more closely as persecutions and captivity had
repeatedly borne down on them from outside nations ; while at
the same time it militated against the sacredness of their high
ideal, sapping the strength of the confidence that Jehovah would
be mindful of His own and deliver them.
The Hellenising party grew to be the party of power. It
strengthened itself greatly during the earlier years of the reign of
Antiochus Epiphanes (B.C. 175-164), to whom the province passed,
with the sanction of Rome, on the defeat of Egypt. Joshua

INTRODUCTION 13
obtained by bribe the high priesthood, and changed his name to
Jason. He built a gymnasium, to which he attracted the youth
of the city ; he weaned them by degrees from the habits and
opinions of their fathers, and trained them in a complete system
of Grecian education, and allowed the services of the Temple to
fall into disuse.1 His successor, Menelaus, carried out the policy
still further, intensifying it both by sacrilege and murder.
But action and reaction are opposite, if, in the moral sphere,
they are not seen at once to be equal. Always had there been a
party zealous for the law ; and the widespreading, all-invading
laxity of the period defined and focussed them, sharply outlining
them against the dark background. The law — a law at once
human and divine — which in our own history gave rise to Puritans
and afterward to Methodists, produced in the age under con
sideration the Chasidim, or Pious, who, whatever they became
by the New Testament period, at least originated in purity of
motive. They stood to uphold the authority of the law, and to
preserve the high theocratic ideal of national life and privilege.
The Jews had gained nothing and lost much in external
condition by the substitution of the Syrian for the Egyptian
dynasty. Especially under Antiochus Epiphanes did they find
themselves beneath the harrow. When on an expedition to
Egypt, a false rumour of his death gave rise to a religious insur
rection against Menelaus the high priest, one of his creatures.
" The intelligence of the insurrection, magnified into a deliberate
revolt of the whole nation, reached Antiochus." He marched on
Jerusalem, easily captured it, massacred many of its inhabitants,
and desecrated with the most odious defilements the Temple and
its sacred place, which the Jews had considered for centuries the
one holy spot in the universe. But even this was not the end, as
it was not the worst of his oppressions : we read of unresisting
multitudes butchered in cold blood, of the inhibition of the
national religion, the forcible substitution of idolatry, of sacrifices
of swine, and of the most revolting cruelties upon those who were
1 Milman.

14 THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
faithful enough to disobey. Well might the Jews consider this
period as forming one of the darkest and most fearful chapters in
their history.
Again does the law of action and reaction enter. The Chasidim
in religion become paralleled by the Maccabees in patriotism.
The higher spirituality of life and devotion in the former looks
across to a corresponding peak in the heroism of the latter. And
the patriotism sprang out of the religion. A grand figure is that
of old Mattathias, as, with his five sons behind him, he stands in
the breach to dispute and defy the king's edict against the
worship of Jehovah, and as he sinks, worn out with years and
toil, in the midst of the fight : equally grand that of Judas, his
son, who took the standard from the failing grasp of his dying
father, rallied to it the zealous, the patriotic, the valorous of the
people, carried it to victory after victory against veteran generals
and disciplined troops who far outnumbered his own, until he
seemed invincible ; and who, by his enterprise and sagacity,
secured the results of his achievements and brought his country
to the verge of becoming an independent state. If the former
was one of the darkest, this is one of the brightest chapters in
their national annals.
Yet it seems the very irony of fate that he, of all men, should be
the means of bringing the power of Rome finally into the country
for whose freedom he had fought. Knowing that he could not
permanently maintain a conflict in which his enemies could
bring into the field, and that continuously, thousands where he
could only bring hundreds, that the sheer force of numbers must
in the end prevail, he applied for an alliance with Rome, which
was readily granted. But before the decree could reach him,
his glorious career had ended. He was killed in battle, and died,
as he had lived, the champion and hero of his country (b.c. 161).
Having once advanced her foot, Rome was not the power to
withdraw it. She did not assume the sovereignty, nor was the
alliance definitely maintained, but her claim was only held in
abeyance, not abandoned ; and through all the long and intricate

INTRODUCTION 1 5
story which follows for a century, of civil war, and intrigue, and
contending claims, she looms ever larger and nearer, until we
find her, having conquered Syria, looking over the fair and fruitful
land of Palestine. Not long was there need to wait for a pretext
to enter it. Hyrcanus and Aristobulus were contending for the
Jewish throne, and appealed to Pompey, who was lying at
Damascus. He put them off for a while, but, becoming doubtful
of the good faith of Aristobulus, and angry too that the Jews
would not admit the arbitration of a foreigner, he laid siege to
Jerusalem, which held out for three months. When it fell
(B.C. 63), Pompey polluted with his presence the very Holy of
Holies, but left the immense riches of the Temple intact. He
nominated Hyrcanus ruler, and left. It was not the policy of the
conquerors to enter at once on full possession of the conquered
territory : Rome usually left a large autonomy to the people she
subdued, on condition that her over-lordship was acknowledged
and her tribute-money paid.
The Caesars brought in the Herods, an Idumean dynasty,
which, notwithstanding its benefits and magnificence, was never
heartily accepted by the Jews. At this point Herod the Great
comes upon the scene (B.C. 36). His almost superhuman vigour,
his resolute will, his tact, his audacity, the greatness of his
schemes, his lavish display and equally lavish gifts, gained for
him his adjective. He was great in everything hut _p___Qnal
character*. But, as if he must carry the element of largeness into
everything he did, he is distinguished among men by the enormity
of his crimes. He was a very monster of iniquity. There is no
need to re-tell at length his story : it is one of blood, while some
of his freaks suggest insanity as the only explanation. The
young and noble Aristobulus, who had the right to the priesthood ;
his beautiful wife Mariamne, the only being, it is said, whom he
really loved ; her mother ; his own three sons ; his uncle ; and
some of his friends, all fell victims to his ambition, jealousy, or
terror. He built theatres, introduced the looser Roman life into
the midst of the people, and placed over the principal gate of

16 THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
Jerusalem a golden eagle, the symbol of Imperial Rome. And
thus, notwithstanding his gorgeous restoration of the Temple, he
was hated by all who adhered to the national party. In all evil
respects, Herod was a man to date from.
On his death, the ferment of the people began to manifest itself
in uprisings and revolt, especially as the family dispute respecting
his will made an interregnum. The garrison at Jerusalem at
length found itself in the stress of great danger, and sent for help
to Varus, the Roman general, then stationed at Antioch. When
he had quelled the revolt, he took terrible revenge by the
crucifixion of two thousand Jews. At length the emperor gave
his decision on the will (a.d. 4), and " the rich and busy province
of Galilee, with Perea, was assigned to Herod Antipas." 1
As to the social condition of the country at this period, its
withered state to-day, under the rule of " the unspeakable Turk,"
is in strange and humiliating contrast. " From early days the
land of Canaan had been the scene of a busy, active life. . . .
When the Hebrews entered it, they found a people already there
in possession of the arts of life ; and they learned from them how
to till the soil and grow the vine, the olive, and the fig. Vast
flocks and herds roamed over the uplands, for they never gave up
their pastoral occupations. . . . But they acquired by degrees a
knowledge of all kinds of trades as well ; they opened mines for
iron and copper ; with the help of the Phoenicians they learned
the arts of building ; they were carpenters, smiths, and masons ;
they made beautiful furniture, costly vessels, embroidered robes,
fine jewels, musical instruments. . . . Galilee was famous for its
corn, and on the lake the fishing trade was of great importance.
. . . Flax was grown of different qualities, some coarse, some fine,
and dried in the sun on the fiat roofs of the houses, then it was
made into ropes. The warm climate of Galilee enabled the indigo
plant to be grown on the shores of the lake ; and Magdala, on
the western coast, was well known for its dyeworks. The rich
pastures of Samaria, as of the uplands east of the Jordan, were
1 For the history, Josephus, The Apocrypha, Milman.

INTRODUCTION 1 7
renowned for their breed of cattle. At Jericho the groves of palm
were very valuable ; and still more the gardens devoted to the
balsam-shrub, precious both as a perfume and for medicinal
properties. . . . Judea was not so well fitted for the growth of
corn ; but the fine turf of the downs near Hebron was thought to
nurture specially fat lambs for sacrifice. Vine culture was general
in the south ; the steep slopes of the hillsides were cut into
terraces carefully banked up with stones. . . . Many of the hills
about Jerusalem were covered with valuable trees. Bethany,
' the house of dates,' was embowered in palms. Bethphage, ' the
house of figs,' stood by a grove of fig-trees. . . . Jerusalem was not
a manufacturing town ; but a great variety of industries clustered
round the Temple ; and as the centre of the whole national life,
not for the Jews of Palestine alone, but for those of the whole
world, all kinds of commodities were brought to its markets." x
Although the state of religion in the nation, in its relation to
John the Baptist and his to it, will form almost the gist and
staple of the succeeding chapters, yet it is needful, to give some
thing like completeness to our introductory sketch, that we should
pass its salient features at the time of Herod Antipas under
review, even if but briefly. It was at a very low ebb. The priest
hood was largely a function, the high priesthood itself but a
political office ; while the puerilities of Scribes and Pharisees
formed the spiritual aliment of the people, — much chaff and little
grain. To the Scribes was allotted the work and responsibility of
making new copies of the sacred books, — the re-writing, in fact,
of the nation's literature.' After the return from the Captivity
they became a recognised order, " rendered all the more neces
sary because at that time the Chaldee letters were adopted in
place of the ancient Hebrew characters. Very naturally the
transcriber and reader of Scripture became its expositor. By
degrees, therefore, the Scribes assumed the office of public
teachers ; the very priests, unless also Scribes, taking a sub-
1 Carpenter.
8

18 THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
ordinate place. To their authority on doctrinal matters frequent
appeal was made. As the oral as well as the written law was the
subject of their teaching, they are constantly coupled with the
Pharisees, the great exponents of the former. The scribe was
the successor to the prophet. The prophet communicated new
Scripture, the scribe guarded and elucidated the old."
The Pharisees formed the most powerful part of the nation.
In their origin, far back in the sad days of " the mingling," they
were, in some respects, the Methodists of their time, reducing
conduct to order, to church observance, recognising the binding
power of religion through the soul and all -the activities of life
down to the minutest details. " But the chief point of distinction
lay in the regard paid by the Pharisees to the oral law, a series of
unwritten interpretations of the divine oracles handed down from
doctor to doctor, and forming an elaborate system extending to
every detail of worship and of life. The 'traditions of the
elders ' thus spun around God's word a web of intricate refine
ment ; and, while professing 'to fence the law,' or to lessen the
risk of breaking it, became in the multiplicity of subtle distinctions
and vexatious rules an oppression to the conscience. Formalism
was substituted for spiritual religion, and the 'separateness' of
this fraternity, as evinced by their long robes with fringe and
tassels, their broad phylacteries, their long prayers publicly recited
by the highways at the customary hours, as well as the casuistry
of their teachings and the inconsistency of their lives, proved
their piety to be in a great measure an affectation."
As for the Sadducees, they were the sceptics of their age, in the
stricter and purer meaning of the word. The old party of the
Chasidim (Pious) seems to have developed nuclei in the course of
the years, and to have segregated into the Pharisees, Sadducees,
and Essenes, according to the special formative principle of each
cell, — obedience, morality, or self-control. "The Sadducees
began with the supreme obligation of morality, and ended as
mere rationalistic moralists ; while from their rejection of the oral
supplements to the Mosaic law, they proceeded to the denial of

INTRODUCTION 19
any doctrine not there plainly and literally taught, as that of a life
after death. Possibly, also, their scepticism on this point was but
an exaggeration of the view that God was not to be served for the
sake o/the reward of eternity," — "that virtue was to be cultivated
for its own sake, without calculation of consequences or hope of
future recompense." They disallowed the oral interpretation of
their great rivals the Pharisees. Their adherents were to be
found chiefly among the upper classes, and they flattered them
selves that the chief part of the intelligence and influence of the
nation was included in their party. We can therefore readily
see how such a position and belief would minister to a subtle
self-flattery and a pride that pitied the rest of mankind.1
The position and beliefs these parties had come to hold by the
time of John had grown up gradually through the centuries of
prophetic silence ; and seeing they claimed the sole interpretation
of things divine, it is not to be greatly wondered at that when
a prophet did arise, he should speedily find them in arms
against him.
Through all these centuries, too, and through centuries before
them, the Messianic hope had established and enlarged itself,
until, by this period, it lay in the minds and hearts of the people
and the sects alike (the Sadducees not excepted) extending its
ramifications, like a root and its fibres, and ineradicable.
The very foundation of their national life and their separate
ness was religious. Divine truth and righteousness, and these
as giving rise to a bright earthly hope, were their choicest
heritage. Hence the high value the Hebrews had ever placed
upon the prophets ; who came, divinely commissioned, to re
affirm and re-enforce Jehovah's claims ; to resuscitate and re-
mspire the moral life of the people along the lines of the theocratic
ideal. The prophets had been, in times past, the moral aristo
cracy of the nation ; its divinely-given, divinely-inspired guides.
1 Consult the section by Dr. Green on Jewish Sects and Orders in the
Queen's Printers' Aids, where the subjects are well summarised, and from
which some portions of the preceding three paragraphs are taken.

20 THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
The paramount influence they had wielded, the high and sacred
regard in which they were ever held, was due to their companion
ship with God. Jehovah had " uncovered their ears," talked with
them, and from His presence they had come charged with the
authoritative message. "Not by man, nor of the will of man"
did they hold their office and exercise their function, but from
Jehovah. They spoke with an authority greater than that of
kings, for they belonged to a higher order. More than once had
monarchs trembled at their rebukes and submissively done their
bidding. It was they who had written as with the finger of God, or
spoken, with " thus saith Jehovah " as an introduction, those laws
upon which their national life was based, and in the observance of
which the divine benediction was found ; they who had directed
it, or striven to direct it, in the great crises of its history ; in the
midst of crooked and perverse generations they had stood as
light-bearers, holding aloft the word of life ; had ever stood for
God and truth and right. In company with their religious songs,
the words of the prophets were the nation's most cherished
literature ; their deeds were its heroics. Each incident of the
life of each, from Moses to "the messenger" Malachi, retained
its perennial interest for the people, as they heard them read oi
¦-^related them to their children.
Like massive trees along the horizon-line of the centuries the
prophets stood ; — trees which had drawn up into themselves the
sap and influences of their times ; which also, on the upward side,
had expanded in the light and warmth and purity of a divinely
, vitalising atmosphere, and whose leaves and fruit had been for the
* healing of the people.
To this heritage of history, and into this environment of his
nation's life, and thought, and circumstances, — its gloomy pre
sent, its smouldering hopes, its exalted ideal, as yet apparently
afar off, — was John the Baptist born, the last, as he was the
greatest, of the prophets, — " yea, and more than a prophet,"

CHAPTER I
Home Life
To the Hebrews, the denial of offspring was " sorrow's crown of
sorrow." Besides the disappointment of a natural instinct, it
had come to be regarded as an affliction, a reproach, a possible
evidence of Jehovah's displeasure. It meant, moreover, the
extinction of their branch of the family in the national records, a
prospect undesirable and depressing to any one, but especially so
to those to whom continuance of lineage was connected with
the highest hope of their race. For there was at least the possi
bility, though the probability amounted to the smallest fraction,
that if children were given, they might be in the line of ancestry
of the Messiah, while childlessness meant, of course, that for them
the very possibility was blotted out.
When Zacharias the priest, " of the course of Abia," l and
Elisabeth his wife, were " advanced in their days " 2 — " far
gone," 3 that is, as to the hope of offspring, and the hope itself,
long deferred, at last had withered, their hearts were suddenly
gladdened by the expectation of a child. New heavens and a
new earth opened to them when their son was born. The
softened haze of disappointment which had gathered upon the
late afternoon of their lives dispersed, the day brightened up
again, and at eventide it was light.
Like Isaac and Samuel, John was a child born out of due time,
and, in accordance with the prevalent belief, was received by his
parents, and by all "the hill country of Judea," as a remarkable
1 1 Chron. xxiii. " *('.&i£%xhit. 3 See Note A.
21

22 THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
child, one full of promise and divine purpose, one from whom
extraordinary things might be expected, — " fear came on all them
that dwelt round about them," and they said, "What then shall
this child be ? " In that quiet village home there came a reverent
bending of thankful hearts before Jehovah as the grey-haired
father and mother leaned over the child's cot, for the happiness
of hopes realised at last and the new life given ; and especially
for the honourable position he should hold in the kingdom of
God. He shall "be called the prophet of the Highest," shall
"go before the face of the Lord to prepare His ways," and "give
knowledge of salvation unto His people by the remission of their
sins." The current of their life's interest runs in a new channel ; " a
little child leads them." Hitherto it has run in the bed of sacred
scrolls and priestly service in the Temple, but there is a new
factor now ; a living God's epistle daily before them ; a light
which, as it feebly burns in the new lamp, is, at least in their eyes,
a beam of the light Eternal, a veritable Shekinah telling of God's
presence there. The honour of it is almost too great, for he
belongs more to God than to them, and yet to them is committed
his training for high and holy service. In the sombre landscape
of their lives a garden has been made, and they feel the privilege,
and responsibility too, of dressing and keeping it. With what
timid concern they watch him and minister to his wants ! with
what anxious carefulness they eradicate its weeds, almost fearing
as they do it !
And they were worthy of their high calling and sacred charge.
The brief description of St. Luke is perfect in its simplicity :
"they were both of them righteous as in the presence of God,
walking in all the commandments and observances of the Lord
blameless." The ageing pair have
" Grown together,
Like to a double cherry " j
and with mutual accord do they maintain, in " doing justly, loving

HOME LIFE 23
mercy, and walking humbly with God," consciences "void ol
offence toward God and man."
Nothing is lacking to the picture : we see the reposeful village,
the neat, orderly home, the quiet and regular ways of its inmates,
their kindly humanity, their " hearts at leisure from themselves, to
soothe and sympathise," calm souls who reverenced God, His
Word, and His House, and who, waiting upon Him, accepted His
providences with unquestioning acquiescence or with thankful
ness. With them the rites and ceremonies of their religion are
not a function, they are a privilege and a life. Within them and
about them is that other-worldliness, that sweetness and light,
which can, which alone can, instil and foster in their child truth,
purity, love, and the fear of God.
It was this atmosphere of reverence, conscientiousness, and
refinement, which John breathed from the first. He belonged to
the choicest caste of the chosen people, using the word without
its stigma. The son of a priestly race, — a race which held the
chief and most unquestioned position in the nation, — he inherited
its seclusive tendencies, and to his opening mind its quiet and
retirement must have been congenial. He was of the priestly
race on both sides, for his mother was "of the daughters of
Aaron." Heredity and its bias count for much in the inclination
of the developing life. The fineness of grain that comes from a
godly and cultured ancestry, especially when there is no concern
about the basal questions, " What shall we eat, what shall we
drink, and wherewithal shall we be clothed ? " constitutes a
mental and spiritual capital of the golden denomination, a capital
whose value can hardly be over-estimated.
But if transmission of good qualities and virtuous instincts
count for much, environment, instruction, and discipline count for
at least as much. When, however, all four are on the same plane
and in the same line, the three latter consolidating and developing
the former, the resultant must be a strong, sound, and manly
character. We can also imagine what springs of moral and religious

24 THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
influence poured their waters into the growing river of his life
before it reached the boundaries of the home domain. The
instruction he received was one of them. Not upon broad : upon
narrow, well-defined, incisive lines would that teaching be. In it
there would be no recognition of culture or letters outside the
Hebrew people ; in all probability the literature of other countries
was quite unknown in the old priest's home. Even if Zacharias
knew of it, it would be to him profane, in the purest meaning of
the word — outside the temple, secular, common ; while only
inside the temple of the Law and the Prophets could the highest
truth, divine truth, be found.1 The sacred records contained
everything it most concerned them to know ; all things needful
for life and godliness were there. They formed John's first
reading books.. And even long before he could read them at all,
his memory had encompassed The Ten Words, written by the
very finger of God, the kernel of the Law ; just as our children
commit to memory the Lord's Prayer.
John's recollections in after years would be of the constant
perusal by his father of the sacred books, and of his patient
teaching of their contents to him. To no ordinance of the Lord
was the devout Hebrew parent more faithful than to that which
enjoined the careful catechising of his children in the first
principles of their faith and first records of their history : " These
1 Even the broadly-educated Josephus, in writing against Apion (Bk. I.
sec. 8), makes it a strong point that they, the Jews, had not many books to
study. "For we have not an innumerable multitude of books among us,
disagreeing from and contradicting one another (as the Greeks have), but only
twenty-two books, which contain the records of all the past times ; which
are justly believed to be divine ; and of them five belong to Moses, which
contain his laws, and the traditions of the origin of mankind till his death."
As showing the high regard in which the people held their sacred books, the
historian continues : ' ' And how firmly we have given credit to those books
of our own nation, is evident by what we do ; for, during so many ages as
have already passed, no one has been so bold as either to add anything to
them, or take anything from them, or to make any change in them ; for it
becomes natural to all Jews, immediately and from their very birth, to
esteem those books to contain divine doctrines, and to persist in them, and,
if occasion be, willingly to die for them. "

HOME LIFE 25
words shall be in thine heart, and thou shalt teach them diligently
to thy children, and thou shalt talk of them when thou sittest in
thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou
liest down, and when thou risest up " (Deut. vi. 6, 7).1
Family worship is also a strong and sacred power. We can
almost see the small group in the eventide reverently laying aside
other duties, while " the sire turns o'er wi' patriarchal grace," or
rather unrolls, some copy of the Law or one of the Prophets :
"' The priest-like father reads the sacred page,
How Abram was the friend of God on high j
Or Moses bade eternal warfare wage
With Amalek's ungracious progeny ;
Or how the royal bard did groaning lie,
Beneath the stroke of heaven's avenging ire ;
Or Job's pathetic plaint and wailing cry ;
Or rapt Isaiah's wild, seraphic fire ;
Or other holy seers that tune the sacred lyre." 2
When able to read for himself, the idyllic tales that fascinated
us in our childhood hold him in still deeper fascination. For he
was nearer them, and the blood of his own race was in the veins
of those who acted, not their mimic, but their serious parts, in
those great dramas that were often tragedies. " Sons of God,"
they seemed, in the perspective of history, close enough to
Jehovah to talk with Him ; while, in the inverted perspective of
reverential imagination, they loomed so large upon the horizon as
to overtop and belittle the men of nearer times.
The Hebrew people have always been strong upon the poetic
1 Again we may adduce the testimony of Josephus. " Our principal care "'
says he, "is this, to educate our children well ; and we think it to be the most
necessary business of our whole life, to observe the laws that have been given
us, and to keep those rules of piety that have been delivered down to
us." And again : " It (the Law) also commands us to bring the children up
in learning, and to exercise them in the laws, and make them acquainted with
the acts of their predecessors, in order to their imitation of them, and that
they may be nourished up in the laws from their infancy, and might neither
transgress them nor yet have any pretence for their ignorance of them. "
2 Burns, '1 he Cottar's Saturday Night.

26 THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
side, and there is much in the story of their race that spon
taneously lends itself to this treatment, — much of heroic faith ;
of walking with God, not knowing whither they walked ; of
sublime victory or pathetic captivity ; and, above all, there is that
religious truth and those observances around which their highest
aspirations and deepest reverence clung, — the presence of Jehovah
among them, and the sanctities of His worship. Loved and
prized by all were "Those strains that once did sweet in Zion
glide." And as children naturally fall to poetry, for the world to
them is still poetic, John would certainly store in his memory
those psalms and poetic compositions in history and prophecy
which still form a large part of the choicest and most valuable
spiritual heritage of mankind.
He reads the story of his race from the calling of its founder ;
follows with absorbent mind and burning heart each vicissitude
of its career, now rejoicing at a victory, now subdued at a defeat,
now sympathetic in some cruel oppression or dark captivity ;
while slowly the deep meaning and divine purpose of its election
shape themselves before him. He read with sorrow and anger
both, of the times when they forsook Jehovah, and other, foreign,
gods were worshipped by his people : but his soul glowed with
admiration at the heroic stand made by the prophets in face of
kings and people ; — their fearless reproofs ; their holding aloft
the standard of a divine righteousness that would not lower its
sanctions to meet the lowered tone of the nation's morality ; their
passionate exhortations to return ; and all in face of ingratitude
and the danger of imprisonment and martyrdom itself. Ever
would one dramatic scene draw his eyes, like the chief incident
in a powerful picture, — that of his great prototype, as, single-
handed, he stood on the promontory of Carmel before the angry
king, the host of false priests, and the multitudes of the people.
Perhaps this was the best perused part of the scroll, this and the
writings of the burning, rapt Isaiah.
To this growing youth of the thoughtful face and eyes that look
beyond, there comes, as he ponders, the root idea of the kingdom

HOME LIFE 27
of God : how that their nation was established and grew, was
fenced around and administered, from the standpoint of Jehovah
as its ruler and judge, in a word, as its Head ; how that beneath
all the earthly forms in which it was incarnated, often very
imperfect and with grave moral defects, there were still the
spiritual conception and heavenly purpose of its choosing, and the
never-abdicated claims of Jehovah.
While as for the future, the kingdom still to come would find
its centre and head in the King Messiah ; around Him would be
drawn the spiritual forces of the nation ; He would " restore the
kingdom to Israel," be the King of the Jews, bring in the glory
of the golden age, and fully realise both the material and spiritual
ideal. And his faith in the realisation of this vision grew in
strength as the vision itself grew in beauty.
The neighbourhood in which he lived contributed the glow and
power of its historic associations. This was " the hill-country of
Judea," the Judean part, that is, of the southern hill-country of
the land of Palestine. A study of the map of Canaan will show
that the whole "hill-country" west of the Jordan was divided
into two parts by the plain of Esdraelon. That to the north
stretches away towards Mount Hermon and the Lebanon
range, while that on the south gradually rises to Jerusalem and
Hebron, then falls off into the broken land of the great wilderness.
This latter portion forms an irregular parallelogram, having the
Philistian plain on the west, and on the east the deep gorge of
the Jordan, which opens, at its extremity, into the Lake Asphal-
titis. The home of Zacharias was in one of the small towns that
dotted the valleys or crowned the hills of that part of this tract
which was within the territory of the tribe of Judah. The name of
the " city " has not been given us. It has been conjectured 1 to be
Juttah, and the suggestion added that we should read Juttah
instead of Juda in the text. But, in the first place, no scribe or
copyist would be likely to make such a substitution of letters as
this would imply, by a slip of the pen ; and, in the second, the
1 Reland, Palestine.

28 THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
reading Juda is not called in question by any of the manuscripts.
We should not therefore be justified in altering it simply on the
ground of semblance.
It may have been Juttah for anything we know to the
contrary, for this was one of the "cities with their suburbs"
assigned to the priests (Josh. xxi. 16), and it was "in the
mountains " (Josh. xv. 48, 55). It certainly was one of the
priestly cities. And with its "suburbs" carefully and well
cultivated (for priests mostly make good gardeners), laid out in
orchards and vineyards, it must have been a charmingly quiet
place to live in. Go out from which gate you would, the eye
rested on trimly-kept vines and peaceful pastures ; in spring the air
was fragrant with the scent of blossoms ; in autumn the number
less trees of olive, fig, pomegranate, and the rest, vied with each
other in bringing forth their fruit in their season.
There is nothing more inducive both of observation and of
thought than " dressing and keeping " a garden ; its occupations
contribute a gentle stimulus, rather than a check, to the calmness
of contemplation ; for while there is always something to be done,
and opportunities cannot be missed without penalty, yet, on the
other hand, Nature cannot be hurried, she will have her own time
in developing and ripening her gifts. And the mystery of life,
and the miracle of multiplication, constantly before the culti
vator's eyes, can hardly fail to raise his thought to Him by whom
both are given. If John assisted his father in these pursuits, as
probably he did, he would find them a plastic matrix in which his
thoughts and visions, tending to coherence, became embedded.
The country round about was replete with historic "connection.
It was indissolubly linked with the great names of the nation.
About these rounded hills and through these pleasant valleys the
patriarchs themselves had led their flocks. Along one or other
of these roads the merchant caravan had gone down into Egypt,
bearing " spicery, balm, and myrrh," and all unwittingly had, in
the person of Joseph, borne the destiny of the nation too ; along
the same Jacob's sons had returned to fetch their aged father. In

HOME LIFE 29
that direction had David fled, and among those hills " every one
in distress, or in debt, or discontented, gathered themselves unto
him, and he became a captain over them." And there were a
hundred associations besides.
Hebron could not be far away. It is a city of great antiquity,
one of the oldest in the world, in fact. Close at hand was the
cave of Machpelah, keeping guard over its sacred treasures, the
graves of the three patriarchs and their wives. The history of
the city was interwoven with great names and critical times.
From Hebron Jacob sent the son of his old age to seek his
brethren, a small event which proved to be the pivot on which
turned the early history of the chosen race. The spies from the
children of Israel in their wanderings visited it, and reported it
to be in the possession of the Anakim. At the division of the
country among the tribes it was allotted to Judah, afterwards
becoming one of the six cities of refuge, and a Levitical city.
Under David it resumed its state as a royal town, until the
fortress of Jebus was taken and Jerusalem became the centre of
his government. At one time it was the ecclesiastical centre of
the nation : so that by the time of John it had come to hold a
relationship to Jerusalem, and a reputation, in some respects
similar to that which Canterbury now holds to London.
Living in such a home, and with such a disposition, he must
have made frequent visits to Jerusalem, either with his father, or
making one in the caravans of pilgrims which went up at the
yearly feasts, going "from strength to strength," one company
joining another as they debouched from the valleys and converged
toward Jerusalem, until they all " appeared before God in Zion."
It is not possible for us with our Western education to fully com
prehend the " burning of the heart " which John, or indeed any
devout Hebrew, felt as he neared the sacred city, and at length
stood within the gloom of the great Temple. God is everywhere,
a Spirit, and they who worship Him in spirit and in truth can
worship Him everywhere with equal confidence of acceptance.
Wherever there is a heart to pray, there is a God ready to hear

30 THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
and to bless. But it was otherwise to the Jew. He came behind
none in his belief in the Divine omnipresence.
" If I climb up into heaven, Thou art there ;
Should I make Sheol my bed, behold, Thou art there.
If I take the wings of the morning,
If I dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea ;
Even there shall Thy hand lead me,
And Thy right hand shall hold me." (Ps. cxxxix. 8-10.)
But it was at that spot which Jehovah had " chosen to place His
name there" that He was, to the belief of the Jew, to be especially
and properly worshipped. There was His " real Presence."
When standing in the Temple before the veil, the devout
worshipper felt that only just behind it was the actual, personal
presence of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob — the God of
his fathers, and the Creator of the ends of the earth. No other,
of all the places of prayer throughout the land, had the sanctions,
or the nearness to Jehovah, of this one. It was as if we should
regard every place of worship with one exception, throughout
town and country — cathedral, church, chapel, meeting-house
— as simply human institutions under divine sanction, for
instruction in religious things and the development of the
spiritual life ; that exception being, let us suppose, Westminster
Abbey, where, once a year, God revealed Himself " behind the
veil." //Tf we could conceive this, and could imagine the feelings of a
serious and earnest youth as he waited and prayed outside the
Temple with the vast multitude, " on the great day, the day of
atonement," while he knew that inside the still warm blood of the
goat was being sprinkled on the altar as the confession of the
right of life forfeited through sin, and the supplication for Divine
mercy ; if we could imagine the hushed and reverent awe which
overspread the whole assembly as they felt that God was very
near, attending to their prayers and supplications, the movement
of relief as the priest came out to bless them in the name of the
Lord, we could then imagine the deep impression which must

HOME LIFE

31

have been made upon the soul of John by this central act of his
nation's religion.
Through all the years which this brief sketch covers, the
development of the soul of John proceeded ; " the hand of the
Lord was with him," " he waxed strong in spirit " ; and we must
not forget that through it all, too, he had the kindly direction and
careful explanation of his father, who rejoiced in the strengtheaing
spirit of his son. The seed is sown "in an honest and good
heart," for lifelong growth and fruitage.

CHAPTER II
"In the Deserts"
In the meagreness of the historic record, no mention is made of
the occasion on which John definitely left his home and betook
himself to the open country of the southern borderland. But
most probably it was on the death of one of his now aged parents.
As a Nazirite, he was not to " come near to a dead body." " He
shall not make himself unclean," said the law, " for his father, or
for his mother, for his brother, or for his sister, when they die,
because his separation unto God is upon his head." ' And if we
suppose that he afterwards returned home, it would be but for
the short while his other parent lived ; on whose death he,
having no near relations or close personal friends, for he was,
and probably always had been, of a solitary habit, and having,
moreover, his manner of life shaped out for him, partly by his
vow, and partly by those growing thoughts within him which
drove him out, would finally leave " the hill country of Judea."
Then he made his dwelling-place far from the homes and
haunts of men, among " the deserts and mountains, and dens and
caves of the earth." 2
1 Num. vi. 7.
2 Robertson (of Brighton) adduces John's dissatisfaction with the state of
religion among the people as the probable reason of his withdrawal. He
says : " It was a period, probably, in which, saddened by the hollowness of
all life in Israel, and perplexed with the controversies of Jerusalem, the con
troversies of Sadducee with Pharisee, of formalist with mystic, of the disciples
of one infallible Rabbi with the disciples of another infallible Rabbi, he fled
for refuge to the wilderness, to see whether God could not be found by the
heart that sought Him, without the aid of churches, rituals, creeds, or forms, "
32

"IN THE DESERTS" 33
John has now definitely entered upon the second great stage of
his preparation. No more will there be for him bright looks
of love, nor the bliss of love returned, nor any offices of
affection, no family interests, no social intercourse, no home, not
even a sheltering roof.
He took his solitary way toward " the boundless region of
treeless downs " which stretched southward far beyond the reach
of the eye to the great desert where the chosen people wandered
in hardship after their Egyptian bondage, a desolation of broken
country, verily " a great and terrible wilderness." On the east
this silent land terminates in the barren shores and ill-omened
waters of Lake Asphaltitis, or the Dead Sea, and on the north
east the limit is reached at the small town of Engedi. Prof.
Palmer gives us graphic descriptions of this region, over which,
it is all but certain, John's feet must often have trod. " The
wilderness of Engedi," 1 says he, " is as grand but dreary a sight
as can well be imagined : a broad rolling expanse shut in on
every hand by high ridges with jagged summits, their sides
deeply scored by torrent-beds, and intersected here and there by
broad valleys of white marl, with not a tree, and scarcely a
shrub, to be seen for miles around. From time to time a small
Arab encampment or a few isolated figures come in sight, and,
with their primeval costume, and their wild and savage air, seem
like some weird vision of David and his outlaw band conjured up
by a highly-wrought fancy, rather than the ordinary inhabitants of
the place." "At length we stand," says the same authority,
" upon the shores of the Dead Sea, the frightful desolation ol
which accords well with the terrible history that attaches to the
spot. We are undoubtedly in the neighbourhood of the Cities of
the Plain. . . . Many writers have supposed that the agencies
employed in the destruction of Sodom and its sister cities were
the natural ones of volcanic eruptions accompanied by earthquake.
This hypothesis is quite in accordance with the language of the
Bible ; the mention in Genesis of slime (i.e. asphalt) pits in the
1 Picturesque Palestine.
3

34 THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
neighbourhood, and of Abraham's seeing that ' the smoke of the
country went up as the smoke of a furnace,' would certainly
seem to indicate such phenomena. The asphalt pits are still to
be seen, and the frequent and severe earthquakes that have
occurred in the vicinity also point to the presence of subterranean
volcanic action." 1
This scene must have struck the mind of John, which turned
more naturally to judgment than to mercy, as a powerful evidence
of the avenging hand of the Almighty. As he looked upon the
broken, black, bituminous region, it would seem as if the iniquities
of those old, lost, accursed cities had eaten into the very soil,
making it barren and desolate for ever. -
John had been partly schooled and prepared for the rigours of
his desert life by his training as a Nazirite. According to " the
prophecies which went before on him," he was to " drink no wine
nor strong drink, and to be filled with the Holy Ghost from his
mother's womb." The Nazirites were not a community ; their
vows and obligations were personal only, and in the case of
"Nazirites of days," whose, vows were but temporarily assumed
and for some special purpose, were terminable according_Jo_ thgu,
wnTor conscience of eaSbT^Lnybne coul Jj3ecorrie._a.N^£uirite,^3i-
at any time, and^jieedjjcj^eye.n leave^ his .djwly j^ca£ioji_AiQj££s_
he._vjsh.ed. Of this kind was St. Paul's vow in Cenchrasa, and
that of those for whom he became " at charges " in Jerusalem,
" declaring the fulfilment of the days of purification until the
offering was offered for every one of them." These characteristics—
mark out the Nazirite as distinctive from the Essene coxnmiini^y,,,
_oQohn's own day ; they also demonstrate that his asceticism
was not the same in basis with the monkish brotherhoods of
later centuries. But there was another class of Nazirites, those
1 Recent years have furnished us with a graphic illustration of a sudden
catastrophe of the kind probably which overwhelmed the Cities of the Plain.
In June 1886, there occurred that eruption of Mount Tarawera, New
Zealand, which destroyed the famous Pink and White Terraces of Lake
Rotomahana, and converted, in a few hours, _ whole region, lovely as the
garden of Eden, into a scene of utter ruin.

"IN THE DESERTS" 35
who were such " for life." The nature of the vows appears to
have been the same in both cases, the only difference being in
their duration. They were regarded as of peculiar sacredness
and binding force : " there was a sacramental consecration of the
whole life to God." The ceremonies connected therewith bear a
striking resemblance to those employed in the consecration of the
high priest himself.1  ^
The root-principle of the Naziritic vow was the dedication, in
such cases as that of John, i.e. in lifelong cases, of the whole
nature and untouched life to the service of Jehovah ; a life to be
kept free from external taint of impurity, or defilement by contact
with the corruption of death ; while its inward purity and sensitive
ness should be such as to catch the most delicate indications of
Jehovah's will. The soul, like some high mountain, was to
lift itself and maintain itself in the clear, pure atmosphere of
heaven. /rj
The rule of the vow was^threefold-^o allow the hair to grow ; '
'not to touch any dead body-^-and to drink neither wine nor strong
drink. The first was the chief public evidence of the vow. It
marked the Nazirite out as distinct from his fellows, and formed
the pledge, the outward and visible sign, of an inward and
spiritual consecration. And by it the profession was made, that
the head, the seat of those great faculties which constitute the
special honour of manhood, and in which the very image of God
inheres, was separated from the world's rough interests, dedicated
to meditate upon divine truth, and if called upon, to proclaim it
in strong unswerving speech.
The second has been already mentioned — he was not to come
in contact with the dead. " The tendencies at work in each of
these institutions (Nazarites and Essenes) are," says Dr. Reynolds,
1 As showing the high and sacred value inherent in the vow of the Nazirite,
it is noteworthy that the word translated "crown," in connection with the
High Priest (113) in Lev. xxi. 12, is the same as that which, in Num. vi. 18,
denotes the long hair of the Nazirite. Consult the whole section in Aids to
the Student, in the Queen's Printer's Bible.

36 THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
" each of them expressions of a deep-seated conviction that the
deliverance of the whole man from evil is almost identical with
the deliverance of the spirit from the power or contamination of
the flesh. They rest upon the thesis which has ever exerted signal
influence over the Oriental mind, that the seat of evil is not^hxthe
soul nor the will so much as in the flesh of man ; thatthg_,flesh^
derives its corruption from the main physical and material con-
T_ition_~7 that the material universe is the evil principle." While,
as to the individual, evil was believed to have its seat, not in the
soul itself, but in that flesh which forms for a time its habitation,
and through which it is related to the material world. The flesh
therefore is the enemy of the spirit, clogs it, drags it down ; it
must be fought against and vanquished, that the soul may rise
untrammelled into that high region of freedom and peace which
is essential to communion with the divine.
There is, of course, much truth in this position. The flesh with
its affections and lusts must be kept under. The two laws which
are at war within our members have ever been recognised as the
first fact of moral introspection, while the obligation to follow the
higher is one of the fundamentals of all religion. Yet it falls
much below the standard of Jesus and the New Testament. It
fails to recognise that all evil whatsoever goes behind the flesh,
and takes its rise in the immaterial thought or passion or will. It
is " out of the heart that evil thoughts, murders, adulteries,
fornications, thefts, false witness, railings " — " the things which
defile, a man " — come forth.
Neither does it take into account that our bodies can be
presented as living sacrifices to God, that they are meant in the
divine intention to be veritable temples and shrines " of the Holy
Spirit." It belongs to the higher region of Christian ethics to see
that the world, with its numberless scenes and things of beauty, is
not a waste, howling wilderness, but a real God's world, pro
nounced " very good " at its creation ; to see that the body is not
to be despised, contemned, and weakened, but that, like a young
and spirited horse, it is to be so broken-in, that it passions, the

"IN THE DESERTS" 37
chief elements of its danger, may, under control, give strength to
goodness and vigour to activity ; to see, again, that life, in the
world as the theatre, and through the body as the instrument,
may, by its experiences, discipline the spirit until its dross shall
be purged away and it shall grow into the lineaments of the lost
image. We do not, of course, condemn John for not knowing those
things which belong to a later and fuller revelation, and respecting
which " he that is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than
he?pSWe simply indicate our higher privilege. To the Baptis"t7
the body was to be repressed ; life, with its thousand-fold interests
and sacred human affections, formed a strong cage which had
caught and prisoned for a while the human soul in its progress
upward. — - «
This whole doctrine of ascetic renunciation has an intense power
within its own limits, like a mountain torrent whose impetuous
force is in proportion to the narrowness of its channel. Yet it
indicates a line of life which all cannot follow ; neither is it
divinely intended all should : such a life belongs rather to those
who are selected for a special purpose, and to whom it will afford
the best possible training. But from this doctrine as premise,
the conclusion logically follows that the spirit must fight relent
lessly against the flesh, which is a " body of death," hindering,
oppressing, dragging it down at every point. When, therefore,
the spirit has left the body, the body, repellent in itself even while
in life, seems tenfold more so, as it is the cold and vanquished
enemy which retained its vindictiveness to the last. *
As for the Baptist, we know from the story how resolutely he
maintained the fight against the flesh, how he kept his body
under, reducing his wants to the simplest and their supply to the
roughest, by means of which, and devout contemplation, he put
the world beneath his feet, and moved on that high plane where
it becomes self-evident that the things which are seen are
temporary and the things not seen eternal.
Abstinence from wine and strong drink formed the third

38 THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
essential of the Nazirite ; total abstinence — " no vinegar of wine,
or vinegar of strong drink, neither shall he drink any liquor of
grapes, nor eat fresh grapes or dried," " nothing that is made of
the grape-vine, from the kernel to the husk." 1
It seems at first sight somewhat strange that the vine, the
symbol to the Hebrews of heavenly favour and earthly prosperity,
and used in their sacred writings as the illustration of Jehovah's
especial care,2 should be placed under the ban, but the reason
becomes more evident the more we consider it.
The action of wine and strong drink On the human system is
not to " prepare," to " make straight," " the way of the Lord "
into the soul of the prophet, but to make it crooked and to break
it up. Wine and strong drink disturb the cool and even currents
of the mind ; so stimulating the activity of the brain as to promise
greater nimbleness to thought, and brighter visions to the
imagination. But wine-spurred faculties do not evolve the truest
thought : if quicker for a time, it is less firm in its step, and
though the pictures of the imagination may be brighter in their
colouring, their outlines are blurred and their colours mere
tricious. In no such case is the calm ethical ideal appre
hended. And further, the seat itself of the faculties rapidly
degenerates under repeated stimulation, becoming less and less
fit for the Almighty to employ in revealing Himself to man,
to say nothing of the general physical and moral deterioration
which ensues and makes the unfitness more pronounced. For
a prophet, then, to keep altogether clear of wine and strong
drink was to maintain the bodily powers and mental faculties
at their best, and to preserve that pure heart wherewith to see
God and His truth.
In many old religions, wine, because of its stimulating effects,
was supposed to bestow inspiration ; to make those who brought
themselves into an intoxicated condition, the media through
which the gods spoke to men. The human will was placed hors
de combat, that the god might borrow and use the faculties.
1 Num. vi. 3, 4. " As e.g. Isa. v.

"IN THE DESERTS'1 39
" Wild excitement stimulated by wine was supposed to confer
the highest revelations." l hi vino Veritas had more than a
social application ; it had a religious meaning. Hence the
position wine held in the religious ceremonies of the Greeks,
Romans, and Orientals. Among the former the worship of
Bacchus is well known, while among the Vedic peoples we
read of the glorification of the soma-juice.
' ' We've quaffed the soma bright, and are immortal grown ;
We've entered into light, and all the gods have known."2
This idea of the intimate connection of divinity and wine was
so widespread and so unquestioned, that it was at once applied to
the inspirational possession of the Holy Spirit on the day of
Pentecost, which, though shortly after John, illustrates the
prevalent belief of the time—" These men are full of new wine."
This was the attribution St. Peter most strenuously resisted,
refuting it by the statement that it was the fulfilment of Joel's
prophecy, " I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh, and your sons
and your daughters shall prophesy." ->^
There is the same juxtaposition of wine and the Spirit, but with
a non licet as to the stimulant, in the case of John — " He shall
drink neither wine nor strong drink, and he shall be filled with
the Holy Spirit from his mother's womb " ; and also in St. Paul's
exhortation to the Ephesians — " Be not drunk with wine" do not
seek your spiritual power and inspiration there, " but be filled
with the Spirit!'
Thus carefully do the sacred writers guard that vinous excita
tion shall not be confounded with the possession of the divine
Spirit. The strongest condemnation is implied on the drunken
prophet — " The priest and the prophet have erred through strong
1 Reynolds' John the Baptist.
2 It is but fair to say that this is not their highest teaching. The fourth
rule of the highest road of the eightfold path is : —
" Shun drugs and drinks which work the wit abuse ;
Clean minds, clean bodies, need no soma-juice."
Arnold's Light of Asia.

40 THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
drink, they are swallowed up of wine," " they err in vision and
stumble in judgment." 1 f
Especially, then, must the prophet keep himself pure, that with
clear eyes he may look on truth through no distorting or colouring I
media, and therefore untruly, but in the direct and achromatic '
light of the Sun of Righteousness.
The general principles of asceticism are of necessity somewhat
similar. And from the rigours of John's life in the desert it has .
been argued that he belonged to the Essenic brotherhood. But (
there are " no traits handed down which suggest that he was a
member of the Essene community. He was an ascetic, and the
Essenes were ascetics ; but this is plainly an inadequate basis for
any such inference." " His abode was the desert ; his clothing
was rough ; his food was spare ; he baptised his penitents.
Therefore, it is argued, he was an Essene. Between the
premisses and the conclusion, however, there is a broad gulf,
which cannot very easily be bridged over. The solitary, independ- |
ent life which John led presents a type wholly different from
the cenobitic establishments of the Essenes, who had common
property, common meals, common hours of labour and of prayer.
It may even be questioned whether his food of locusts would have
been permitted by the Essenes, if they really ate nothing which
had life. And again, his baptism, as related by the Evangelists,
and their lustrations as described by Josephus, have nothing in
common except the use of water for a religious purpose. ... If
positive statements are allowable, it would be more true to fact
to say that he could not possibly have been an Essene. T__umle_,
of his life was isolation : the principle of theirs, t-ommf/Hiti." 2
/ But to what continuous severities is the Evangelist's brief
'description the index-finger : — " John had his raiment of camel's
hair, and a leathern girdle about his loins, and his food was
1 Isa. xxviii. 7.
2 Dr. Lightfoot. The whole subject of the Essenes is most ably and
exhaustively dealt with in the Dissertation at the end of his indispensable
Commentary on Colossians and Philemon.

"IN THE DESERTS" 4 1
locusts and wild honey." His long garment had no suggestion of
comfort in it : durable in wear and coarse in texture, such as only
the poorest wore, such as the dervishes wear to this day, it was
the sharpest antithesis of the " soft raiment in kings' houses."
Locusts werespecially and by name exempte^fj^ia-thfJajv^pfjhe
unclean — " Every creeping thing that flieth is unclean to you. . . .
Yet these may ye eat of all winged creeping things . . . the
'locust after its kind, the bald locust after its kind, and the cricket
after its kind, and the grasshopper after its kind." l Burckhardt,
quoted in Thomson's The Land and the Book, says that " the
Arabs, in preparing locusts as an article of food, throw them alive,
into boiling water with which a good deal of salt has been mixed.
After a few minutes they are taken out and dried in the sun ; the
head, feet, and wings are then torn off ; the bodies are cleansed
from the salt and perfectly dried, after which process whole sacks
are filled with them by the Bedawin. They are sometimes eaten
boiled with butter, and they often contribute materials for a
breakfast when spread over unleavened bread mixed with butter."
Thomson continues that they are " tolerated only by the very
poorest people. John the Baptist, however, was of this class.
. . . His ordinary 'meat' was dried locusts — probably fried in
butter and mixed with honey, as is still frequently done. . . .
Wild honey is still gathered in large quantities from trees in the
wilderness, and from rocks in the wadies, just where the Baptist
sojourned." 2 3 The principle of the whole is, that John reduced
his wants to the barest and simplest necessities, in order to " keep
his body under," and also to have as few points of contact as
possible with the world of men.
1 Lev. xi. 20-23. 2 See 1 Sam. xiv.
3 " In the Ebionitic recension of Matthew, we find the food of John
described as p.ii.1 xyfiov, .Z -h ytCe-is %v rev f^oLvnot, ii lyxfis U \>.aiBj (' it had the
taste of manna, as a cake baked in oil,' Num. xi. 8). The simple statement
of Matthew is here misrepresented, and even falsified. The ixpitti (locusts)
seemed to this writer food unworthy for John, and he makes lyxfltis (cakes)
of them, and thus gets a chance of comparing John's food with manna."—
Neander's Life of Christ.

42 THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
' Consider, then, the dreary monotony of his life in this wilder
ness, — his companions the wild beasts, whom he watched as they
pursued and pounced upon their prey, whose daily habits, as they
stole along the hillsides or hid among" the rocks, became familiar
to him, and who on their part came to know the anchorite and
did not molest him. Each day passed like its predecessor,
neither was there any change or incident to look forward to on
the morrow. The sun rose out of the grey haze over the bare
mountains in the east, became a burnished and burning ball for
the day, then sank into the purple gloom of the west.
" The sun went down, the stars rushed out,
At one stride came the dark,"
and with it the deep indigo sky, " inlaid with patines of bright
gold," while now and again the echoing scream of a bird, or the
cry of a jackal, seemed rather to emphasise the stillness than to
break it, as a flash of lightning in the night seems to intensify the
darkness.
i^With such habits and amid such surroundings, the growing
prophet lived for long, uneventful years.

CHAPTER III
"The Thought that Breathes"
There are three hpnvpns fnr mpn even on the earth-C^Tlie first
is that of material success and prosperity, in which there is no
further concern as to answering the great basal questions of food
and clothing, and in ijihose charmed circles there are delightful
social relationships.Q*The second is that of philosophic calm,
whose enjoyments are found in balanced thought, advancing
knowledgebase! cultured taste, — whose realm is literature, science,
or art, or aft-^The third is that which rises, like some mountain
peak above the smoke, above the cloud, into the still pure
heavens, upon whose Sinai summit divine truth is revealed, un
speakable words are heard ; on which Jehovah Himself descends
to declare His imperishable law.
It was in the third, the highest, that John the Baptist lived
during those monotonous desert years. The Almighty prepares
His choicest servants by the discipline of solitude. He is not
afraid to throw them back upon bare, solid, fundamental truths :
He has faith enough in them to know that they will not falter nor
fail when the spirit passes before them, and they behold "the
face of immortality unveiled." (_Jnly in solitude can heaven and '
earth, the eternal and the temporal, God and humanity, righteous
ness and the wrongs of men, be adequately apprehended or their
mutual relationships truly adjusted^ While daily cares, house
hold or business anxieties, are ""incessantly alighting on the
balances, it is not possible rightly to weigh these greatest truths.
They require removal to such a distance that there shall not even

44 THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
be the trembling of the floor which comes from the traffic of the
street. So large are they that both hands need to be emptied
of other things to take effective hold on them. Let both be
preoccupied with earth's affairs, and they remain unheeded al
together, like the crown in the hand of the angel above the head
of the man with the rake ; if one hand tries to take hold, and the
other be engaged with matters merely mundane, the grasp is apt
to slacken in the interest of the things that are seen, when the
greater truths take wing and fly away. It is necessary to with
draw, at least now and again, from " the loud, stunning tide " ; to
come " into the desert places and rest awhile."
The "desert" places, — where the thought is driven inward.
As Isaac Taylor puts it : — " There is a purity or abstinence in the
tastes of the man of ' spiritual ' education which forbids that he
should desire to be placed in the midst of the gaudy magnificence
of nature, before he can fill his soul with the ravishments he
delights in. He does not covet as his home some valley of the
East where the sun seems to linger to shed all his favours. On
the contrary, he would much rather draw his devout inferences
from the slenderest or most modest examples ; he chooses to
dwell upon instances where the parsimony of nature gives larger
scope to the diligence of reflection, and where the premisses are
always less obtrusive than the conclusion. (It: is most true that
the pious contemplatist finds, in the sere herbage of the wilder
ness, and on the rugged and scorched surface of granite rocks,
symbols enough of God."1?
/in the clear, dry atmosphere of the wilderness, the cubes of
truth retain the sharpness of their edges, while in the busy world,
with its thousand crossing and recrossing interests, the subtlety
and speciousness of its evil, the edges are apt to be rubbed off,
until at length the cubes will roll in compromise. Moreover,
away from the haunts of men comes no false glamour arising
from pleasure, or success, or ambitious contest ; these things fade
till they seem of no account
i Saturday Evening: " The Recluse."

"THE THOUGHT THAT BREATHES" 45
There, the being and the righteousness of God appear to be,
as indeed they are, as far above " the little lives of men," as the
interstellar spaces are greater than the small world we inhabit.
Qf we come to examine the record of their lives, we shall find
that God's greatest servants have passed through such a period of
silent mental incubation)^Tor forty days and nights Moses stayed
upon the sacred mount before he received the two tables of the
law ; his prolonged and undistracted meditation so prepared him
for apprehending the Almighty's glory, that his words, spoken in the
name of heaven and earth's eternal King, and from Him, have had
an incalculable influence in the moulding of the centuriesO' It was
in the desert that "the still small voice" came to Elijah /Jesus
was " driven of the Spirit into the wilderness " for forty days after
His baptism V for three years Paul withdrew into quietude after
his conversion. It is not surprising, then, that the Baptist's pro
vidential education should have the same great factor in it.
As we have seen, dreary must those solitudes have been to
which John had exiled himself. Slowly the seasons went by. He
braved the heat of the days and cold of the nights. He watched
the thin bright green of the vegetation that crept, during and after
the rainy season, along the valleys and up the sides of the hills,
soon to change to brown under the fierce heat of the dry. He
knew every path through the wilderness, — where the springs
were ; where the wild bees made their nests, where the conies
dwelt among the rocks ; he was " with the wild beasts," passing
about unharmed, neither did they fear or fly at the approach
of the silent, preoccupied recluse. <^3ut if he walked about half
mechanically, he had no mechanical musing, — the fire burned !
The essential truths, the fundamental facts, Jehovah's supremacy,
the sins and needs of his fellow-men, all stood out in sharp
definition before his vision, revealed in the straight rays and
white light of absolute truth. And into his fervent soul they
settled, and at length amalgamated withTb) - —
(It is very probable that John took with him into the desert,
when he definitely left his home, those sacred scrolls which had

40 THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
been his father's and now were his!} For the furniture of the
home he has no use ; for these he has — they are treasures, essen
tials. In them his maturing spirit finds much in common with
itself. The prophets were to the destined prophet kindred spirits.
Let us then imagine John in his lonely cave, conning, with vivid
imagination, the narratives of their heroic lives and faithful words,
and, as he walked about, pondering them and their significance.
it is not easy for us, in these days, under this civilisation, and
with our fuller body of truth, to gain the standpoint of the Baptist,
and his outloolo But we must make the attempt. The Hebrew
prophet was inspired by Jehovah, His spirit entered into him and
clothed him. The Hebrew name " Nabi" recognises this passive
aspect of the prophet as the recipient of the divine mind and will ;
it is from the passive form of the verb. " The root of the verb is
said to be a word signifying to boil or bubble over, and is thus
based upon the metaphor of a fountain bursting forth from the
heart of man, into which God has poured it." '
In the stricter and more proper sense of the title, the prophets
took their rise in Moses. They became an institution or order
under Samuel, and continued under the kings. They were not
circumscribed by heredity like the priestly order ; anyone in
whom dwelt the Spirit of God in sufficient measure, from whatever
rank of life, was recognised and " established to be a prophet of
the Lord." The gift was that of God, the recognition that of the
people. They continued through the divided kingdom, through
the Captivity, after it, until we come to Malachi. Through all the
vicissitudes of their history Jehovah had not for long left Himself
without a witness, until we come to the strange, long silence of the
four hundred years between our " Testaments."
In regard to their religious teaching, its great characteristic
was the proclamation of the Unity and Spirituality of the Divine
Nature; To the Unity the prophets were ever faithful, lifting it up
against those idolatries of surrounding nations which were not
merely theoretical errors, but which, as every student knows, were
1 Dean Stanley's Jewish Church, Lectures XIX. and XX.

"THE THOUGHT THAT BREATHES" 47
so inwoven with their national life as to give the sanction of the
gods to cruelties and immoralities simply horrible and unrelate-
able. The Spirituality of God, His justice, and His love, re
presented the active side of their teaching. " The moral mani
festation of God in some impressive form constituted at once the
first call and the sustaining force of every prophetic mission."
The prophets stood, too, to proclaim the inseparable union of
morality with religion. There is hardly one of them whose life or
writings does not contain an intense proclamation of this truth, as
may be readily verified. " Mercy and justice, judgment and truth,
repentance and goodness — not sacrifice, not fasting, not ablutions
— is the burden of the whole prophetic teaching of the Old
Testament." How unflinching were their denunciations of wrong,
either in king, priest, or people ; how powerful their appeals to
the consciences of their fellow-countrymen ! Sometimes they had
been the leaders of the people, and always were they patriots.
(Indeed, they were essentially patriots. It was their function to
bring back the nation to those strong moral foundations upon
which alone it and its institutions could securely starid?)
They saw visions and made predictions of a glorious future :
but this will rise again for our consideration. \T_he popular limi
tation of the idea of a prophet to a foreteller of future events,
especially merely earthly events, is a quite erroneous and com
paratively modern idea? That they did foretell such is of course
without doubt, but (the chief part of their work was to apply the
principles of God's righteous rule to their time and nation}
The religion of the Hebrews, as one of our calmest thinkers x
writes, " gave existence to an inestimably precious unorganised
institution, the order (if it may be so termed) of the prophets.
Under the protection, generally though not always effectual, of
their sacred character, the prophets were a power in the nation,
often more than a match for kings and priests, and kept up, in
that little corner of the earth, the antagonism of influences which
is the only real security for continued progress. . . . The remark
1 J. S. Mill, Representative Govermmnt.

48 THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
of a distinguished Hebrew, that the prophets were in Church and
State the equivalent of the modern liberty of the press, gives a just
but not an adequate conception of the part fulfilled in national
and universal history by this great element of Jewish life."
^his meaning, this significance of the prophets and their
function, was of course powerfully present to the mind of John
out there in the solitude of the desert. Deeply did he ponder
them, until he came to see the history of his people from their
standpoint! Yet in all his retrospect he found no period wherein
the prophet was more needed than his own} For four centuries —
a period equal to that which stretches from the beginning of the
reign of Henry the Eighth to our own time — the prophetic voice
had been silenjp No need is there for us to enter upon the weary
intricacies,1 the unworthy intrigues, the invasion of the heathen
spirit with which the priesthood of the nation not only was power
less to cope, but which tainted it with its own consent, the
gradual drawing on of a permanent captivity : it was a gloomy
landscape, one of morasses, of "antres vast and deserts idle,
rough quarries," with very few "rocks and hills whose heads
touch heaven." Then he looked around upon the condition of
his people in his own day. They are no longer a nation, their
land is but a province bound to the triumphal car of Imperial
Rome, and " they are slaves to those whom they believed them
selves destined to rule." The eagles of the Cassars fly in the
air of the sacred city, and flout the Temple itself. His fellow-
countrymen are treated by the conquerors with the calm con-
temptuousness of assured and unbreakable power. Mercilessly
had they crushed patriotic insurrections, and they were quite
prepared, if need be, to do so again. The land groaned beneath
the oppressor's tread.
If politically the forward as well as the backward look was
dark, it was still darker in the direction of religion. The sacred
priesthood itself was corrupted into a political office. This must
have been a point of special soreness to John, for, like Jeremiah
1 See Introduction.

"the thought that breathes" 49
and Ezekiel, he was himself of the priestly order. It may be quite
the fact that the exalted ideas we have been taught to attach to
the priestly office did not belong to it in the Hebrew economy.
It was for the most part and in most cases an external function.
Personal character and life counted for little as to the validity of
its duties ; that was secured if they were officially and, from a
ceremonial standpoint, properly performed. The man who held
the office was subordinate — part of the apparatus. And the
worship itself was a coarse one, external too, as compared with
our ideas. \* The arrangements of the temple were, as has been
truly said, not those of a cathedral or a church, but of a vast
slaughter-house, combined with a banqueting hall. Droves of
oxen, sheep, and goats crowded the courts. Here were the rings
to which they were fastened. There was the huge altar, towering
above the people, on which the carcases were laid to be roasted.
Underneath was the drain to carry off the blood. Close by was
the apparatus for skinning and fleecing them. Round the court
were kitchens for cooking the meat. The stench was abated by
the fumigation of incense. For that which constitutes Christian
devotion — prayer, praise, commemoration, exhortation — there was >
not in the Mosaic ritual any provision." ^
It is very evident that John had but Tittle regard for this aspect
of the nation's religion. (_His was the prophetic, not the priestly,
soul) The streaming blood was of infinitely less consequence to
him than that state of heart which was a spiritual and living
sacrifice. His attitude and position was that of his favourite
Tsaiah : " To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices
unto Me ? saith the Lord : I am full of the burnt offerings of
rams, and the fat of fed beasts ; and I delight not in the blood of
bullocks, or of lambs, or of he goats. When ye come to appear
before Me, who hath required this at your hand, to trample My
courts . . . Wash you, make you clean ; put away the evil of
your doings from before Mine eyes ; cease to do evil ; learn to do
well."2' 1 Stanley's Jewish Church, vol. ii. pp. 352-3- Isa' U II-I7-V

50 the last of the prophets
Yet it is also evident that one of John's inwardness, a see-er
into the heart and inner meaning of things, would, pushing aside
the coarse externalism, recognise the spiritual import of it all.
(The central acts of a people's religion cannot be meaningless in
their origin, nor spring from seed that is bad ; their danger is
that externalisms should so accumulate upon them that the life
should go out by suffocation. And sacrifice meant sorrow for a
broken law ; it confessed the desert of punishment, even to the
forfeiture of life ; it sought to open an approach to God by a
gift of the offerer, a gift valuable in proportion as it represented
the entire dedication of the life. And as John's own life was a
full dedication, he had seized the reality of which animal sacrifices
were but the symbols. )
Bejidjs_s__aifice^prie_vthood 2^p^esented_the_line of approach
of_sinful manjto his JVTaker. The priest appeared before God for
him, and from God brought back forgiveness and blessing. He
represented the people, in symbolism, to God. The high priest's
very dress was a series of symbols, the gold plate on his forehead,
on which was engraved the incommunicable Name, the breast
plate with its twelve stones, the Urim and the Thummim. Q_ut
the full purport of priesthood only came home to the mind of
John when it was connected, as everything national was, with the
hope of the Messiah. He would be the Lamb of God to bear
away sin, led to the slaughter, the suffering Servant of Jehovah
who should, through His consecrated pain and sorrow, enter into
the mediatorial and administrative glory of His High Priesthood.
Then we should see of the travail of His soul and be satisfied^
But the origin and the ideal, as against the present and the
real, " what a fall was there ! " (The priesthood corrupted into a
political office! It was "tampered with by Idumean tetrarchs
or Roman procurators ; the chief influence over the degraded
Sanhedrin was in the hands of supple Herodians or wily
Pharisees." Brooding over this contrast, the old warrior blood in
the recluse was stirred. John did not forget that the " sons of
Levi " had been essentially a military caste. As Dean Stanley

"THE THOUGHT THAT BREATHES" 5 1
points out, "every step of their early history is marked in blood!
The consecration of the tribe was no calm ceremonial in the
solitude of the sanctuary. It was by the tremendous self-dedica
tion to the work of exterminating the worshippers of the molten
calf." Their music was the clanging trumpet or the dissonant
ram's horn. The morning hymn with which they raised the ark
on their shoulders was the stirring war-cry : " Rise up, O Lord,
and let Thine enemies be scattered." Nor did he forget that the
greatest, the most heroic struggle his people could boast in their
annals was led by a family of priests — the Maccabees, in whom
seemed to be reincarnated, for a final and supreme effort, the old
fierce warrior spirit which had made the tribe of Levi a synonym
in earlier times for faithfulness and devotion. But now, alas !
u_s for the people at large, even the Pharisees, once the
Puritans of the race, and who still stood as the chief represent
atives of the law and as its strictest observers, bowed down and
smiled, if only "from the teeth outward," before the foreign I
power and the " abomination of desolation standing in the holy
place." Is not this why John called them afterwards a genera
tion of vipers, their showing such a supple subserviency toward
those whom they hated with a venomous hatredT^
Oyer^against this degradation of the nation|s_ political, and
religious life, tihere rose in the^mind _of ^the. prophet J:he sublime
ideal of the kingdom pLJeh.oy.ah. His imagination pictured what
it ought to be, what it might be among a faithful people. The
histories he meditated showed what it had been aforetime, how
blessing had flowed as milk and honey when the nation realised
its God, and how His anger had fallen on them in the long
seasons of defection. But he felt that all the best must come
again, — nay, was he not expressly chosen and appointed to
herald it ?
Whenever we might conclude the song of Zacharias to have
been written, there is no doubt that it expresses the prevailing
Messianic hope of the time. Jehovah, the God of Israel, was
about to "remember His holy covenant, the oath which He sware

52 THE LAST OF THE TROPHETS
to Abraham," " to deliver them out of the hand of their enemies,
that they might serve Him without fear, in holiness and right
eousness all their days." "The dayspring from on high shall
visit us, to shine upon them that sit in darkness and the shadow
of death ; to guide our feet into the way of peace." While as for
John, he should "be called the prophet of the Highest, go before
the face of the Lord to make ready His ways, to give knowledge
of salvation unto His people by the remission of their sins." ^nd
over this hope and this vocation long and earnestly brooded the
soul of John in the wilderness, until the fulness of its meaning and
the nearness of its coming stood clear before him?
But the prophet is more than a seer : he is a seeder plus the
"forth-speaker" of what he sees. "The word of God came to
John, the son of Zacharias, in the wilderness. . . . And he came
preaching." How did the word of the Lord come? It had also
come to other prophets. There is no need to require the audible
voice of God : it means that the soul of the prophet became so
filled with the divine truth he studied, and a sense of its import
ance to the people, that his heart was "burdened" with it ; he
must declare it; he is "straitened till it be accomplished";
nay, " woe is to him if he does not preach " it. The streams from
the hills of divine truth and rapt contemplation have gradually
filled his soul, like some great reservoir, till at length it becomes
imperative to provide an outlet. And, seeking God's direction,
he is shown the how and when and where.
Whenever we read that the "word of the Lord came" to any
prophet, we find that soon after, and in consequence of its
coming, there is the authoritative proclamation of some truth
needful to the times. No purpose could be served by the re
vealing without the declaring. The "coming" of the word —
the hoyo;, the doctrine, the inner truth to be uttered — marks the
"psychological moment" for the prophet. Seeing has become
prophecy ; meditation a message ; the molten truth issues in
white-hot words.

CHAPTER IV
"The Word that Burns"
(At last " heaven saw the hour ripe on earth." The long silence
of the desert was broken by a ringing call of no uncertain
sound, the call of one sure of his message, and burning to
deliver it^)
|We can see the tall gaunt figure of the roughly-clad recluse
entering one of the scattered hamlets of the borderland, standing
like an apparition as he cried out the short, sharp sentence which
pierced each of its quiet homes, and penetrated every heart that
heard it — " Repent ! the kingdom of heaven is at hand ! " ~;
We can see the groups of people too, children in the foreground,
flocking round him wonderingly. To them he is a new embodi
ment of the law and the prophets. His " Repent ! " is an appeal
to the former, a demand for a moral " baring " until the bed-rock
is reached upon which Jehovah can build ; while his statement
that "the kingdom of heaven is at hand" is a re-affirmation of
old and cherished prophecies.
To the next village he goes, where a similar scene is enacted ;
and so on, along the hill-slopes and through the valleys, trending
toward the Jordan, until at length the whole country-side is in a
ferment about the new prophet with the old message. He seemed
as one of the prophets come to life again — those heroes of an
heroic age, who loomed large through the mist of the centuries.
His fame soon reached the capital, and Jerusalem, and all Judea,
and the region round about Jordan, came out, like the waters of
a flood, seeking him.

54 THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
" It is Elijah come to earth again ! The chariot of fire has
brought back the prophet who was taken up alive into heaven ! "
The last note of the old covenant was a promise. And it sounded
like a bell through the silent four hundred years with " one clear
call " for them : " Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet
before the great and terrible day of the Lord come." 1 Upon this
the scribes had taught, and the people believed, that Elijah had
to re-appear in bodily presence to proclaim the kingdom and
prepare its way.
vhe points of similarity between the two men were so striking,
that it was natural, nay almost unavoidable, that the prophet of
the desert should be, in their imagination and belief, " he who
should come.") Everything about him suggested the old prophet
who had not died, who might therefore return at any moment,
who would, when Jehovah saw fit to send him. \^ith the same
startling suddenness had he burst upon the people ; there was the
same ignorance respecting his former life and training ; both
appeared among the people as if placed down there by the hand
of Jehovah without previous note or warning ; the carriage of
both was equally fearless, and their message equally uncom
promising ; and as Elijah had been the right hand of the
Almighty as the rebuker of the evils of his time, and in pulling
round the nation, by the sheer strength of single-handed faith, to
the allegiance from which it had wandered, so the words of the
new prophet struck the same high note of demand, and his bear
ing promised a similar result^)
(Along the walls of the Hebrew national portrait gallery there
hung no picture before which the reverent gazers stopped in
admiration at his doing and daring, so instinctively as before
Elijah's. Others might represent wisdom or piety or zeal ; but
his stood for that which strikes an answermg chord in every
heart — courage^ Nor was it to be always a portrait ; once again
it would descend, take the form of life, and become the same power
ful personality as before, to usher in " the notable day of the Lord."
1 Mal. iv. 5.

"THE WORD THAT BURNS" 55
When, therefore, they heard the voice of John, and looked upon
him, the portrait in their imagination became a living reality
before them. fAnd their conclusion was only dispelled, and that
not completely, by the direct disclaimer of the prophet — " I am
not he.'P>
disappointed, they ask, "Who art thou, then?" And John's
answer is as if he had said : " Do not think of me, or put any
weight upon me, at all : who I am matters little or nothing, the
kingdom and the King must be supreme with you. I am only a
voice. The Eternal is on a progress through His dominions, and
I am but the herald who runs before His chariot, crying, " Prepare
His way."1 The avant-courrier is only a function — look beyond
him to the coming King — " He is mightier than I, the latchet of
His sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie. Repent !
the kingdom of heaven is coming ! it is at handj_^
T[hJ5. isrin ..hri^ the significance of John's startling message,
and we can readily understand that a fever of excitement and
expectation should be produced by it.
The content of the idea of the kingdom of heaven and its King
is so totally different to us from what it was to John's contempor
aries, that it is only by the aid of the historic imagination that we
can in any way understand the force with which it appealed to them,
and the effects which it produced. (lo us the phrase " kingdom
of heaven " comes freed from an earthly basis altogether ; it is
eminently and entirely a spiritual conception* Even so early as
the days of the Apostle Paul the spiritual content was pushing
out the worldly — " The kingdom of God is righteousness, peace,
and joy in the Holy Ghost." And whenever we think of it, it is
1 " The voice of one crying in the wilderness." " Probably ' in the wilder
ness ' should be attached to the words uttered by the voice, as is required by
the parallelism of Hebrew poetry —
' Prepare ye in the wilderness a way for Jehovah,
Nay, even in the desert a highway for our God. '
The wilderness is metaphorically the barren waste of the Jewish life in that
day (Isa. xxxv. i)." — Farrar on Luke iii. 4.

56 THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
in a similar light ; as established in the affection, the will, the
conscience of men s^as casting out the evil there, and producing
there loyalty to Goo) And the kingdom spreads by spreading
thus. In a word, with us the connotation of the phrase is ethical,
and ethical only.
(But what was the meaning of the phrase to those to whom John
proclaimed iOand to John himself (for his doubting message to
Jesus from the prison conclusively shows that he partook of the
popular conception of " the kingdom ") ? If we were to say that
it meant the setting up of a throne in Jerusalem ; the founding of
an earthly state ; the " armies of the Lord " going out to battle
and driving the hated Roman domination out of the land ; the
re-establishment of their nation and city in all the glory that it
had in the palmiest days of King David or King Solomon, we
should be right, so far. It was just because Jesus, afterwards,
while claiming the title of king, was not such a king, that the
Jews, who, led by the Chief Priests and Scribes, would have
followed Him to a man if he had taken such steps as these to
justify His title, procured His crucifixion by a mean misrepresenta
tion, to the very power they hated. "We have no king but
Caesar" ; " If thou let this man go, thou art not Caesar's friend ! "
shouted the hypocrites in their mock loyalty. Representing Him
as dangerous to the Roman authority by His use of the title " The
King of the Jews," the chief indictment in their minds and hearts
was, that He was not dangerous at alj)
Still, if we limited the idea of the phrase in the devout Jewish
mind to this, we should "do it wrong, being so majestical." Cit
did mean this, but it meant far more than thisJI Below, above,
and around it, was the belief in the overlon^ipof^-Jehjiyah, — in
that it lived and moved and had its being. Its first fact was the
theocracy ; it was ever regarded, by all thoughtful minds and
understanding hearts, as having a divine and spiritual foundation.
The ideal began with the beginning of their race, in the call of
Abraham to go out and find the place that God should tell him
of. And Jehovah promised to make him a great nation. It

"THE WORD THAT BURNS" 57
continued, with ebbings and flowings, it is true, according to the
vicissitudes of their history, — but it continued ; never wholly lost,
even in the darkest periods, but never fully realised, even in the
brightest. Ever after the father of the faithful, God was regarded
as the director of the nation's concerns and the giver of its laws.
The people were under His control and guidance when but a
family. In each development of their tribal and afterwards
their national life, the reference was to Him. Moses gave them
laws written with His finger ; they were an elect race, a holy
nation, a people for God's own possession ; chosen and ordained
to conserve His truth, and to maintain, in the midst of a world
that wandered from Him, the truths of the unity and spirituality
of His nature, and the right He had to reign.
CThe request of the people for a king was regarded by the
prophets and the ardently religious as treason against the
Almighty, because it seemed to invade His headship) At length
it was granted, but, though a step downwards had been taken,
they still believed Jehovah to be behind their king, and ruling
through him. Under the bad kings there came a contraction of
this belief, or rather the whole belief seemed to be rapidly
travelling along the line toward the vanishing point. But
Jehovah did not leave Himself without witness. The prophets
stood by the law that was losing its sanctions, and the God
whose very presence and power seemed to be withdrawing
themselves. And "the man who rose to eminence in the
commonwealth was the man who had a stronger sense than others
in the presence, power, and justice of the invisible King ; and his
great function was to awaken the same sense in others by
eloquent words and decided acts." x
(But the course of history was against them. Instead of
advancing nearer their ideal, each succeeding age found them
apparently farther from it, until, after terrible oppressions and
captivities, the colossal power of Rome put down its foot upon
their beloved land } a power that had no " heart of mercy," but
> 1 Ecce Homo.

58 THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
pitilessly crushed every insurrectionary aspiration and its leaders.
And, further, though it might affect them as a people but to a
small extent, yet the whole tendency of the world's thought was
away from them, toward perhaps more philosophical, but certainly
laxer, religious ideals.
^hrough all, the people looked for a restitution of Jehovah's
"kingdom upon earth. It was a dream of the future, based upon
that golden age of the past when, under David and Solomon, the
nation was in power and splendour ; but it was to be infinitely
more glorious. 'This ideal they had kept before themselves alike
through temporary success and prolonged oppression. In every
day of hope, at every slight favourable turn of affairs, they had
eagerly imagined it coming, and through the long night of their
disappointment the vision had assumed a magnitude and bright
ness greater by reason of the darkness that threw it into contrast.
But one by one these "gorgeous palaces and cloud-capped
towers" had been shattered by the unsparing hand of hard
reality. And yet the vision, broken though it might be, burned
in the hearts of the people still. Hope deferred maketh the heart
sick ; yet, sick as it was, the Jewish heart clung to and cherished
the hope. Ever did the Hebrews show a remarkable upspring-
ing of belief and hope in the very presence of disaster and
defeat.1 1 " A gigantic dream haunted for centuries the Jewish people, constantly
renewing its youth in its decrepitude. A stranger to the theory of individual
recompense, which Greece diffused under the name of the immortality of the
soul, Judea concentrated all its power and love and desire upon the national
future. She thought she possessed promises of a boundless future ; and as the
bitter reality, from the ninth century before our era, gave more and more the
dominion of the world to physical force, and brutally crushed these aspirations,
she took refuge in the union of the most impossible ideas, and attempted
the strangest gyrations. Before the captivity, when all the earthly hopes of
the nation had become weakened by the separation of the northern tribes,
they dreamt of the restoration of the house of David, the reconciliation of the
two divisions of the people, and the triumph of theocracy, and the worship
of Jehovah over idolatry. At the epoch of the captivity, a poet (Isaiah), full
of harmony, saw the splendour of a future Jerusalem, of which the peoples
and the distant isles should be tributaries, under colours so charming, that

"THE WORD THAT BURNS" 59
/it was to this slumbering instinct and smouldering fire that
John appealed when his trumpet call woke the desert) The
people rose ; their long, silent heart-solitude, like that of the
wilderness, was broken too. Their heart leaped to the hope, as
steel leaps to a powerful magnet. The vision again brightened ;
patriotic zeal, religious fervour, and moral strength, came to the
front, answering the call ; and many began to pledge themselves
to its realisation. The kingdom of heaven was energised, filled
with new forces, vital with that vitality that absorbs and
incorporates ; and men of energy, who were roused to a profound
sense of its importance, seized upon it.1 Here was the force of
the call, " Repent." It was as if John had said : " Bring round
your mind from earthly things to this — the coming kingdom ;
get back to first principles ; realise the sanctity of the law, and
the unchangeable purpose of Jehovah respecting you as a people.
The God who has been over all your history is over you still ; He
will establish the theocracy once more. Make ye ready the
way of the Lord. The chariot of His accomplishing purpose is
coming ; it is but just over the hill ; it holds the King ! Smooth,
make level the road ; fill up the valleys, bring down the moun
tains ; the righteous Jehovah must have a straight path. He is
coming, and all flesh shall see His salvation ! "
(And can we not readily understand how such a message,
spoken with no quaver in the voice, but with the confidence
of absolute conviction ; by one who had " seen the King
in His beauty " and talked with Him ; from whose presence
he had just come ; who heralded His advance, and bore His
commission, should rouse the people in its tocsin-like appeal?
one might say a glimpse of the visions of Jesus had reached him at a distance
of six centuries." — Renan.
1 'Afro Se tSSv yfttpvv '\ua..,»v rcu fixirTtffTOv l_s tr.prl -r> pettrtAltot rm ovpatuv
^toi^Txi, xxi fitu.tr'ia.'i ot,ptrx.Zovtri. uaitvi,." — Matt. xi. 12. The late Dr. Samuel
Cox, in The Expositor, First Series, vol. iii., suggested the translation
of the latter part of this verse which has been adopted in the text : ' ' From
the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven is energised,
-and the energetic seize it by force, "or " puts forth force, and men of force
strongly lay hold upon it.'

60 THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
For it touched at once the deepest spring's of their faith
and their highest hopes. No wonder, then, that "Jeru
salem, and all Judea, and the region round about Jordan,"
should turn out their multitudes to see and hear the new
prophet|)

CHAPTER V
"The Wrath to Come"
The leading religious parties soon heard of the prophet and his
preaching ; and among the crowds which flocked to the banks of
the Jordan came groups of Pharisees and Sadducees. By their
distinctive dress, their separateness from the multitude among
whom they slowly moved ; by the superiority of their demeanour,
and that air of refinement that only can come from culture,
although the culture may be narrow both in base and super
structure, the penetrative eye of John singled them out.
s we have seen, John had begun to rouse the people from their
ong lethargy ; the bold statement that the kingdom of heaven
was at hand had awakened those feelings and hopes which,
though they had lain for generations in a trance-like^ slumbei^had
never finally died and . been'KiiriecL^Kid now there appear before
"Turn ffiFrepresefnSTvesoftihose very parties who, professedly and
ex officio, were above all others seeking the coming of the kingdom
and labouring to bring it in ; and yet who, in reality, were the
greatest obstacles in its way^
And that in_two directions. First, by having "the spirit injjie
letter lost, the substance in the shade." There was every care for
the forms of religion, but very little for the spirit ; they tithed
mint, anise, and cummin, but neglected the weightier matters of
the law, — judgment, mercy, and faith. Religion, with one of the
parties, had become a careful and anxious round of performing an
endless series of absurdly wire-drawn observances, or of the study
of equally absurd and wire-drawn commentaries on the sacred
61

62 the last of the prophets
text ; with the other, it had come to be merely rationalistic
morality, from which the supernatural was excluded ; while
Messiah's coming, or divine intervention, or angel, or spirit, were
so many idle tales. The second wasf that both of them, one by its
supercilious, over-much righteousness, the other by its total in
difference, contributecTTrie'opiates whicTETprolonged the coma_of
the nation toward the kingdom and its kingT
TCnrTjohn knew that these men, ui "tlieir" venomous pride, spoke
with despising of " the common people " who .iLkjassu. not— tire
la,yy" ; that they were men who would resent any infringement of
their ecclesiastical position with a calm and assured condemnation
in the tone of their question, " By what authority doest thou these
things, and who gave thee that authority?" and that, in point of
fact, they were men who manipulated the sacred ordinances of
religion for the sake of worldly gain, caring most for the social
position they conferred — " the chief places in the synagogues and
the uppermost rooms at feasts " ; while, at the same time, it held
good against them, that they lowered themselves and crept at the
feet of that civil power which oppressed them, and which they
hated. Here was a hypocrisy which included Pharisees and
Sadducees both, for if they believed the beliefs they professed
to believe, they were manifestly untrue to them in conduct. Must
not John, then, have long regarded them in his desert meditations
as the greatest hindrances to the re-establishment of the theo
cracy, with all the benefit and blessing that implied ?
Like the Master^who : came af____hL_vno -terms .arejop hot and
scathing for th______j' O offspring of vipers, — O viperousJarood.
who hath warned you to flee from the coming wrath V1 " It was
bitterly, it was uncourtly,— -but oh, it was truly said ! They were
the offspring of vipers, for often had their fathers stung to_dcath
1 Luke (iii. ) says it was to • ' the multitudes "John thus spake, but Matthew
reports it as having been addressed to the Pharisees and Sadducees. The
latter is much more probable. For Luke has an evident antithesis in ver. io :
"And the multitudes asked him, saying, What then shall we do?" And
further, the description of vipers, dry trees, and chaff is much more appro
priate to these special classes than to the people at large.

"THE WRATH TO COME" 63
the benefactors, the saviours, sent from heaven to save the nation ;
and soon were the children to show themselves born in the
likeness of their sires, by stinging with persecution and death
that greater One whose shoe-latchet he was not worthy to
unloose." 1
But in their self-security of righteousness or shallow morality,
the Pharisees and Sadducees before the prophet must themselves
have been stung" by the calm and implied assurance in the
question of John that they were obnoxious to, and in the way
of, the coming wrath. On the other hand, they expected, as
favourites of heaven, to hold high positions among the officers of
the kingdom when it should come. But now they are told they
are so bad and worthless that they jnust be swept away by
Tehoyah's angerjjeforethat kingdom can come at all.
To obtain any adequate conception of the force with which
these words struck the parties to whom they were addressed, we
must ask and try to answer — What was the meaning of the phrase
" wrath to come " ?
And we must ever keep before our minds the fact that the basal
idea of the kingdom of God was not material prosperity or
national aggrandisement. These were parts of its superstructure,
it is true, but the foundation was purely moral — Jehovah's
righteousness. The prophets were always true to spiritual ideals.
One essential factor in the conception was that God would
take vengeance on the wicked, and so clear the ground for the
establishment of His reign. The " nations may rage, and the
kings set themselves, and the rulers take counsel against the Lord
and against His Anointed," but " He shall break them with a
rod of iron, and dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel."2
" Jehovah will come with fire, and with His chariots like a whirl
wind, to render His anger with fury, and His rebuke with flames
of fire. For by fire and by sword will the Lord plead with
all flesh ; and the slain of the Lord shall be many." s Before
Jehovah's house can be filled with His glory, He will " shake the
1 Ed. Irving. 2 Ps. ii. s Isa. Ixvi. 15, 16.

64 THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
heavens, the earth, the sea, the dry land, and all the nations." •
"Jehovah is God in truth ; He is the living God, and an everlast
ing King : at His wrath the earth trembleth, and the nations are
not able to abide His indignation." 2 " He will overthrow the
throne of kingdoms, and destroy the strength of the kingdoms of
the heathen." 3 These kingdoms are often mentioned by name,
and the " burden " proclaimed respecting them, — as Assyria,
Babylon, Chaldea, Moab, Ammon, Tyre and Sidon. The nations
who oppose the Eternal, and by their evil stand in His way,
shall be turned into Sheol, or be so broken that they shall have no
power to oppress any more, and His chosen people shall have
a free course to run and be glorified.
But not only were outside nations to be rendered powerless
by the judgments of Jehovah. Ever true to the ideal of righteous
ness, the prophets declared that a similar cleansing process must
go on inside the elect nation itself : the bad had to be cast out,
and the people to be made "all righteous." No privilege of
blood or religion can over-ride the moral requirement. In this
light consider the opening chapter of Isaiah, where he writes
of the vision he saw " concerning Judah and Jerusalem." How
powerful is his indictment, how graphic his picture of their moral
delinquency and spiritual degradation ! They are a " sinful
nation, a people laden with iniquity, a seed of evil-doers, children
that deal corruptly." " The whole head is sick, and the whole
heart faint. From the sole of the foot even unto the head there is
no soundness in it ; but wounds, and bruises, and festering sores."
" Thy silver is become dross, and thy wine mixed with water."
But the Lord shall " turn His hand upon " them, " and throughly
purge away the dross," and take away all the " alloy." He will
"ease Him of His adversaries, and avenge Himself on His
enemies." " The destruction of the transgressors and the sinners
shall be together, and they that forsake the Lord shall be con
sumed." If there are those, says the same prophet in another place, who
1 Hag. ii. 6. 2 Jer. x. io. 8 Hag. ii. 22.

"the wrath to come" 65
have made lies their refuge, and under falsehood have hid them
selves, the hail shall sweep away the refuge of lies, and the waters
shall overflow the hiding-place.
When "the day" cometh, it shall, says Malachi, "burn as,a
furnace ; and the proud, and all that work wickedness, shall be
stubble, and the day that cometh shall burn them up, saith the
Lord of Hosts, that it shall leave them neither root nor branch."
Zephaniah proclaims that Jehovah will " search Jerusalem with
lamps," that " the great day of the Lord is near, it is near and-
hasteth greatly." " That day is a day of wrath, a day of trouble
and distress, a day of wasteness and desolation, a day of darkness
and gloominess, a day of clouds and thick darkness, a day of the
trumpet and alarm against the fenced cities, and against the high
battlements." And through all the prophets it is very clear that
Jehovah's judgments begin at His own house.
Neither do the official and privileged classes escape the test
of the plummet-line of righteousness because of their position.
Jehovah is no respecter of persons. He requires truth in the
inward parts. If "prophets prophesy falsely, and priests bear
rule by their means," it is in Jehovah's sight " a wicked and a
horrible thing." 1 " Woe " is denounced upon the pastors that
destroy and scatter the sheep of Jehovah's pasture. It is fearfully
possible that the "pastors" may "become brutish, and their
flocks be scattered." 2 " Woe be to the shepherds of Israel that
do feed themselves ! should not the shepherds feed the flocks ?
Ye eat the fat, and ye clothe you with the wool, ye kill them that
are fed, but ye feed not the flock." Zephaniah continues the
"woe" upon princes who are roaring lions, judges who are
evening wolves, prophets who are light and treacherous persons,
and priests who have polluted the sanctuary and done violence to
the law.3 Quotations need not be further multiplied. Enough
have been given to illustrate the fact that " the righteous Jehovah
loveth righteousness," and that evil will be punished.
1 Isa. v. 30, 31. 2 Jer. x. 21 ; Ezek. xxxiv. 3 et seq,
» Zeph. iii. 3, 4.
5

66 the last of the prophets
The punishment of the nation, however, severe as it was,
was not vindictive. Its purpose was purification. When Jehovah
appeareth, He will be like " a refiner's fire, and like fullers' soap ;
and He shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and He shall
purify the sons of Levi, and purge them as gold and silver, and
they shall offer unto the Lord offerings in righteousness." 1
Jehovah is more concerned for purity in those who are His than
for numbers of adherents who lack that purity. He is not afraid of
the pruning-knife, or of committing the great and weighty affairs
of His kingdom to " the remnant." The people may be decimated
by captivity ; cut down as a tree till but the stump is.left,. ljut even
then "ajBranch shall grow put. of his roots.". "The Lord is mind
ful of His own." And with the small handful, of faithful followers
HewilLheginJo reconstruct .the kingdom that is to be universal
andjeyerlasting. It may be objected that much of this promise and threatening
refers to their national history, and has no larger outlook. And it
must be conceded that the idea of the coming kingdom was very
composite, and that, moreover, its composition gradually altered
as the years and generations came and went, bringing with them
and then leaving behind new events and developments. Besides,
the continual postponement of its realisation led to its modifica
tion. Vengeance was threatened against the nations for their
oppression of the chosen people ; the judgment was visited ; but
still the kingdom did not come. " All things continued as they
had been from the beginning." Its advent must be put a stage
further forward : something else is seen to be an obstacle, let but
that be removed, and it will arrive. Time and the course of
events removed that, and yet Jehovah delayed His coming. In
this the Jewish people were like a party of travellers ascending a
renowned but untraversed mountain range. The peak that pro
jects into the heavens far above them seems to be the very
summit, but, on arriving there, another and distant peak projects
higher still. Weary but patient, they begin to travel the long
1 Mal. iii. z, 3.

"THE WRATH TO COME" 67
distance, over broken and disheartening ground, and when at
last they arrive at what they fondly hoped was the end of their
journey, another and yet more distant summit shows them another
and almost hopeless task. And this is repeated until it feels like
crossing a continent.
f_trtJhe^ejx.po__rK>»eiBe-nt-e^ of
tlie_glqry and beauty of the kingdom when it should arrive, just as
the distant mountain peaks we have been imagining seemed more
attractive and more magnificent under the bright and alluring
light than the stern, rocky reality of present surroundings. And
graduallythe spiritual interpenetrated itself into the_idgal_dim-
inishing" the proportion ofthe material.1 Thus it was a varied
and a changing hope, lacking crispness of conception, slow in its
growth, and made up of many parts.
But the element in the conception that remained an invariable
factor in all its variations was, that "Jehovah's day" should be
ushered in by judgment on all the wicked, inside and outside the
nation ; it would be " a day of darkness and gloominess, a day of
clouds and thick darkness."
As we haveseen, the mind of John the .Baptist leaned much more
to judgment than to mercy. To him that day of wrath was lurid,
and its advent close at hand. And there are coming to him the
Pharisees and Sadducees, who " neither enter in themselves, nor
suffer those who are entering, to go in." At the sight of them his
whole soul rises in indignation. How surprised they must have
been at the warmth of their reception ! and especially so to find
that, according to the prophet, they were between
" The full-incensed points of mighty opposites,"
and that neither their smug self-satisfaction nor their ecclesiastical
inertia can abide "the day of Jehovah's wrath, nor stand when He
appeareth." " Bring forth fruits meet for repentance '^-Jruitsjhat correspond^
1 It is~most interesting to trace this process through the books of the
prophets and the early days of Christianity, until it becomes etherealised, by
becoming spiritualised, in the later Epistles of St. Paul.

68 THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
to and evidence contrition of soul arid change .of Jieart, if_ye-
would escape " the conjinjj_wrath." It is as if the prophet had
said : Before there can be any entrance into the kingdom, you
must cease to rely upon multiplied observances or position, and
get back to the sweet simplicities and healthy morality of " the
first works." " Wash you, make you clean ; put away the evil of
your doings from before~Jehovah's eyes ; cease to do evil ; learn to
do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the father-
less,.plead for the widow."
Would they fall back upon the fact that they were Abraham's
children, and therefore God's wrath must pass them by ? That
plea will not stand. The pride and boast of the Jew was his line
of.jdescent.from "the father of -the faithful." And it was -to the
Hebrews like charity ; it had to cover a multitude of sins. " They
could scarcely believe it possible that any son of Abraham should
.ever be lost." 1 It was the one fact to which they ever harked
back, that justified their actions, settled all disputes, put the full-
stop to controversy ; the high unscaleable wall behind which they
were ever safe, however proud in spirit, superficial in devotion, or
heartless and oppressive in conduct.
In boldly taking up the position he did in relation to hereditary
privilege, Joh_n again allied himself with the prophets. Their
royal bard had long before discerned an3taugfirfKat, before God,
blood counted for little and character for much ; the " true
generation of them who seek Jehovah's face " are they who have
" clean hands and pure hearts, who have not lifted up their souls
to vain things, nor sworn deceitfully."2 "Trust not in lying
words, saying, The temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord,
the temple of the Lord, are we," said Jeremiah. For if their
ways were not amended, judgment executed, the stranger and
fatherless and widow left unoppressed, these were lying words.
Micah calls upon the heads of the house of Jacob, and rulers of
the house of Israel, to hear this : " The heads thereof judge for
reward, and the priests thereof teach for hire, and the prophets
1 Farrar, 2 Ps. xxiv. 4-6.

"THE WRATH TO COME" 69
thereof divine for money : yet will they lean upon the Lord, and
say, Is not the Lord in the midst of us ? no evil shall come upon
us." But because of this, " Zion shall be plowed as a field, and
Jerusalem shall become heaps." '
And these are but specimens. All through the prophets,
physical descent did not bar judgment when conduct and life
were bad. And the strong, swinging arm of John ruthlessly
sweeps aside such a refuge of falsehood. The true line of descent
is spiritual, inherent in faith and works like those of Abraham.
" If the physie_JL_wj;ijs__alL Jehovah^ jan raise up children__ta,
AJbrfiarn <af th.ese.very stones," said John^ jointing to the. rough
boulders about his feet.
One emblem ofjparrenness is quickly ^succeeded by another.
They are fruitless trees, nothing coming from them for the glOry
of God or the betterment of their fellows, — absorbers, yet non-
producers. They must be cut down in the day of wrath ; and
already the gleaming axe lies at their root, the woodman stands
by preparing to use it, and there is no one to say, " Woodman,
spare that tree," " let it alone another year." 2 And yet they con
sidered themselves to be trees planted by the rivers of water,
whose leaf did not wither, and whatsoever they did had Jehovah's
blessing, and prospered.
With the doom of fire still present to his thought, he likens
them again to the chaff winnowed from the good wheat by the
self-elective fan of the greater than himself who was coming after
him. Light of character, with little spiritual earnestness or moral
1 Micah iii. ii, 12.
2 The note of Dr. Farrar on Luke iii. 9 (Cambridge Bible) contains a
characteristically beautiful idea. ' ' The notion," says he, " is that of a wood
man touching a tree with the edge of the axe to measure his blow before he
fells it." But the notion is not self-suggested by the text, and the verb
employed seems fatal to it. It is xiirxi (*e7,__i), "to be laid" ; and this, its
radical meaning, enters into the varieties of its application. It contains a
passive idea. Another verb would be more suitable if he had the axe in his
hand. Wesley's note 6n Matt. iii. 10 is preferable. " The comparison seems
to be taken from a woodman who has laid down his axe, to put off his coat,
and then immediately goes to work to cut down the tree."

70 THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
worth, they have no weight to withstand the fan that shall
throughly purge the threshing-floor in that day.
How thoroughly roused must the Pharisees and Scribes have
felt at the fierce onslaught of the prophet, with such weapons^ in ..
his hands as vipers, chaff, stones, barren trees !

CHAPTER VI
"What then must We Do?"
While John has been anathematising Pharisees and Sadducees,
various questions have been rising in various minds as to the
bearing of the kingdom upon themselves, and what manner of
men they ought to be to enter into it. Did they also come under
the lash ? " And the jnultitudes^asJied himr saying, What then
must we do ?" John's answer is plain, direct, and pointed : "He
that hath two coats, let hirrijmpart to him that hath none ; and^
he that-hath food, let him do likewise."
But the question is not the general one it seems at first sight
to be ; nor is the answer, concrete as it is, such as would only
redeem him, though it would do that completely, from the charge
of being an unpractical visionary. Both question and answer are
specific, and have direct reference to "the kingdom," which
formed the " burden " of the preaching of John, and with which
he had strongly impregnated the mind of his hearers. It is as if
they had said : " What then are we to do to enter it ? " And to this
John's answer is directed. Those commentators who regard the
prophet's reply as simply enjoining general philanthropy have
touched the shaft of the arrow, but not its point
These practical and brotherly kindnesses were to form one of
the special and distinguishing marks of the citizens of the kingdom
when it should be established. Within a short time after this,
Jesus assumed the position of Messiah, and His teaching on this
subject proceeds upon these lines. To the disciples who came
round Him on "the mountain" in Galilee, Jesus said : "Give to
71

72 THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee
turn not thou away." When the young ruler came with his
earnest and sincere question, he was told to sell all that he had
and give it to the poor, and he should have treasure in heaven.
And having watched him go away sorrowful, unable to make
" the great renunciation," Jesus turned to His disciples with the
remarks : " It is hard for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of
heaven. Again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go
through a needle's eye, than for a rich man to enter into the
kingdom of God." J And if we ask why it was so hard_for rich men,
the answer is, BecauseitJAas to be a lawj)f_the_jVI.essLanic reign
that there must be, a mutual distribution of goods.
In the great dramatic picture of the Son of Man sitting upon
the throne of His glory, Jesus represents Him as judging the
nations gathered before Him, and, assisted by all the angels,
separating them one from another, as a shepherd divideth the sheep
from the goats. The reason why the King shall say unto them
on His right hand, " Come, ye blessed of My Father, inherit the
kingdom prepared for you," is just the reason we are considering,
— they had distributed to the necessity of their brethren, — " For I
was an hungred, and ye gave Me meat : I was thirsty, and ye
gave Me drink : I was a stranger, and ye took M? in : naked,
and ye clothed Me : I was sick, and ye visited Me : I was in
prison, and ye came unto Me." . . . "Inasmuch as ye did it
unto one of these My brethren, even these least, ye did it unto
Me." 2
In another place Jesus tells His little flock not to fear, for it is
their Father's good pleasure to give them the kingdom ; that,
therefore, they are to sell that they have, and give alms ; and
that they, having sought first the kingdom, shall have food and
raiment added, for the Father who feeds the birds and arrays the
lilies will care for them.3
It was upon this principle that Judas fell back when he saw the
waste^asjie thought, of the ointment ; it was not in accordance
1 Matt. xix. 16, et seq. 2 Matt. xxv. 3T, et seq. 3 Luke xii. 22, et seq.

"WHAT THEN MUST WE DO?" 73
with the new social law ; " it might have been sold and the
money given to the poor " : and the covetousness of the man is
seen in this, that though he recited the law, Tip " Hirl nntj-arp for
the poor," but wanted to have the money.
The possession of the bag, the common fund of the society,
indicates the practical communism which was to be the rule of
life under the Messiah's reign. In "the regeneration," i.e. the
regenerated social state, the law would be that the interests of
each should be identical with the interests of all, and vice versa.
There would be a perfect balance between egoism and altruism.
And it is interesting to find that this was one of the distinguish
ing traits of the body of the disciples immediately after the
ascension : " All that believed were together, and had all things
common ; and they sold their possessions and goods, and parted
them to all according as any man had need."1 And when per
secution came, this was still their distinguishing feature : " And
not one of them said that aught of the things which he possessed
was his own, but they had all things common." . . . "As many
as were possessors of houses or lands sold them, and brought the
prices of the things that were sold, and laid them at the apostles'
feet ; and distribution was made unto each, according as any one
had need." 2
To its earliest adherents, the conception of the Christian Church
had by no means the same content it has to ourselves ; to them it
was the beginning of the realisation of the long-promised kingdom,
and shortly Jesus would come back to reign as Messiah. Its
communism was, therefore, in accordance with the social duties
which would become universal under his reign.
St. Paul exhorts the Corinthians to the same disposition :
" For I say not this that others may be eased, and ye distressed ;
but . . . that there may be equality : as it is written, He that
gathered much had nothing over ; and he that gathered little
had no lack." 3 And this he enforces by the example of " the
Lord Jesus Christ, who, though He was rich, for their sakes He
1 Acts ii. 44, 45. s Hid. iv. 32, et seq. 8 2 Cor. viii. 13-15.

74 THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
became poor, that they through His poverty might become rich."
And were we to examine all the New Testament references to
duty in relation to the poor, it would be found that their force is
derived, not from the general feeling of the brotherhood of the
race, — after ages spiritualised them into that, — but by their direct
relarion to the Messianic kingdom.
(This social duty of kindly helpfulness to the poor had been of
course recognised within the circle of God's chosen people long
before the time of John, as far back indeed as the Mosaic
legislation itself, the foundation of all their life ; and it was,
doubtless, upon this that the unwritten law in the minds of John
and Jesus and their contemporaries was foundedA " If there be
with thee a poor man," wrote the author of Deuteronomy (xv. 7,
et seq.), " one of thy brethren, within any of thy gates in thy land
which the Lord thy God giveth thee, thou shalt not harden thine
heart, nor shut thine hand from thy poor brother : but thou shalt
surely open thine hand unto him, and shalt surely lend him
sufficient for his need." And in Leviticus also we read (xxv. 35,
et seq.) : " And if thy brother be waxen poor, and his hand fail
with thee ; then thou shalt uphold him. . . . Take thou no
usury of him, or increase : but fear thy God ; that thy brother
may live with thee." Much of this chapter is concerned with the
affairs of the poor, and the duties of others in relation thereto.
When Isaiah expounds the fast which shall be acceptable to
the Lord (Iviii. 7, 8), he asks : "Is it not," among other things, " to
deal thy bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the poor that
are cast out to thy house ? when thou seest the naked, that thou
cover him ; and that thou hide not thyself from thine own flesh ? "
And, according to Ezekiel, the man who is just, and who shall
surely live, is the man who, besides observing other duties, " hath
given his bread to the hungry, and covered the naked with a
garment" (xviii. 7).
Quotations to the same effect might be largely multiplied,
but, the meaning being clear and the case proved, to do so is
unnecessary, for, although confirmatory, they would not minister

"what then must we do?" 75
much further light. Yet such an extended and detailed examina
tion of all scriptural references would establish and illustrate our
position, — that care for the poor was not only one of the social
principles of the elect race, but that it was to receive its fullest and
most communistic expansion under the reign of the King Messiah.
We therefore find that John's jmjwer__to_ the quesjdon,_'^What
then are we "to dp (to enter in) ? " was one, as said above,
not merely enjoining a general philanthropy, but specifically .
recognising.and enforcing the well-understood law incumbent on
membership in the coming kingdom.
Then the publicans come with their question : " Teacher, what
shall we do ? " — by no means an idle question, put for the sake of
hearing what kind of an answer the prophet will make in reply,
but one that had the sincere purpose of entering the kingdom
behind it, for they came " to be baptized."
The Roman government had a peculiarly expeditious method
of getting in its revenue.1 Contracts were made with rich
capitalists (publicani), who paid a certain agreed-upon sum for
the privilege of farming the taxes of the districts of the empire,
of which Palestine was one. These sublet the taxes to con
tractors of a lower grade, who in their turn appointed the actual
collectors. It is only the latter who find any mention in the New
Testament, with the possible exception of Zaccheus, who may
have been one of the " middlemen." It was, of course, the aim
of all to make as much over and above the sum paid as possible,
while the actual collectors could, without fear of detection, exact
more than the specified amount, and keep it. Such a system of
taxation, while easy and convenient for the government, readily
lent itself to all kinds of extortion and bribery, and was, in fact,
the most oppressive of all methods of taxation.
The collectors could only be obtained from the lowest orders
of the people, and they were hated, with the intensity of a Jew's
hatred, as the constant reminders of their subjection to the
tyranny of the conqueror ; as traitors to their own people, because
i See Smith's Dictionary of the Bible, art. Publican.

76 THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
they had become his tools, and their interest was with him rather
than with them ; and because of their extravagant greed. " They
were regarded almost with horror, and were always included in
the same category with harlots and sinners. -When an occupation
is thus despised and detested, it is clear that its members are apt
to sink to the. level at -which they are placed by the papular
odium."1 How strong then must have been the preaching of
John when it could thus powerfully move this, the lowest class of
the population, with its earnestness !
John^reply^tojtheir question was "not a summons to temple
service or sacrifice, nor was it ascetic or revolutionary in its tone."
" Exact," said he, " no more than is appointed you." " Extortion
was the fierce temptation of the class. I£would have been easier
for the publicans to keep all the ritual than radically Jo change
the^ whole spirit of their lives." " He tested sincerity in a manner
at once definite and practical. His answer involved no doctrine
of human brotherhood or divine fatherhood ; it was a dogmatic
appeal to the conscience of men who had laid their ethical sense
to sleep." 2 So they received their answer, — one so complete and
self-evident that from it there was no appeal.
The helmet crests and the dress, the erecter forms and lighter
features of groups of soldiers, move about among the crowds, as
they push their way, as soldiers will, to the front. The name given
to them (aTpxrivof&ivoi) indicates that they were on active service,
and not " off duty " from the Jerusalem or other garrison, who
had come to be " in at " the new excitement. But there were no
military operations afoot at this time of which we have any
knowledge. They were probably on service among these crowds
themselves, for the authorities responsible for the public peace
were aware of the highly inflammable nature of the Jews, and
knew how readily a tumult might arise at the call of the prophet
if he were so minded. Indeed, the fear of an insurrectionary
outbreak is given by Josephus as the reason of Herod's sub
sequent arrest of John.
1 Farrar. 2 Reynolds.

"WHAT THEN MUST WE DO?" 77
Apparently careless, but alert, they move about in small groups
among the people, and, coming near the prophet, break a lance
with him : " And what shall we do ? " It is not probable that
there was any seriousness in this question ; the soldiers, whether
Romans or mercenary, would have no adequate sense, probably
no sense at all, of the meaning of the phrase which had so deeply
stirred the hearts of the Jewish people about them. The scrip
ture does not say, either, as it does in the case of the publicans,
that the purpose of baptism was behind the question. It_^_____"L,.
in a light, bantering way ; the questioners were both curious and_„
" careless for the answer.
The surprising thing is that the fierce spirit of John did not
boil over in scalding words at the power the soldiers represented.
Here was the colossal power of Rome, with its iron heel upon the
country, its domination hated by all patriots, the chief external
hindrance to the kingdom, yet there is no word of denunciation,
nor, even when the door is open for it, is there any sugges
tion of irritation or rebellion. His reply is personal, not
national. The careless soldiers must have been surprised at its pointed-
ness. Its three parts were short, sharp home-thrusts — "Do not
extort money by thr£&t,s_or.jwokm£ejfrom any man." It was not
easy for quiet civilians to resist the demands, although unjust, of
trained soldiers, strong in physique, and without effeminate pity
for those from whom money might be extracted. Mercy, con
sideration for such had but small weight with them. " Do not
cheat by false accusation ; be too Jionest^ to act as mere
informers ; do not bleed people's purses by threatening^ to lay
fictitious charges." On the other hand, " Be content with your
pay,"a1iH~as~y6ii agreed to it, when you went into the service, let
it serve you."
These instances are given by the Evangelist, not as exhaustive,
but as typical. All sorts an_d_c_di_itijQns of men came to Tphn,,
many doubtless sincere in their queries, and others to hear what
he would say, how he would meet their difficulties. "And many

78 THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
other things in his exhortation preached he unto the people."
This was the style of his preaching. However various the classes
of people or the types of character, his " exhortation" took them
back to righteousness of conduct, to the first principles of ordinary
morality. There was with him no slight and hasty dealing with
sin ; he required evidences of reform in character, in " good
works." The way, thej^Jo enter into the kingdom of heaven,, is,
according to the Baptizer, not to let our "inwardness," our
fitrxpoice, suffice ; neither to sit down and see visions and dream
dreams,.but to engage in those practical humanities of " neighbour-.
li0£Sj_^^h_dija.re_tli& evidences of having passed through the strait
gate into the narrow way that leadeth unto life.

CHAPTER VII
"The Baptism of John"
1 Anjj they were baptized of him in the river Jordan, confessing

__ei_-_u_s_' The principal question for us here is— Whatjsvas therneaning
and significance of John'.s-bapti^rrj, .tP.^hjffjrrnpript hirnspjfa.ndj-o
his disciples ? For, just as there is a wide divergence in the idea
of the kingdom of heaven between his day and ours, so also
there is a great and corresponding difference on this subject. In
by far the greater part of Christendom baptism possesses certain
doctrinal attachments, of which the authoritative communica
tion of divine and regenerating grace, through the hands of the
priest at the time of its administration, is the chief. But these it
certainly did not possess to the mind of the Baptizer. Whether
these additions or developments can be justified because of the
fuller baptism of the Spirit under Christ, and continued to His
Church, is a large and important question ; but it is not now
before us : putting all these things aside, the question for us is —
What did this rite mean to John and to those who came to receive
it at his hands ?
It need hardly be insis.t.e__orL_hat-tha.prophetAid~not originate
the-cexemony ; he. found it alreadyJn existence,, and ior purposes
and >vjth_ significji&£e_jSimiJA£-to-feis- own. Evidence to almost
any required amount exists and is easily accessible, that the rite
was in use both among the Jews and many Gentile nations.
Lustrations and baptisms of various kinds prevailed throughout
the civilised world. The Romans, the Greeks, the dusky peoples

80 THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
of the East, all employed it ; and, as the footnote shows, it was
observed by the North American Indians (where did they get
the idea ?), and with a beautiful meaning too.1 So that we need
not spend time upon proof or illustration, or upon the con
troverted method of its administration, — these would prove pleasant
" by-path meadows," but we must keep before us the one idea of
John's baptism.
John, then, adoptedj_rite alr^_i£y-_y__lJiXtO»i,.J_ulJ_e_Utached
to jj_a_ i^w_pjurj_qsj^ arid_ pledge. W'th him it was.a_.simple and
earnest symbolic act. The root-idea of its symbolism is natural,
patent, almost self-suggestive. It is the power and suitability of
water to take away uncleanness from " the outer man." And
everyone in the crowds which assembled day after day on the
banks of the Jordan, coming to his baptism, was perfectly familiar
with this idea. It had been in their sacred records for genera
tions, and was often heard and read in public worship and
exposition, and doubtless in private devotion too. " Wash me
throughly from mine iniquity and cleanse me from my sin."
" Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord, or who shall stand
in His holy place? He that hath clean hands and a pure heart"-
" Wash you, make you clean, put away the evil of your doing
from before mine eyes." " I will sprinkle clean water upon you,
from all your filthiness and from all your idols will I cleanse you ;
a new heart will I give unto you." In all of which we find linked
together the external act of purification and its spiritual signi
ficance. 1 " A striking instance of the primitive significance of the symbol is given
by Frederika Bremer. A tribe of Indians on the Mississippi, on the first day
of the year, assemble and plunge into the river, and rise to begin a new life.
This ceremony is called the Bushkiton. No quarrel is allowed to survive
that act. Should anyone, after that, attempt to rake up a former feud, he is
at once reminded that the water of the Bushkiton has quenched the last spark
of animosity. Should anyone allude to any unworthy act of any member of
the tribe which occurred before the ceremony took place, he is silenced at
once by the memento, ' He has passed the Bushkiton.' Every one reckons
himself ' dead indeed unto ' all the errors of his past life. He rises from
that plunge to 'walk in newness of life.' "—Quoted in Dr. Gregory's Hand
book of Scriptural Church Principles.

"THE BAPTISM OF JOHN 8 1
To John and his disciples it meant, then, that those who
received it were-desirous of leaving, and were resolved to leave,
their past sinfulness _aLiif_u. and_to™g_t backv by the -divine
remission of sins, -to th&se simple, clear, and earnest conditions of
he_u__J_i__v_gh which alone God can work for -the-£Stablish-
mentof His kingdom. In this John is in line with Moses and all
the prophets, who were ever faithful to the spiritual basis as the
first essential for the coming of the kingdom of God. It there
fore expressed contrition for having been negligent of the
existence and claim of the divine kingdom, and for harbouring
that personal evil which denied God's rule and obstructed its
advent ; for having been content with the state of things around
them, and drifting farther and farther from its realisation. But
baptism was the burial service of the old nature and course of
life. It was a re-pentance, a change of mind, heart, and purpose,
the first condition of that remission of sins which was to fit them
for being the agents of the kingdom, — a coming back in thought,
affection, life.
With a special force did the baptism of John appeal to men in
whom the religious sense was deep and strong, " men of energy "; 1
and separated such from the great mass of their fellow-country
men. His call was much too severe for the acceptance of those
who form so large a part of every community, — those who have
" itching ears," and the roots of whose religious life wander
weakly about in a thin surface-layer of excited emotion. The
chaff could not_s_a_ui.fiy.pji Jnhn'sjwinn.ca_iiig^fan. Whjle to-thnsp.
who accepted, it, baptism stood as the Rubicon between, them
and their former life, — " the course of this world.'^ Their citizen
ship, henceforth was a heavenly one.
But the baptism of John implied still more. It meant the
pledge anrTcte^Icatton of ti^emselyes^ for _ the bringing in of the
kingdom just at hand. They are now instruments in the hand of
Jehovah for this purpose, and they will strive to keep that inward
1 See Dr. Cox and Dr. Brace's papers on Matt. xi. 12 in The Expositor,
First Series, vols. iii. and v.
6

82 THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
moral state which alone is suitable as the prepared and
straightened way of the Lord. They expect its coming, they are
going to work for it, they place themselves at its service.
So far and no farther did the baptism of John go. There was
no Pentecost inniSTmoyemerit It was confessedly limit-ed-hr its
scope and meaning. " I indeed baptize you with water ; but there
cometh He that is mightier than I, the latchet of whose shoes I
am not worthy to unloose : He shall baptize you with the Holy
Spirit and fire, whose fan is in His hand, throughly to cleanse
His threshing-floor, and to gather the wheat into His garner ;
but the chaff He will burn up with unquenchable fire." 1
In regard to the interpretation of baptism "with the Holy
Spirit and fire," we are not of course to ask " what exposition will
it bear?" and answer according to subsequent events and
doctrinal developments, but " wh a*-_lid John, mean by. it,_to_wh_m
these developments were unknown,?" To suppose that he looked
forward to the day of Pentecost, as_the time of its chief fulfilment,
would be to attribute to him a foreknowledge he did not possess ;
while to consider him as conscious of the dogma of the Holy
Spirit, as future ages formulated it, and of the spiritualised
application of the doctrine of the Spirit's baptism to the " Church
throughout all the world," as we have the doctrine to-day, would
be to imagine him possessed of a still more impossible prescience.
W^must again say that John's code of . ideas was .purely
Messianic ; .he had_no -outlook, beyond the,nationaI. expectation.
By keeping this in mind, the interpretation of this fine passage
is not far to seek, especially if we bring to bear its beautiful
parallelism. As we have already seen, one essential part of the
conception of the coming of the kingdom was a day of judgment,
which should separate the evil and the good. At present the
nation is mixed, like the wheat and chaff that lie upon the
threshing-floor before the winnowing. Th£_ua_jjf_the farijyill.be
to divide the mass into those worthy to enter the kingdom—
those, i.e., who stand the test, and fall down, of full weight, as the
1 Luke iii. 16, 17.

"THE BAPTISM OF JOHN" 83
^ood_grainJialU-;-and-th_se-wlier- Kghlrtrrrd-wOTthiess-accerding
.to-±h_j____i_i___t_ila__T_are~&^ distance_away,
-where it falls-iruajoose, irregular heap.
The fan will be the divine breath or wind — the Holy Spirit
(to miivfta to a-yios). The words here employed are the exact
equivalent of the Hebrew words in John's mind ; possibly,
probably, the words he also used (ruach Elohim, ruach Jehovah,
ruach Kodesh). The words indicate the divine Spirit as " giving
effect to the will of God in the world of matter and mind." 1
At the very beginning of Scripture we read that when the earths
was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of
the deep, the first step in its reduction from chaos to cosmos was
that " the Spirit, or breath, of God, moved upon the face of the
waters." The Psalmist (Ps. xxxiii. 6) tells us that all the host of
heaven were made " by the breath of Jehovah's mouth." Con
cerning the same subject of the creation, Isaiah asks : " Who
hath directed the Spirit of the Lord (still the same word, meaning
breath or influence or power), or being His counsellor hath
taught Him ? " (Isa. xl. 13). In his reasoning with Job (xxxiii. 4),
Elihu reminds him that ".the Spirit of the Lord hath made him,
and the breath of the Almighty hath given him life," evidently
referring to the account of the creation of man in Genesis. When
the breath has breathed upon the slain in the valley of dry bones
(Ezek. xxxvii.) and they live, we read : " Thus saith the Lord to
the house of Israel (who are the dry bones of the vision), Behold,
O My people, and ye shall know that I am Jehovah when I have
put My Spirit in you." And as both words are the same, the
identity of the breath and the Spirit of Jehovah is proved. This
Spirit is at once the authority and the inspiration of the prophet :
" The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me," says Isaiah (lxi.). And
this gave him the commission to preach good tidings unto the
poor, to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the
captives, and the opening of the prison to them that were bound.
We need not extend examples, although they would corroborate
1 Davies, Hebrew Lexicon.

84 THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
the general conclusion ; which is, that the Spirit of Jehovah, or of
Elohim, represents the divine energy as effective of its purpose in
creation and mind, and in separating men for special work. To
John the conception of Jehovah doing His will among the armies
of heaven and also among the inhabitants of the earth was a very
old one ; and his words to the people before him are but another
application of it. The Spirit shall distinguish and divide between
the good and bad in Messiah's kingdom.
His is a tentative work and undiscriminating. He will baptize
all with water who come to him, unto repentance, — the change of
mind and attitude suitable to welcome the day of Jehovah : but
He who was coming after him would come with discernment of
spirit ; and, baptizing with the divine breath or wind, the chaff
would be blown away from the good wheat as effectively as it was
done on the summer threshing-floor.
The adjective " holy " indicates that it is peculiarly God's own.
" Very conspicuous," says Dr. Beet,1 " especially in the writings of
St. Luke, is the term Holy Spirit, already used in the Septuagint
as a rendering of the phrase Spirit oj Holiness in Ps. Ii. II ; Isa.
Ixiii. 10. The Spirit of God claims the .epithet as being in a very
special manner the source of an influence of which God is the one
and only aim. All other influences tend away from God. He is
therefore, in a sense shared by no other inward motive principle,
" The Holy Spirit!'
Further, it is very manifest that, if the Messianic interpretation
of the passage be the only right interpretation, as we contend it
is, and if we follow out its fine parallelism, the "fire" is to be
applied to the chaff. The Breath separates, the good wheat is
gathered into the garner of the kingdom, the chaff is burned up
by a fire that is fierce, unquenchable, till all is consumed, as must
have been the case if the chaff of the threshing-floor once caught
fire. When Jesus afterward spoke of His kingdom, He sanctioned, if
He expanded, the concept of it which his forerunner had pro-
1 " Holiness as understood by the Writers of the Bible,"

" THE BAPTISM OF JOHN '' 85
pounded. And when he had occasion to speak of judgment in
relation thereto, he adopted the ideas of John respecting it.
" The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in
his field, but his enemy came and sowed tares." Both are to grow
together until the harvest, when the reapers will be directed to
" gather up the tares, and bind them in bundles to burn them."
" The kingdom of heaven is like a drag-net which was cast into
the sea, and gathered fish of every kind, which, when it was filled,
they drew up on the beach ; and they sat down, and gathered the
good into vessels, but the bad they cast away. So shall it be in
the consummation of the age. The angels shall come forth, and
sever the wicked from among the righteous, and shall cast them
into the furnace of fire ; there shall be the weeping and the
gnashing of teeth." It is clear, therefore, that one part of the
idea of fire baptism is that of separation and judgment.
But there is in that saying of John we are now considering
more than a parallelism. Other thoughts besides those of
judgment would be awakened in his own and his hearers' minds
by the symbol of fire. Fire was the manifestation of Jehovah to
accept and consecrate His people. It was associated with His
highest revealings. To John and his audience " it would recall
the scene when their father Abraham asked Him who promised
that he should inherit the land wherein he was a stranger, Lord,
whereby shall I know that I shall inherit it ? " The answer came
thus. He was standing under the open sky at night, watching by
the cloven sacrifices, when, "behold, a smoking furnace and a
burning lamp that passed between those pieces." It would recall.1
the fire which Moses saw in the bush, which shone and awed and
hallowed even the wilderness, but did not consume ; the fire
which came in the day of Israel's deliverance, as a light on their
way, and continued with them throughout the desert journey;
which burned upon the summit of the sacred mountain, and out of
which Jehovah spake ; " the fire which descended on the taber
nacle in the day when it was reared up, and abode upon it
continually ; which shone in the Shekinah ; which touched the

86 THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
lips of Isaiah ; which flamed in the visions of Ezekiel ; and which
was yet again promised to Zion, when the Lord will create upon
every dwelling-place upon Mount Zion, and upon all her assem
blies, a cloud and smoke by day, and the shining of a flaming fire
by night." J
As to the individual, the two baptisms — water and fire — hold a
contrast within their similarity, the contrast of the external and
the internal. ^___g-OJ-^-OL-the seraphim laid. rhp4iviriff--rna-l-frnrn
off the consecrating altar upon Isaiah's mouth, he said, "Lo, this
hath touched thy lips, and thine iniquity is taken away, and thy
sin purged." And following on that came the offer of, and the
commission to, service. Probably this indicates the highest
meaning of the symbolism of fire in the thought of the prophet, —
cleansing, consecrating, commissioning, invigorating, for the
coming kingdom.
It was with no querulous tones in his voice that he thus defined
the limits of his own, and recognised the superiority of his
Successor's work. With splendid humility, thorough acceptance
of his position, unquestioning loyalty to the divine will that made
another greater than himself, he who had spoken of himself as the
avant-courrier of the King, now declares that he is unworthy to be
the most menial bondservant in the household, whose business it
is to loose the sandals off the master's feet when he comes home,
and wash his feet.
It was because of the jubordinate position of the founder of the
movement timt J^^jovejm e_j_jj_elf lacked finality. His disciples
became scattered abroad in course of time, and probably shadows
of deepening disappointment came upon them as the weeks and
months passed away, and there were no signs of fulfilment ; shadows
that fell upon the great soul of the Baptist himself, as we shall see.
" It was a solemn scene, doubtless, when crowds from every
part of Palestine gathered by the side of the Jordan, and there
renewed, as it were, the covenant made between their ancestor
and Jehovah. It seemed the beginning of a new age, the re-
1 Arthur's Tongue of Fire, 26th ed. pp. 1, _.

"THE BAPTISM OF JOHN" 87
storation of the ancient theocracy. . . . But many of those who
witnessed the scene, and shared in the enthusiasm it awakened,
must have remembered it in later days as having inspired hopes
which had not been realised." J
It was in this condition that St. Paul found " certain disciples "
at Ephesus. These had been baptized with John's baptism, but
had not so mu^h as h^ard nf the— LLaly-.^rit And when the
apostle showed them how John had directed his disciples to Him
who should come after him, they also were baptized in the name
of the Lord Jesus. " And when Paul had laid his hands upon
them, the Holy Spirit came on them."
While, therefore, within its own limits, John's baptism was
" from heaven," yet, upon the other hand, it was but tentative, —
professedly so ; divinely destined to merge into the divinely
.permanent,! 1 Ecce Homo.
2 Josephus's testimony to the Baptist is interesting and valuable, although
it is manifest that he had not a clear and full idea of the meaning of his
baptism. He says that John "was a good man, and commanded the Jews to
exercise virtue, both as to righteousness toward one another, and piety toward
God, and so to come to baptism ; for that the washing (with water) would be
acceptable to him, if they made use of it, not in order to the putting away (or
the remission) of some sins (only), but for the purification of the body :
supposing still that the soul was thoroughly purified beforehand by righteous
ness." — Ant. Bk. xviii. ch. 5.

CHAPTER VIII
"-Comest Thou to Me?"
All through, the Baptist has been true to his own description of
himself as the herald who runs before the chariot, the " voice "
that proclaimed its coming. If. we ask for -the .grouncLjof '.his. con
fident assertion that "there standeth one among you whom., ye
know not,"jwe have for answer, first, .Jus_.as_a_t_uL.helief.jn the
nearness of th.e.Messiahila_ipproach; and, second, " He that sent
me to baptize with water, said, unto me, Upon whomsoever thou
shalt see the Spirit descending and abiding upon Him, the same
is He that baptizeth .with the Holy Spirit." In the prophet's
mind there hovered this great expectancy. " So I baptize, and
watch for the opening heavens ; He is among you, He will
shortly present Himself, and by that sign be .both manifested
and recognised."
And now the time had arrived to introduce the King Himself.
It would be an error, however, to suppose that John knew Jesus
as thev.Messiah directly he saw Him among the people, or -as
soxin-a_-I--,J3gcame a candidate for his baptism. The Baptist's
self-depreciation, " I would need to be baptized of Thee, and
comest Thou to me ? " was due to another cause, as we shall see.
The Kingship of Jesus remained unseen, even by the prophet's
piercing eyes, until the heavens opened, and the Spirit descended
like a dove and alighted on Him. All he knew was that there was
someone among them who was divinely destined to the Messiah-
ship, but the individual he did not know. But that he was among
them he was certain ; it was the very root of his mission ; it gave

"COMEST THOU TO ME?" 89
it its meaning and purpose ; unless that were so, it would have
no raison d'etre at all. He may possibly have had surmisings,
pre-judgments, as to who it might be, but if he had, he felt he had
no right to take away the interrogation mark behind them, and
state them as conclusions.
Among the crowds that gathered, day after day, thick as
swarms of bees, on the river banks, to hear the uncompromising
prophet and to receive his baptism, came a young man from
Galilee, the cousin of the Baptizer, who at length presented him
self. Probably he was personally known to John. It is reason
ably certain that "the prophecies which went before on them,"
when their mothers met, would not be allowed to fall into such
abeyance or to be of such little influence, that the cousins did not
see each other through all the years of their youth ; and although
they lived so far apart, one in Galilee and the other in the hill-
country of Judea, yet many would be the opportunities of meeting
they had in Jerusalem at the celebration of the great religious
festivals, — festivals which two such youths would, as a matter of
course, attend. John was aware of
"Those sinless years
That breathed beneath the Syrian blue " ;
of the reputation of Jesus ; of His quiet ways and pure life and
gentle demeanour ; of that insight into the principles and spiritual
meaning of the sacred records which, even at twelve years of
age, forced Him, to the forgetting of all else, into the presence of
the doctors of the law, to hear the learned men of His nation and
ask them questions. Of alHhisJohn could not well be ignorant.
We therefore take the phrase, "I knew Him not," to mean," I
knew Him not as the Messiah."
For years, however, they had not seen each other ; on quite
different planes had their lives moved. John had dwelt amid the
rigours of the desert, Jesus in a quiet village home ; John had
forsaken the world, Jesus had remained in it and fulfilled its daily
duties ; John's course for the most part had been one of cataracts

90 THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
and rapids, that of Jesus " in green pastures and beside waters
of rest." But, given true hearts, absence and the lapse of time
make no difference to appreciation and friendship, except it be to
deepen them ; and when they met, spirit answered to spirit in a
flash of mutual recognition.
When the purpose of Jesus to be baptized became manifest,
the Baptist quickly put in an earnest disclaimer : " I have need to
be baptized of_Th.ee, and comest Thou to me?— of this, honour I
am not worthy.' The head which had been carried high bows
itself ; the voice which had spoken with no softened accents to
the brood of vipers, which had been inflexible in propounding
practical righteousness, now falls into other and gentler tones,
and new and strange acknowledgments. _jn all probability he
had no idea of the divinity of Jesus ; he sought to decline the
honour, not on supernatural grounds, but upon those of spiritual
superiority. He laid the staff of authority down, and bent
himself before the greater, doing " obeisance to the royalty of
inward happiness." It was the same feeling as that which finds
its parallel and illustration in the case of Peter afterwards, when,
at the Last Supper, Jesus would have washed his feet. To him
the natural order seemed reversed ; he would gladly wash the
Master's feet, but for the Master to wash his ! In utmost sur
prise does he say, " Thou shalt never wash my feet ! " To those
who knew Him, the personal supremacy of Jesus was ever
unquestioned and accorded.
It is instructive to note that Jesus pressed His request for
baptism, and overruled the protest of the Baptist : " Suffer if
to be so now, for thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness."
It is as if Jesus had said : " The question of our relative positions
or merits is one we will not raise now, both of us want to bring
in the kingdom of heaven, which is just at hand ; it is befitting
that everything which takes practical steps toward its incoming
should be observed by us. Your baptism is one of them, it
pledges to that righteousness of life which is one of the essentials
of the kingdom ; so that, allow it to be so now." " Then he

"COMEST THOU TO ME?" 91
suffered Him." Jesus accepted and, by accepting, sanctioned the
purpose of the ordinance, just as before He had observed the
Temple services, and as afterwards He continued to observe
them. He did not over-ride, count lightly, or neglect anything of
value under the old covenant ; He was " under the law."
Generally speaking, we have a dim, ilLjdjs&^idjea. that .Jesus
need iiat_h__5rbbeye(Tt5i'law .urUess„He fished to, for was He.
not the Lord of Jhe law? But He Himself said that He "came
not to destroy the law, bj_l_ to. j_Jfil_it." J^nsjstently with, this,
tKejrecprds of His Jif*-^r__w_HirrLas. fulfilling it all along the line,
It was observed for Him at His birth, — His parents came to offer
sacrifice " according to the law of the Lord." And all through
His life He acknowledged it. No inconsistencies or failures in
respect of it were ever alleged against Him. His enemies
followed Him about, lynx-eyed, watching every movement, no

peccadillo coulcLhave iKpped them ; but sqjawful was His whole
career, triat even at His trial the capital sentence could only be
secured on the evidence of lies_that weje d__sj_icable. Had Jesus
ever broken the law, itmust have come out then.
And although the Baptist's ordinance was not invested with
the authority of a Mosaic enactment, yet Jesus was prepared to
sanction and approve everything that made for righteousness.
The same attitude re-appeared when John the disciple came to
Him and said : " Master, we saw one casting out devils in Thy
name, and we forbade him, because he followeth not with us."
But Jesus said : " Forbid him not, for there is no man who shall
do any mighty work in My name, and be able quickly to speak
evil of Me. For he that is not against us is for us."
But besides this personal ground of John's disclaimer, there
was another, viz. the nature of his baptism, and Jts_fe_y:_jnappro-
priateness jto Jesus. We have seen that it was — (1) "Unto
remission of sins," and (2) Dedication to sincere ^ndejavc___Jo
bringjn the kingdom. Whatever may be our opinion as to the
incidence of the first of these in the case of Jesus, it is certain
that John at l_aa_it _fe__. hijjjjap^

92 THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
that H^ihad-no-need-tif-repentaTrcer-trralrthere-was nothing in Him
torequire it or its implied, remissio.n_of.sins,. tJiat.Je5us.\Kas.iaore
qualified to enter the kingdom than he was.
The interesting and important question here emerges — Did
Jesus, in thus accepting baptism, nay, pressing for it at the hands
of John, accept it for Himself "in its totality of meaning, for it was
a /SairTurftx //.crxvoixs, a baptism of repentance ? There are
some considerations which lead us to a simple, direct, and natural
answer. Th_j_rsJ_js,__liaJ_vveJiay_s no eyidenj_e_thj^ Jesjus was .conscious
of His destiny as the Messiah until His b_mt__jm. , The Gospel
histories do not reveal that He had any knowledge of His divine
nature, or of His designation, or of the possession of miraculous
powers, before this event, while they do consistently show that
He possessed and used them all after it The descent of the
Spirit upon Him at that time was the official designation, so to
speak, to His life's work ; the revelation that indicated the
Father's meaning, and filled out, if the expression may be
allowed, the soul of Jesus both with knowledge and power. A
few sentences comprise all that is told us of His earlier life, and
they tell us of development. There was a real sense in which
"Jesus advanced in wisdom" as well as "in age, and in favour
with God and man " ; He " grew and waxed strong, becoming
full of wisdom." The account of the scene of Jesus in the Temple
among the doctors is often misread. We are not told of the
doctors asking questions_of Him, waiting for His answers as out
of a divine and recondite knowledge ; but that the boy of twelve
was hearing them, JJie, .teachers of .the people, and.asking them
questions, as a youth strong in spirit and desirous to learn : while
tha-dnctorson their part_were " as^onisjjjed at. His understanding
and answers," at_Hiscomprehen5ion of__ieJxuths--a&d-princip-es
o£__the law. To assume the prescience of Jesus before His
baptism, in regard to His nature and Messiahship, is to take up
a position which necessitates occult and metaphysical explana
tions, all of which, it seems to us, are obviated by the simple and

"COMEST THOU TO ME?" 93
scriptural position we take up as to the meaning of the baptism
to Jesus Himself.
And this position shows us how Jesus could accept baptism
from the hands of John. He came to the bank of the Jordan,
attracted by the reputation of the prophet, when, impressed by
the importance, forcefulness, and truth of his preaching, He
entered the lists for baptism as one of those earnest spirits who
eagerly desired the coming of the kingdom, and pledged Himself
to help to bring it in. Itmay seem at first sight as if John's
disclaimer, " I have need to be baptized of Thee," implied some
such foreknowledge, but we_ need Jja_ separate between this
statement, and " There standeth one among you whom ye know
n5T.~"it" is HeTBe latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy .to
unloose." For John to say the former to Jesus when He came
does not imply that he, there and then, recognised Him to be the
latter. The disclaimer was upon personal and moral, not upon
official, grounds. Besides, we have the prophet's direct state
ment, that " I knew Hininot: but He that sent me to baptize with
water, He said unto me^Upon _whom_ thou shalt see the Spirit
descending and flighting, upon -..Him, the same is He that
baptizeth with Jhe^Holy_^ Spirit. Ajid_J_Jiaye, , seen,., and _ have
borne witness that this (Jesu^whowas coming towards hirnj_js
the Son of God."
"r^hg^secpnd^consideratiqn^ is, that^ everyone who accepted
bap_tism_at the hands^fjohn. accepted it _jn_jits general meaning
and purpose, and applied it to hj^ojyj___sj_mtual condition. In
fact, he could accept it in no other way. And there must have
been a variety of spiritual conditions as great as the individual
cases that presented themselves. To some the meaning of the
rite would be a strong but diffused desire with vague ideas ; to
others, material and social progress and national aggrandisement
would loom the largest ; while to others, again, the spiritual
would be the most prominent part of the conception. We cannot
reduce all the adherents of new movements to the same unbroken
level of spiritual nature or expectation. And many a man who

94 THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
attaches himself to such movements does so accepting the general
motif, but by no means pledging himself to every tenet and
position. Let us apply this to the case before us. The movement of
John necessarily had a large range, but we have no warrant to
stretch everyone who accepted its initiatory ceremony to fit it all,
from its Alpha to its Omega. Wejhave seen that the baptism of
John meant (i) confession of sin, and (2) a pledge to bring in the
heavenly kingdom. In Jesus' acceptance there was certainly
the acceptance of the latter; yet it would be quite illogical to
make ijt. include the former.
The evangelical commentators hold a very strong position in
the sinlessness of Jesus. He did no sin, neither was there
deceit in His mouth ; and neither before nor after the baptism
have we any indication of the slightest breath to dull the mirror
of His fair fame. And to this position the Baptizer lends his
strong support by his instant recognition of spiritual superiority.
But, failing to recognise our principle, — that Jesus accepted baptism
only in so Jar as it applied Iob Himself, .as./' becoming. "_ in .the1
fulfilment pf_all points of righteousness, —His very sinlessness
makes it a greater difficulty for them to interpret the fact of Jesus
receiving a baptism, one part of whose meaning was repentance
unto remission of sins.
This difficulty was felt in the early Church. A heretical and
apocryphal writing, generally included in Cyprian's works,
appears to have attributed to Jesus a confession of His own sins
at His baptism. Strauss does not, of course, agree with the
solution of the difficulty by modern theologians, but he has well
defined the dilemma itself. He, says1 that "the sum of what
theyhave contributed toward the removal of the difficulty cpnsis.ts
jn the application to Jesus of the distinction between what a man is
_as an individual and what he is as a member of the community. He
needed, say they, no repentance on His own behalf,, but, aware
of-itsjiecessity for all other jnaen, the children -of- Abraham not
1 Life of Jesus, Eng. Trans, vol. i. p. 351.

"COMEST THOU TO ME?" 95
excepted, He wished to demonstrate His approval of an insti-
tutibn which coiffirmed JhJs .tru££_and..heace. He submitted to it"
The theologians make the baptism part of Jesus' vicarious
relation to the world, — expanding its significance by metaphysics
until it includes His temptation, and as it cannot include His own
sin, then "the sins of the whole world." Dr. Reynolds may
stand as the type of this large and influential class of expositors,1
the more so because of the definiteness of his elucidation and the
liberality of his spirit. Summarised in his own words, the case is
stated thus : " His submission to this ordinance of confession was
a part of that unutterable humiliation by which He brought in
and fulfilled the eternal righteousness. He who bore our sins on
Calvary confessed their guilt and shame in the Jordan. . . .
Confession of sin could not, need not, mean in His case the
remembrance and disclosure of a corrupt nature, or the acknow
ledgment of base motives and unworthy deeds. . . . The Lord
took our humanity upon Him. The Son of God felt, through
human flesh and creature limitation and temptations to sin, all
the curse, the darkness, the perplexities, the humiliations of our
fallen race. He was not, and coul___flt.b£,x___u^U-S..of^p^sjjnj_l
corruption or defilement,. but He must have felt, in a degree ini
wjjich.no other-person ever did or could have done, the burden,
-¦-'-- - " ¦ ....... ----- u_
the curse, the peril, and-the, shame-of sin ; not of His own_dns,
but of the sins of, the world, the^jins. of., the theocratic kingdom^
the sins of those, whom.JIisJathpjr_hadgiven.-Him. and .of the
nature which, in His infinite condescension, He -had .assumed
. . . None could know like the incarnate God what sin was ; none
but He has fathomed the need of human nature. He alone
estimated fully the regeneration which He declared essential to the
formation of His kingdom. If so, who can rival the Lord Jesus
in confessing the sins of the whole world ?"
We may perhaps add to this, as being in the same line, the
exposition of Dean Chadwick : 2 " But here we meet a deeper
1 John the Baptist, 2nd ed. p. 321, et seq. New York, Barnes & Co.
2 " The Gospel of St. Mark," Expositor's Bible.

96 THE LAST OF THE TROPHETS
question : not why Jesus accepted baptism from an inferior, but
why, being sinless, He sought for a baptism of repentance. How
is this act consistent with absolute and stainless purity ?
" Now it sometimes lightens a difficulty to find that it is not
occasional or accidental, but wrought deep into the plan of a con
sistent work. And the,, Gospels are consistent in representin__lhe
innocence of Jesus as rpfnsingr imrrppity f™ the r-nncpruiprirp.
fii-guilt. He was circumcised, and His mother then paid the
offering commanded by the law, although both these actions
spoke of defilement. In submitting to the likeness of sinful flesh,
He submitted to its conditions. . . . When He tasted death
itself, which passed upon all men, for that all have sinned, He
carried out to the utmost the same stern rule to which at His
baptism he consciously submitted. . . . Baptism was avoidable,
and that without any compromise of His influence, since the
Pharisees refused it with impunity, and John would fain have
exempted Him. Here, at least, he was not ' entangled in the
machinery,' but deliberately turned the wheels upon Himself."
Both these expositions, which may stand as expressing the
position of what may be termed the strictly orthodox school,
proceed upon the assumption that Jesus was conscious of His
divine nature and Messianic destiny before His baptism, and that
therefore His baptism was part of a pre-arranged plan. But this
is a position not only full of metaphysical difficulties, as to how
one could possess limited human and unlimited divine knowledge
at one and the same time, but is also, as we have intimated,
unsupported by scriptural evidence. The circle of Jesus' im
peccability is drawn ;_j^enfror_ua pointJEar outside it, another is
described, whose circumference is made to approach as near as
possible, but not quite to tou_h,„ttiat of the jflrjner,-r-the circle of
th_i_sj__pf. the. world.; then, its malarial haze is blown. over the
surface of the former, with, the ..suggestion rather than the state.
roen-t-that-that meets~alLtlie.mquirement_Lof the_case. But who,
reading the Gospel narratives naturally, would spontaneously
think of the subtle distinctions and intricacies which this theory

"COMEST THOU TO ME?" 97
necessarily involves. Our contention is, that it was at the baptism
Jesus became conscious oL_His~-divine -nature and Messianic
destiny. This is not only the most, natural position in itself, Jjiat
jt_also_Jendj_ immense weigta-_jid_agm_£anc)e_tc. jthe-Iemptation,
which immediately followed, andjgives_the strongest of all reasons
for Jesus settling and matorir_gfcjriBti^.wnderness, that. "plan".pf
life and work from which Hje neyer. swerxed.
All the difficulties are obviated, yet the sinlessness of Jesus is
preserved intact, by the adoption of the simple and scriptural
exegesis we advocate. To sum up : We hold that our answer to
thejrripjorjarr^_question- raised by Jesus -accepting baptism at the
hands of John — (i) TJhat_J5e_.was_.not .conscious of .His. .nature
or designation until then ; (2) That He accepted it in its., general
spirit and purpose and in so far as it was. applicable to. Himself — is
natural, clear, and comprehensive; and (we would say it with all de
ference)^ do not see a. satisfactory answer onany^iher-Uypothesis.
There is an account in each of the Evangelists of the events
which accompanied the baptism, viz. the opening heavens and
the descent of the Holy Spirit. John does not mention the
divine voice, Mark and Luke represent it as speaking to Jesus
Himself, and Matthew as speaking to John. Luke is very cir
cumstantial : " It came to pass, when all the people were bap
tized, that Jesus also, having been baptized, and praying, the
heavens were opened, and the Holy Spirit descended in a bodily
form as a dove upon Him, and a voice came out of heaven,
Thou art My beloved Son, in Thee I am well pleased." If we
take this as the standard narrative, the less explicit accounts
must be of course interpreted by it. But the balance of evidence
seems to point to the position of interpreting Luke by the others.
We have before seen 1 the advisability of this course. It is not
for us to try to reconcile the accounts, — reconciliations are, as a
rule, forced and strained, — but rather to get at, if possible, the rock
of Christian tradition on which all the accounts are based. And
" Luke's description of what occurred, if we had no other authority,
1 See Note, p. 62 (in Chap. V.), and Luke iii. 7 and 10.
7

98 THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
would suggest an objective circumstance ; but since Matthew
represents the whole occurrence in historical form from the stand
point of John's experience, it seems to. me imperative to take
Matthew and John as the true sources of information." 1
The only points in which all the Evangelists agree are the open
ing heavens and the descent of the Spirit, although all the
Synoptists agree in a divine voice. It is certainly a strange
circumstance that the one Gospel which omits nothing that can
c_caitribute to the dignity of the Messiah should^ omit this. In
their exposition of the voice, some writers " suppose a clap of
thunder, which was imagined by those present to be a Bath K61,
and interpreted into the words given by the first Evangelist." To
this school belongs Dr. Farrar. " The Bath K61," says he, in his
Life oj Christ, " which to the dull, unpurged ear was but an
inarticulate thunder, spake in the voice of God to the ears of
John — ' This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.' "
But to make the Almighty resort to ventriloquism to convey a
secret message, — to state that His voice was simply thunder to
some, yet rumbled out an articulate sentence to others, — is not
only to play fast and loose with the physical forces of the world,
but to attribute to God a course of action which is unworthy
because at variance with the dignity of His nature and cha
racter. Many commentators do not fairly face the subject at
all, but content themselves with general and diffused remarks.
But the_whple matter resolves itself into the question as to
whether the appearances were subjective or objective. In en
deavouring to conceive the incident as objective, there are no
insignificant difficulties to be surmounted. " First," to let Strauss
state them, who states them fairly, "that for the appearance of a
divine Being on earth, the visible heavens must divide them
selves, to allow of His descent from his accustomed seat, is an
idea that can have no objective reality, but must be the entirely
subjective creation of a time when the dwelling-place of Deity was
imagined to be above the vault of heaven. Further,.how is it
1 Reynolds.

"COMEST THOU TO ME?" 99
reconcilable, .with the true idea of.the_Holy Spirit as the divine,
aU;pervading power, that He shoukL-JBASje-. from -.one. place.Je__„.
another, like a finite being, and embody Himself .in, the formof . a
dove? Finally, that God should utter articulate tones_Jn a
national idiom,"ftas""_eeh justly held extravagant."
If this vision were objective, would it not mark a new de
parture in the method by which Jehovah communed with His
servants the prophets ? The " voice of the Lord," or the " word
of God " came to them and spoke in their exalted, inspired, and
sensitised consciousness. It was "a conviction of surprising
force and intensity "; and when it was a message for the people, it
became, by thought and communion with God, at length too
great and strong for retention, and burst forth in " Thus saith the
Lord." Moses and all the prophets heard, believed, and obeyed
these voices and uttered their messages, as the slightest examina
tion of the records would amply show ; and had they been
objective, open to the eyes and ears of all and sundry, they must
seriously have militated against the prophets' sacredness, their
separateness of office and function as Jehovah's representatives
and heralds. Micaiah said to the king of Israel : " I saw the
Lord sitting on His throne, and all the host of heaven standing by
him on His right hand and on His left." In like manner, Isaiah
declares : " I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and
lifted up, and His train filled the temple. Above Him stood the
seraphim," — and the prophet goes on to describe the scene in
the heaven that is at once the throne-room and the temple. No
one seriously considers that these visions, and others like them,
existed anywhere else save in the inspired consciousness and
sublime imagination of the prophets themselves. TJrrjjiis_pla.c_d
beyond doubt by the vision of Stephen at his martyrdom.  S ur-
rounded. by his persecutors, he declared he saw the heay,ens
opened, and Jesus standing on the right hand of God.  Not
when they . saw the . vision,--but.wJaj_ri_they heard the tejLtiirnony,
they .crjejl. put, and stopped their ears, and ran upon him with one.
accord and stoned him. Stephen alone saw it.

ICO THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
We cannot but conclude, then, that the vision of John and
Jesus was subjective. Reynolds concludes to the same effect :
" The consciousness of the Hebrew prophet or seer, the eye and
ear of the man who enjoyed such commerce as he pursued with
the spiritual and unseen world, must have been opened in a way
that ordinary psychological phenomena cannot explain." (This
last point may be reasonably doubted). . . . " If we believe that
John saw and heard these things so far as his consciousness was
concerned, and said so, it will be enough to account for all the
peculiarities of the Gospel narratives."
And " even in the early Church, the more enlightened Fathers
adopted the opinion, that the heavenly voices spoken of in the
biblical history were not external sounds, the effect of vibrations
in the air, but inward impressions produced by God in the minds
of those to whom He willed to impart Himself: thus, of the
appearance at the baptism of Jesus, Origen and Theodore of
Mopsuestia maintain that it was a vision, and not a reality,
oTTTxolct, ov <pi<ri;. ' To the simple, indeed,' says Origen, ' in their
simplicity, it is a light thing to set the universe in motion, and to
sever a solid mass like the heavens ; but those who search more
deeply into such matters ' will, he thinks, refer to those higher
revelations, by means of which chosen persons, even waking, and
still more frequently in their dreams, are led to suppose that they
perceive something with their bodily senses, while their minds
only are affected : so that, consequently, the whole appearance in
question should be understood, not as an external incident, but as
an inward vision sent by God." x
Then how is it, it will be asked, that so large a consensus of
opinion should have regarded, and should still regard, this vision,
more especially than all others, as objective ? On close inspec
tion, the reason appears to be that objectivity is given to it by the
figure employed in the description — the dove. A well-known
and beautiful object is supplied for the eye of the mind to rest
upon ; and the " bodily shape " of Luke would suggest externality ;
1 Strauss, Life of Jesus,

"COMEST THOU TO ME?" IOI
although it need not, for the Spirit could equally well appear as a
dove to the inner sight of John and Jesus as to the physical eye of
the crowd. But if we interpret Luke by the other Evangelists, as
we have suggested, we. shall come to the conclusion that the idea
is not that, the Spirit appeared in the form and shape of ji_dove,
but that the method of His descent was like that of a dove's
descent " out of thejheavens " : — to' Tlutifix rov &eou narctfiaiuou
atnl irtptGTspav (Matt.) : to Hvivpu. „_¦ 7T£pttjT£pst-i/ KOttafiotivov tig mvt6u
(Mark) : ro Tlvivpiu zceTafiaivov a; vtpisripa,i> l| oip»uou (John).
Now the accounts of this vision must have been related by Jesus
and John to their disciples, and it is evident they had said that
the Spirit of God had descended upon Jesus in the same manner
that a dove comes sweeping down from the heights of heaven to
its home.
The variation in the form of the divine communication, as
recorded by St. Matthew and St. Luke respectively, lends its
support to our conclusion. To John the voice said, " This is My
beIove_d_ _Son^_ ; to Jesus, " Thou art My beJoyed_Son." Ij_jless_
tlie vision had_been subjective, it is not easy to see how this
variation could have occurred ; but ^>n the theory that it was,
the vision must, in the nature of things, have voiced itself in
the different ways the Evangelists relate. We conceive that the
revelation to both was instantaneous ; that they united in the
vision ; that conviction was borne in upon the soul of each by the
descending Spirit, and that Jesus stood revealed, at the same
moment, both in the prophet's eyes and in his own, as " the Son
of God."
And it is in accordance with this view, finally, that the psycho
logical explanation becomes clear and simple. Jclmhad_an
intense, conviction of the nearness ofthe Mejsjah's_c_)ming ; he
is the herald of a chariot that is but just behind ; he has an
equally intense expectation of His being revealed — He is among
them ; Jesus presents Himself ; the moment has arrived ; the con
viction that "this is He" is divinely borne in upon the prophet's
mind ; the ecstatic vision comes, and the heavens open in his soul.

102 THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
John was of the_ priestly order, and unconjicJously_ has Jie
fulfilled his priestly function of jmojnting and dedicating^Him of
whom he. thought himself but the herald. Unexpectedly has he
reached the highest point in the mountain-ridge of his life and
ministry ; suddenly his., short future course lies before him, ge
sees at a glance the upward slope of the past. __ Hejstands " silent
on apeak in Dari en," looking now toward J^hejwe^Jern seaj^the
infinite, mysterious sea of God's redeeming ^pjrrr)ose_ which lies
before him, dazzling in its brightness.
" And I must decrease " is his feeling as he looks upon his own
short downward slope toward it In him had been the tentative,
proclaiming voice ; in Jesus the fulness, to irxipafiei, dwells : He
shall baptize with the Holy Spirit and with fire.
Jesus went straightway to His temptation. He has now a new
fact, the greatest of all facts, to deal with, and He withdraws into
the solitude of the wilderness to let it settle into position, to
estimate it at its full value, and to be tested, in view of it, by the
temptation of the devil.1
i Unless the view we advocate respecting the revelation to Jesus of His
nature and Messiahship for the first time at His baptism, be the correct one ;
that is, if Jesus knew before it that He was the "Son of God," and had
therefore a pre-arranged " plan," the Temptation becomes simply an incident
in the course of His life, rather than a pivot upon which His whole life turns.
But this view robs the Temptation of nine-tenths of its significance and power,
while the language of the evangelists in joining the Temptation to the Baptism
is needlessly strong and pointed. On the position we hold, the Temptation
not only retains the intense significance which in the nature of things it might
be expected to possess, but the language of the evangelists receives adequate
justification. After describing the Baptism, Matthew continues: "Then
was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness," etc. Mark is very graphic :
"And straightway the Spirit driveth Him forth into the wilderness." Luke
says: "And Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan, and
was led by the Spirit into the wilderness," etc.

CHAPTER IX
"I Saw and Bare Record"
We next find John_at Bethany,1 beyond Jc__Ia_L_j£jjyifter tjie
return of Jesus from His temptation.2 Bethany was a place pro
bably a few miles below the exit of the river from the Lake of
Tiberias, on its left bank, and over against the southern border of
Galilee. For some time now the Baptist and his work had been known
to the ecclesiastical authorities, who have been waiting to see
whether the movement would live, or of itself die down and
become extinct. But as yet it shows no sign of being a passing,
if a fervent enthusiasm ; the fire seems rather to obtain firmer
1 " There can be little doubt that it fathutp is the true reading of John i. 28.
It is the reading of a large number of MSS. and of versions. The reading
/3i5_/3__«is avowedly a suggestion of Origen, in a passage the whole of which
is given by Tischendorf and other critics." — Note in Reynolds.
2 This seems the most probable order of the course of events. In St. John's
narrative the baptism is definitely past ; it is spoken of as having taken place
a while ago. It is first at Bethany (John i. 28), and shortly afterwards at
Enon, near to Salim (John iii. 23), that we find John baptizing. This Salim
" is no doubt the Salim of Gen. xxxiii. 18, and some seven miles north is
'Ainun, at the head of the Wady Far'ah, which is the great highway up from
the Damieh Ford for those coming from the east by the way of Peniel and
Succoth. The situation was a central one, approachable also from the
northward and from all Samaria, and by the central main road from the
south. The assumption that the place where John baptized must have been
in Judea, at least not in Samaria, is without show of proof. It should be
recollected, moreover, that John's ministry was nearing its completion, and
the Christ having come and entered on His ministry in Jerusalem and Judea,
John might withdraw into the half alien Samaria to prepare His way there
also." — Dr. Henderson's Palestine : Its Historical Geography, 2nd ed,
p. 154. Messrs. T. & T. Clark, Edinburgh.

104 THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
hold. John is again diligently preaching and baptizing. Some
of the Pharisees had been attracted by the reputation of his work,
and had been hotly received. Even had they been inclined to be
quiet under their castigation, feeling perhaps, in secret, its truth,
yet now the movement is so growing that it will not be hid. More
serious notice must be taken of it. £_3_a__l_piitatinn is appointed
at Jerusalem_pfJ_rie_ts_ ar__J_£y_t_van.d sent to interview.him.
(«-) To the Deputation
The " Priests and Levites " were the temple dignitaries, regarded
by all, and regarding themselves, as custodians of the law and all
matters religious. They were the ecclesiastics of their time,
who, in their narrow conscientiousness, sent to know who the
prophet really professed to be, and what his mission was. There
is no need to assume that they had prejudged him, and sought
only his condemnation, though the Pharisees who sent them still
smarted under the castigation they had received from him in
the face of the people. Probably the whole of them would be
ready to welcome him, and to sanction his movement, if they could
be satisfied of his credentials. But the question of ecclesiastics
to one who preaches without credentials signed by them, even
though he casts out devils too, is always, "By whatauthority
doest thou thesethmgs,_and who. gave thee.that authority?"
Armed in this coat of mail, they sought the scene of baptism,
and on coming to the Baptist himself, found him in no mood to
argue with them. There is a fierce reserve about him that neither
invites loquacity nor bows before their office. That they should
do obeisance to him has never appeared on the furthest horizon
of their minds ; theirs is the unquestioned right to question, and
he, of course, will submissively reply. The query, "Who art
thou ? " is put in the tone of those who have a right to know.
The first pass does not draw blood ; his guard is equally quick,
and is effective, " I am not the Christ." " What are we to make
of thee, then ? art thou Elijah, His forerunner, brought back from

" I SAW AND BARE RECORD " I05
heaven, as the common report runs ? " And he saith, " I am not."
" Art thou the Prophet ? " Shorter do his replies become, — " No."
As to this question of the deputation, the Authorised Version
reads : " Art thou the Prophet ? " with the marginal alternative,
"Art thou a prophet?" If the question simply means the latter,
John's denial is but another example of his fine humility. He is
not ready to lay claim to or accept so honourable a title or office.
The reference, however, seems much more specific. We_tal__.it
that-thfr-a-rtteJe-has-its full definitive force — that, or the, prophet.
And fortwo reasons. First, as against the indefinite fo^rnjjf the
question, we can hardIy~_voTd_jhe conclusion that John_Jknew
himseff to _be a prophet of Jehovah. His training and charac
teristics, his meditation and communion with God, and the nature
of his message, would together force such a conviction on his
mind, that it is not easily conceivable how he could have answered
the query with a negative. We believe that John did know him
self to be " established for a prophet of Jehovah," and that he
accepted the position with all its responsibilities. External evi
dence also lends its support to this view ; " the people regarded
him as a prophet." And "the people" had such a high reverence
for the office, that they were not prepared to bestow it except upon
those who bore strong evidence of having received the divine
commission. Jesus Himself, also, in giving His estimate of His
forerunner, answers His own question, "What went ye out into
the wilderness to see? a prophet?" with, "Yea, I say unto you,
and much more than a prophet."
The second reason carries us to a conclusion. It is that the
questioners had some definite prophet in mind. The reference
in their question is doubtless to the clear promise given by the
great lawgiver in Deut. xviii. 15-18. "From among (the priests
and Levites) the Lord thy God will raise up unto thee a Prophet
from the midst of thee, of thy brethren, like unto me ; unto Him
ye shall hearken ; . . . And I will put My words in His mouth, and
He shall speak unto them all that I command Him." To regard
the singular number as figurative of a line of prophets in dis-

106 THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
tinction to the enchanters, sorcerers, or diviners mentioned just
before in the same chapter, is to force the exegesis, to make an
antithesis rather than to find one ; while, on the other hand,
there is evidence that the Hebrew people anticipated the fulfil
ment of the promise in a single person.
Beyond these statements they had no information or prediction
respecting him or his work, — he loomed large but vague in their
expectancy. In some way he would be a specially commissioned
and authoritative Prophet, standing out head and shoulders above
these greatest of men ; he would hold a very close relationship to
the Almighty, would speak with His authority, and do for the
chosen people, at some point in the future of the nation, what
Moses had done at its founding.
It is not surprising to find that the prediction came to be
regarded as Messianic in the Christian view ; but that time was
not yet. " Originally," says Wendt,1 " it was nbt two great human
personages, but only one, who was expected to appear in the latter
days. It was either a king who should be the medium of carrying
into effect the divine judgment and salvation, or a prophet, as the
forerunner of Jehovah Himself, who was coming to accomplish
judgment and mercy. . . . The passages (John i. 20 f., vii. 40 f,
cf. Mark vi. 15, viii. 28), imply that the promised prophet was
not so completely identified with the Messiah. in the Jewish ideas
as in the later Christian view. John Baptist's negative reply to
the question whether he were the Messiah did not preclude the
further question, whether he were the prophet or not. But though
in their surmisings as to the significance of the Baptist and of
Jesus, the Jews regarded the question as to the one or other being
the Messiah as distinct from the question whether either were
' the Prophet,' it would be wrong to infer from this that both a
Messiah and a Prophet were expected. The expectation of the
Prophet rather stood, so to speak, in a concurrent relation to the
expectation of the Messiah. Those who said, ' This is truly the
Prophet,' and others who said, ' This is the Messiah ' (John vii.
1 Teaching of Jesus, vol. i. pp. 68, 69. T. & T. Clark.

"I SAW AND BARE RECORD" 107
40 f.), ' had not the same view of the character of the coming
dispensation which Jesus, according to their hopes, was to intro
duce. But though the scribes, in the time of Jesus, were wont to
combine those originally distinct ideas, we must assume that
those distinct ideas lay alongside each other in various ways in
the minds of the people themselves."
This was the period when these two originally distinct ideas
tended to coherence and unification. In the passage, John vi. 14 f.,
it is related that, after the miraculous feeding of the multitudes,
they said of Jesus, " This is truly the Prophet that should come
into the world," and sought to make Him a king. Here the title of
the coming Prophet appears as if it were equivalent to that of the
Messiah. In Peter's discourse at the Beautiful Gate of the temple
also, the passage which promises the Prophet was quoted, and its
fulfilment claimed for Jesus (Acts iii.). Returning to the deputa
tion, — the fact that they made a distinction in their series of
questions between the Christ and " that Prophet " is clear evidence
that as yet the two ideas were not conterminous.
By the short, decisive reply of the Baptist his questioners are
turned adrift ; are altogether at sea ; they have obtained nothing
but negatives. Yet they must effect a landing if possible, for
bidding though the coast evidently is, and go back home with
something tangible. They return and continue their catechism :
" Who art thou, that we may have something definite to answer
when we get back to those commissioning us, — for we are a depu
tation ; what dost thou say concerning thyself? " And, for answer,
he simply reaffirms what he had formerly told his disciples : there
is nothing new in it ; he evidently intends to tell them as little as
possible : " I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, as said
Isaiah the prophet." Then appears the cloven foot ; and, after
reading the note of the Evangelist, we are prepared for it : " Why
then baptizest thou, if thou art not the Christ, neither Elijah,
neither the Prophet ? " And again does he give for answer the
substance of what he had declared to the public : " I only baptize
with water, but in the midst of you standeth one whom ye know

108 THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
not, even He that cometh after me, the latchet of whose sandal
I am not worthy to unloose." And with no more information
than they brought, the deputation returned.
The last-recorded reply of John is the same he had given to
the general company before, with a difference. He says that He
who was to come now standeth in the midst of them. Jesus was
on the ground " on the morrow," and must have been present
during this controversy ; He had returned from the wilderness, and
was now, of course, known to John as the Christ.
The view advanced in the last chapter of the subjectivity of the
heavenly vision and voice at the baptism of Jesus, receives
additional support from the fact that no mention is made of it in
the cross-examination to which John had been subjected ; yet
had the appearance and the voice been addressed to, or seen and
heard by, the people at large, such a remarkable and super
natural occurrence could not but have been known to his
questioners, and must have appeared, in some form or other, in
their catechism.
And again, if we are at first sight surprised that there is no
recognition in their questions of the baptism itself, as apart from
its accessories, we must once more employ the historic imagina
tion. The baptism of Jesus was not such an important event in
the eyes of the people of His own day as it is in ours ; it did not
mean to them what it means to us. To us it is the moment of
the manifestation of the Christ to the world, the moment when
He was dedicated to and accepted His position as the Redeemer
of the world ; to them Jesus, even if they knew of Him at all, was
simply a young man from the country, just one of the crowd, with
nothing to distinguish Him from the rest.
(/3) To His Own Disciples.
" Onjl^e^morrow he__j.__e.th Jesus coming unto him, and saith,
j|ehold the Lamb of God which- beareth the sin of the world."
What was the content of the phrase " Lamb of God " to the

"I SAW AND BARE RECORD" 109
prophet's mind ? The exposition given by the brilliant author of
Ecce Homo is at least inadequate. The main part of the concep
tion he makes out to be, not the " usages of the Jewish sacrificial
system," but the following : — " When we remember that the
Baptist's mind was doubtless full of imagery drawn from the Old
Testament, and that the conception of a lamb of God makes the
subject of one of the most striking of the Psalms, we shall
perceive what he meant by this phrase. The Psalmist describes
himself as one of Jehovah's flock, safe under His care, absolved
from all anxieties by the sense of His protection, and gaining
from this confidence of safety the leisure to enjoy without satiety
all the simple pleasures which make up life, — the freshness of the
meadow, the coolness of the stream. It is the most complete
picture of happiness that ever was or can be drawn. It represents
that state of mind for which all alike sigh, and the want of which
makes life a failure to most ; it represents that Heaven which
is everywhere if we could but enter it, and yet almost nowhere
because so few of us can." It is not without great reluctance and
regret that we have to put this winsome picture aside as the
proffered exposition of John's descriptive phrase.
Without doubt there was a meekness in the bearing of Jesus
which made the title applicable ; but the uppermost thought in
John's mind is not that of quiet happiness, but that of sacrifice.
This is rendered indisputable by the grammar of the text. The
second part of the sentence gives the signification of the first.
Had the pastured lamb been the prophet's leading thought, or
even a co-ordinate and separate thought, the word " also " or an
equivalent must have been employed in the second clause. But
there is no such addition to specify two separate movements of
thought. On the other hand, the participle (aXpoiv), not a finite
verb, is employed, which joins the second indissolubly with the
first, and interprets it. Literally the sentence reads : " Behold the
Lamb of God, the one bearing the sin of the world " (""IS. 0 oe_»so's
tow Qeov, 6 ui'ptu'j Tp i&pictpTixti rov xoo-ftov ").
The fifty-third chapter of Isaiah was much more in John's mind

IIO THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
than the twenty-third Psalm. As we have previously noticed,
Isaiah seems to have been John's favourite prophet. And we
can well understand how the fiery spirit of the Baptist should find
in Isaiah's words of fire its inspiration in the wilderness. The
scroll of his prophecy was often taken down from its ledge in the
recluse's cave and deeply pondered.
What more natural, then, than that he should think of the
Messiah as Isaiah had portrayed Him? — "led as a lamb to the
slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb. . . ." " By
His knowledge shall My righteous servant justify many, for He
shall bear their iniquities." " Surely He hath borne our griefs
and carried our sorrows." " He was wounded for our transgres
sions, He was bruised for our iniquities ; the chastisement of our
peace was upon Him, and with His stripes we are healed."
Whatever misconceptions John's contemporaries might be under,
as to the person and work of the coming Messiah, — though they
had dropped the suffering part out of their idea, and enlarged and
magnified and materialised, too, the reigning, — yet the Baptist
knew that the " servant whom Jehovah upheld " must suffer.
And from his youth up John had been familiar with the whole
round of sacrificial observances, on which the figure he employed
was based. As he spoke he must have thought of the blood of
the slain lamb as a sin-offering. And " there was a common
tradition that the Messiah's birth would involve suffering, and
that the earlier portion of His work would be the expiation of the
sins of Israel."1
Following the lowered tone 'n the voice of the_grophet after
the baptism_of__[esus, we are struck with the fact that thejseyerer
aspects of Messiah^s_work are, lost sight, of j___there is__now no
mention of the .axe laid at the root of useless trees, nor of
winnowing fan and chaff burning in quenchless fire ; but the
meekness and peace of His bearing, aided by the application of
Isaiah's prophecies, bring up instead the picture of the patient,
suffering Lamb, chosen of God to bear the world's transgression,
1 Reynolds.

"I SAW AND BARE RECORD" III
On the repetitiqnof his .testimony next day,, "two of his^disciples
heard him speak.'___i(j_ileft him and followed Tesus." Without
doubt John felt their^oing:.awayy=^they departed to_the stronger ;
but J_hj_BagtisLhad.und accepted Jys_owji_ten_tative
po__tij__,;.raiuIit iaujodJMthJits-toiaiand its -ompensaiiojun„tiiat
his own disciples were the. first-fruits of Jtus. testimony to his
greater successor.

(y) "The Son of God."
" And I sawj___jd^bjrjej_ecord that this is the Son of God." We
look at Jesus and His work through the golden haze of interven
ing centuries ; look upon a finished work and a completed revela
tion. Everything about Him has been studied, estimated, and
put into systems. But this rounded completeness could not
possibly present itself to the minds of His contemporaries.
As Dr. Reynolds says, " We cannot attribute to the Sanhedrin
or the early disciples the full significance that the phrase sub
sequently acquired in the minds of the Apostles or Evangelists.
It became very soon the recognised formula of the faith, ' I
believe that Jesus is the Son of God.' In that confession, how
ever, we have the metaphysical and theological, as well as
the national, signification of the phrase." To John, most of the
facts of Christ's life were in a future he never saw, and therefore,
doctrines about those facts were, in the nature of things, entirely
beyond his ken.
At the risk, then^of wearying iteration, we must again ask our
question — not,_what does, the phrase """'_Km**oTGod " "jnja_nto^us,
after all these centuries of Christian teaching? but, what did it
mean-,to..the.B_.ptist ? what washis jconceptof the tide ?
It is quite in accordance with the idiom of Hebrew thought
that anything which was abnormal or super-eminent should have
attached to it the name of God ; and this in reference to
inanimate things and things even outside the Jewish nation. In
speaking of the incomparable wealth and privilege of Tyre, —

112 THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
"every precious stone was thy covering," etc., — Ezekiel says
(xxviii. n, et seq.): "Thou wast in Eden, the garden of God"; . . .
" and I set thee so that thou wast upon the holy mountain of
God." The reference in the latter phrase is evidently not to
Jerusalem, but to her own mountain, here poetically taken to
illustrate the high natural and spiritual privilege of the city.1
The place where the Eternal revealed Himself naturally
received the addition " of God." Moses led his flock to the back
of the wilderness, and came to " the mountain of God, even to
Horeb," where he saw the burning bush, and received the divine
commission to deliver God's people. When Daniel prays for
Jerusalem, he presents his " supplication before the Lord his God,
for the holy mountain of his God." And the evidence that
Jerusalem and its "holy hill of Zion" were especially regarded
by all the Jews as "the city of God" "and the hill of God," is so
abundant and so well known, that there is no need to give it here
in extenso. But from it all we readily see how natural is that
whole body of thought which considers the place "which God
had chosen to place His name there" — the tabernacle or the
temple — as being specially His, and which still calls church or
chapel or house of prayer " the house of God."
Coming into the human sphere, and turning to the earliest
records, we read that the " sons of God saw the daughters of men
that they were fair." But this description " sons of God " is not here
givenbecause of any outstanding goodness or moral superiority over
other men, — as a matter of fact they were much the reverse, as the
record shows, — but simply because they were of larger stature and
great prowess. They were nephilim, giants. " To the eye of the
historian there loom through the obscurity of the archaic times
before the flood, colossal forms, perpetrating deeds of more than
human savagery and strength and daring : heroes that seemed
formed in a different mould from common men. " 2 It is on these
physical grounds alone that this title is given them.
1 In Ps. lxxx. io, we read of ' ' cedars of God."
2 Dr. Dods on Genesis.

"I SAW AND BARE RECORD" 113
But if these would justify the title, much more would closeness
of moral relationship or spiritual privilege. If we turn to Exodus
(iv. 22), we read respecting the people of " God's own possession,"
"Thus saith the Lord, Israel is My son, My firstborn : and I have
said to thee (Pharaoh), Let My son go, that he may serve Me."
And in Hosea (xi. 1) we also read, "When Israel was a child,
then I loved him, and called My son out of Egypt." " Son of
God," " firstborn of God," are here given to the children of Israel
themselves. We<are not surprised, therefore, when we find these
high titles given to the kings of the people. Thus in 2 Sam. (vii. 14)
we have the Almighty's promise respecting David, " I will be his
father, and he shall be My son."
The language and title of the second Psalm, although un
doubtedly and strongly Messianic, also undoubtedly refer to
David or Solomon or one of the Hebrew kings in the first
instance, — most probably to David.
'Yet have I set My king
Upon My holy hill of Zion.
I will tell of the decree :
The Lord hath said unto me, Thou art My son ;
This day have I begotten thee.
Ask of Me, and I will give thee the nations for thine inheritance,
And the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession."
With this compare the language of the eighty-ninth Psalm (26, 27),
also referring to David —
" He shall cry unto me, Thou art my father,
My God, and the rock of my salvation.
I will also make him My firstborn,
The highest of the kings of the earth."
But from the first, the second Psalm has been regarded as
Messianic.1 " The singer's words are too great to have all their
meaning exhausted in David, or Solomon, or Ahaz, or any Jewish
monarch. Or ever he is aware, the local and the temporal are
swallowed up in the universal and the eternal. The king who
1 See Dr. Perowne's Commentary on the Psalms,

1 14 THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
sits on David's throne has become glorified and transfigured in
the light of the promise." It was probably the language of this
Psalm which at once elevated and contracted the sphere of the
application of the phrase " Son of God." Certain it is that the
whole nation of Jesus' day, and the disciples of the early Church,
regarded the title as purely Messianic. Peter quotes it in his
sermon on the day of Pentecost, and applies it to Jesus as the
Christ (Acts ii. 34, 35) : " For David ascended not into the
heavens ; but he saith himself —
The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit Thou on My right hand,
Till I make Thine enemies Thy footstool.
Let all the house of Israel therefore know assuredly, that God hath
made Him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom ye crucified."
It is quoted to the same purport and with the same application
in Peter's prayer, recorded in Acts iv. 25, et seq.; inPaul's sermon in
Antioch of Pisidia, Acts xiii. 33 ; in Heb. i. 5, et seq. ; in Heb. v. 5.
By tlie„time_o_f John and Jesus, this- phrase, Son of God, had
come to designate Him .-who -stood out in Jewish thought and-
hope,ab-Ove.the-*aGe,. and ..who.-held_sucli_a, special. relatioj__to-
Jehovah as the .earthly ..Head— of His people,^as to justify .its-
limitation to-tlim. In other words, it was one of the titles of-tlae
Messiah. He was especially worthy of that designation who
should restore the kingdom to Israel, make the theocracy once
more a living fact, and rule in Jerusalem righteously, while all
the kingdoms of the earth should be subject to His sway and
bring their riches to His feet.
King of the Jews, Messiah, and Son of God appear to be
synonymous and interchangeable terms. That the first two are,
there is no question, and examination shows that the third is so
joined with them as to be evidently intended to be an exposition
of them and they of it.
As we hayeseen. John recogyi'':pd Jesus-as-the-Mfigsiah by this
title at His baptism. And that Tohn. continued so to understand
it is clearly seen fromJii£^i___bting. message Jo_J__a§_j_JieB«4ii
prison : " Art_ thgu_ jje who should com e, or do we look for

"I SAW AND BARE RECORD" 115
another?" for Jesus is not taking the expected line of action ;
there is no visitation of wrath, no restoration of the kingdom.
For answer Jesus points to Messianic works : " The blind receive
their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear,
the dead are raised up, and the poor have the good tidings
preached to them."
The countrymen, contemporaries, and disciples of Jesus
evidently understood the phrase "Son of God" as equivalent
to Messiah. "One of the two that heard John speak and
followed him was Andrew, Simon Peter's brother. He findeth
first his own brother Simon, and saith unto him, We have found
the Messiah (which is, being interpreted, Christ)," or Anointed.
" He brought him to Jesus " (John i. 40). Nathanael's statement
is very clear and explicit in its juxtaposition of the two ; he
answered Jesus, " Rabbi, Thou art the Son of God ; Thou art the
King of Israel" (John i. 49). " But who say ye that I am?" He
asked His disciples on one occasion. " And Simon Peter answered
and said, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God"
(Matt. xvi. 15, 16). Here the second clause fills out in Peter's
mind the meaning of the first, and for this penetration he
received the Master's commendation. In the story of the raising
of Lazarus (John xi.) Martha makes the confession : " I have
believed that Thou art the Christ, the Son of God." Toward the
end of his Gospel, John tells us " that these things are written ''
in it — referring to the content of his writing — "that ye may
believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God" (xx. 30, 31).
One of the subtlest parts of Jesus' temptation in the wilderness
was the appeal to His newly-realised Messiahship,— the sugges
tions that, as He was the Son of God, He should use His new
found power to make bread of stones, to satisfy His natural
hunger ; His new-found special confidence in His heavenly
Father, to trust Him while He cast Himself down ; and, subtlest
of all, that, as He was the Son of God, and there should be given
to Him " all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them,
He should take a short and easy road to the realisation of tha

Il6 THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
promise. Simply " bow down and worship me," said the devil, —
" acknowledge me as the source of Thy authority, the one from
whom Thou takest Thy commission, and they shall be Thine." The
evil spirits, too, in the demoniacs, dreaded lest, as the " Son of
God," He would exercise His Messianic power in casting them
out and banishing them.
In the sense of Messiahship did the High Priest and the
Sanhedrin understand the phrase at the trial of Jesus : " I adjure
Thee by the living God, that Thou tell us whether Thou be the
Christ, the Son of God." Solemnly, as putting the last, the
decisive question, did he ask it, and to it Jesus answered : " Thou
hast said." And that He, Jesus, the carpenter of Nazareth, the
artisan who was an itinerant preacher, poorer than the foxes and
the birds, whose following was among the poor, too, and the least
instructed ; who had come with nothing of the pomp and blazonry
of the expected king, proclaimed no crusade against the power
which held them down, but had even recognised it ; who had
taken no steps for the aggrandisement of His own nation and the
subjugation of others ; to whom the prophet's pictures of the
glorious King and kingdom were totally inapplicable ; who had
done none of the expected works of Messiah ; who had opposed
their party and their authority at almost every point ; that He
should claim to be the hope of Israel and to fulfil it in His own
person and work, — that was too much for them, and they said,
and sincerely felt, " He hath spoken blasphemy." :
1 Even Dr. Liddon {Lectures on our Lords Divinity, 8th ed.), amid
all his special pleading for the title as expressive of nature rather than of
office, admits that " it is indeed probable that of our Lord's contemporaries
many applied to Him the title Son of God only as an official designation of
the Messiah " (pp. 246, 247). And if the above interpretation of the trial of
Jesus be the right one, as we contend it is, then Jesus' condemnation was
not upon the ground of divinity of person, but upon His Messianic claim.
Again, respecting Peter's confession, " Thou art the Christ, the Son of the
living God," Liddon says : "If St. Peter had intended only to repeat another
and practically equivalent title of the Messiah, he would not have equalled
the earlier confession of a Nathanael, or have surpassed the subsequent
admission of a Caiaphas " (p. n). As regards the confession of Nathanael
(John i. 49), ' ' Thou art the Son of God, Thou art King of Israel, " we do not

"I SAW AND BARE RECORD" 117
" The primitive Christians were Jewish, alike in their ideas and
hopes. Their creed was comprised in a single dogma, — 'Jesus
is the Messiah! . . . Their preaching of the Gospel strictly
follows the lines of the Messianic tradition." T This was the
theme of Peter's preaching on the day of Pentecost. Jesus was
proved to be the Christ by the resurrection of the dead. David,
"foreseeing this, spake of the resurrection of the Christ, that
neither was He left in Hades, nor did His flesh see corruption.
This Jesus did God raise up, whereof we all are witnesses." This,
also, is the single proposition of his summing up : " Let all the
house of Israel know assuredly that God hath made Him both
Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom ye crucified" (Acts ii.).
Peter's sermon to the people who assembled, on the healing of
the lame man, at the gate of the temple called Beautiful, has the
same thesis (Acts iii.). It was in the name of Jesus, as the Christ,
that the lame man had been restored. " The God of Abraham,
and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, the God of our
fathers, hath glorified His servant Jesus ... By faith in His name
hath His name made this man strong. . . . Repent ye therefore,
and turn again, that your sins may be blotted out, that so there
may come seasons of refreshing from the presence of the Lord ;
see in what point it exceeds that of Peter. It does not seem, if anything, to
equal it, for Peter emphasises God as living, and gives that title to Jesus
which includes King of Israel, and much more. While as to the " admission
of Caiaphas," we do not find where he made any. The reference given
(Matt. xxvi. 63) shows that the high priest examined and questioned Jesus,
but He admitted nothing. On the contrary, the high priest rent his garments,
and charged Jesus with blasphemy. Further, Canon Liddon says (p. n) that if
we construe Peter's language thus (i.e. Messianically), " it is impossible to
conceive why either the apostle or his confession should have been
solemnly designated as the selected Rock on which the Redeemer would
build His imperishable Church." It is altogether true that the content of the
Messiahship was much larger in the mind of Jesus than in that of His
disciples, but we hold that it was just the Messiahship of Jesus which formed
the rock foundation upon which He would build His Church. We do not
see how any other interpretation is possible. Dr. Liddon, so it would
seem, reads back our fuller and completer doctrinal knowledge into the minds
of those who, from the nature of the case, were precluded from it.
1 Sabatier's Apostle Paul.

Il8 THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
and that He may send the Christ, who hath been appointed for
you, even Jesus. . . . Unto you first God, having raised up His
servant, sent Him to bless you, in turning away every one of you
from your iniquities." This, and the expectation of the Messiah's
speedy return to earth to inaugurate His reign, formed the
binding and unifying beliefs of the infant Church.
This — Jesus as the Messiah — is also the burden of St. Paul's
first preaching. As soon as he recovered his sight and was
baptized, he " straightway in the synagogue proclaimed Jesus,
that He is the Son of God." He " confounded the Jews which
dwelt at Damascus, proving that this is the Christ " (Acts ix.).
He expounds the same thesis at Antioch in Pisidia. " Of this
man's (David's) seed hath God, according to promise, brought
unto Israel a Saviour, Jesus ; when John had first preached
before His coming the baptism of repentance to all the people of
Israel. And as John was fulfilling his course, he said, " What
suppose ye that I am ? I am not He. But behold, there cometh
one after me, the shoes of whose feet I am not worthy to unloose.
Brethren, children of the stock of Abraham, and those among
you that fear God, to us is the word of this salvation sent forth."
And Paul went on to preach Jesus and the resurrection (Acts
xiii.). At Thessalonica the theme is the same. Here was "a
synagogue of the Jews, and Paul, as his custom was, went in unto
them, and for three Sabbath days (or weeks) reasoned with them
from the Scriptures, opening and alleging that it behoved the
Christ to suffer, and rise again from the dead ; and that this
Jesus, whom, said he, I proclaim unto you, is the Christ " (Acts
xvii. 2, 3).
Wejiave travelled beyond the tiine pfjohn the Baptist,.and have
found a uniform meaning in all. thx thought 0f thatage attached
to the phras.e,.J.'Son of God.''_JJetu_m»gtJ.hen, to ..the Baptist,
are we notMund, to .come, to Jj^cjpjjclu,^ that tp.him.as to all
tlje rest of his contemporaries, this_title had an ethical, theocratic_„
Messianic content and meaning, .and. that-flnly f_ Jf Lohn had
"ndsrstood_it to mean absolute divinity of person and nature, as

"I SAW AND BARE RECORD" I ig
the Church now understands it, is jt possible that, within a few
months, he would doubt whether _ Jesus_atas_the-Chr__t ? .JWfiuld
not that belief _have settled, as on a sure and tremorless basjs.of
confidence, every possible question and surmise ? It, was reserved
to the future to expand it __________§._ higher ancHuhermean^^
therefore, John pointed Him out to his fecMes_as____J__________Son . of I
God," he simply recognised Him as theexpected_____________tipnaf
Me^iah7°de^giateT oQ,ehpyah."to_._jjS_i^^
office.1 *

„ £i MA,

(S) " THE BRIDEGROOM." 1 ^P l~*~Y~
Although the public work of Jesus was now definitely begun,
yet the great prophet did not slacken his effort as if his work was
accomplished. Thejext time we see him after his testimony to
Jesus is at ^Enon, near to Salim, where he is still^baptizing. His
" decrease " will be a gradual rather than a sudden' one. The
kingdom of heaven needs all the earnest and sincere spirits who
are willing to dedicate themselves, and upon none of them will
John bar the gate. The line of action which the Christ will take
the prophet does not know, and in the uncertainty he will not
stay his hand. Jesus Himself, however, and His disciples, have
adopted the rite of John as their own, and the kingdom is large
enough for the disciples of both, although the characteristics, the
preaching, and bearing of the younger are cast in another and
much more popular mould than those of the elder prophet.
John is still a solitary, though among the crowds ; there ever
hangs about him something of the gloom of the great and lonely
mountains, or the inhospitable desert, to which he now and again
withdraws as though going to his home. So much so, that, not
withstanding his work, the people came to the conclusion that he
had a " demon," — an indwelling spirit besides his own, that
impressed upon him his fate or destiny and impelled him to it,
— a natural conclusion for a life of such startling contrasts to
produce in such an age. i See Note B.

120 THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
But Jesus took roads altogether different,— those which led
Him to the haunts and companionships of men. He talked with
them easily, naturally, winsomely. He caught Peter by His
insight into his nature, and the bestowment of a new name.
Philip answered to His call at once. The interesting conversa
tion with Nathanael in the orchard won him to the confession,
" Rabbi, thou art the Son of God, thou art King of Israel." He
accepted with pleasure the invitation, and went with a smile, to
the marriage feast at Cana ; visited His home for a few days ;
then went up to Jerusalem and manifested His power by the
cleansing of the Temple ; and then taught Nicodemus under
cover of the night. In short, He did not shun, He sought, the
beaten tracks of men ; He put Himself into their life, ate at their
tables ; and by His personal charm, His profound insight into the
Law, the expositions that brought the kingdom of God, and God
Himself, within reach of the poorest and lowest if sincere, and the
firm integrity of His life, He won men on every side. So strong
were His social habits, so readily did He identify Himself with
the people for their upraising, that the " unco guid " curled their
lips at the mention of His name, — He was " gluttonous and a
wine-bibber, a friend of publicans and sinners." No wonder, then,
that when He began to baptize, " all men came to Him."
It was singular that two such, and so different, men should be
using the same rite, singular at least to the people ; singular
enough to be reported to the forerunner. If the reporters had
the slightest expectation of rebellion or adverse comment on the
prophet's part, they were not gratified. How sublimely —
sublimely because meekly — he met the new fact ! Ever since the
baptism of Jesus he had doubtless expected some such procedure
on His part, and fully does he accept it. " A servant," said he,
in effect, " can only go so far as he is commissioned. To be the
Christ was not given me from heaven. You yourselves know
that I said I was but the herald sent before Him. I am not the
bridegroom, whose honour it is to marry the heavenly bride and
make her his own ; I am his friend, his ' best man,' who leads

"I SAW AND BARE RECORD" 121
him to her home. That is my office, my only office. It is not in
my own position alone that I rejoice, and yet I rejoice that I have
this honour ; it is in His joy I rejoice ; this, my joy, is now
fulfilled. Then, having done my work, I shall retire : He must
increase, but I must decrease." 1
How superior he rises to all littlenesgj_ If^thexe-is-a-tinge of
the sadness of resignation, _there ________ no ^t__j_j________g_(__ravvy, in all his
words andj_«_^____]___n_g_______^^ whieh, as
Milton says, is " the last_ infirmity^ of noble minds " jffindeed he
had ever possessed it„ " He„was ._ cgntent,to_be. like. the cheap jir,
mxder whose shelter the young _____a_kjrootsjt__^^ in a
little while^is_cut down, and gives^ place Jojhe nobler tree." 2
Such is the attitude and such the spirit of the last of the
prophets ; the greatest of the___pid,Jhg .courier of the Ngv,
DiijHmsation. Like the waning moonjjn the western homon^at
the dawn of day, his light pales before, and at length is lost jn,
th_ug__ry.^f__Jife_a«ing..Sun. 1 The friend also presided as master of the ceremonies in the marriage
procession and the feast. It was an important day for him, and a responsible
one ; but, his work finished, he drops back out of view, leaving the bride
groom with the bride. Jesus afterwards uses this very figure to justify to
John's disciples the conduct of His own. "The air of gladness which
reigned around Him (Jesus) surprised them (the disciples of John).
Accustomed to fasts, to persevering prayer, to a life of aspiration, they were
astonished to see themselves transported suddenly into the midst of the joys
attending the welcome of the Messiah " (Renan). And in surprise they ask,
" Why do we and the Pharisees fast oft, but Thy disciples fast not?" And
taking the former language of their own master to answer them, He said,
" Can the sons of the bridechamber mourn as long as the bridegroom is
with them ? but the days will come when the bridegroom shall be taken away
from them, and then will they, fast."
2 A. K. H. B.

CHAPTER X
On the Steep Slope
BY_the period at which our narrative has now arrived, the Bagtist,
had become the one sensation of the country. Like a stone
dropped into the placid pool of Jewish social life, from him waves
of reputation have been spreading in rapidly widening circles.
And the ruler, Herod Antipas, soon felt their oscillation beneath
his keel.
Herod wagjeUaware of the kind of people with whom he had
to deal. He knew the inflammable material (if we may change
our figure) of which the people were made, knew also that
another kingdom had been their dream and hope for long genera
tions, that this was their most sensitive and caloric spot ; and
that they would, at any moment and at any sacrifice, respond to
the call of a religious fanatic, and rise against their rulers in the
endeavour to establish it. He may wake up some morning and
find he has another Maccabean revolt on his hands. The move
ment, if not at present dangerous, may suddenly become so.
Josephus gives this as the reason of John's arrest. He says •.
" Now, when (many) others came to crowd about him, for they
were greatly moved (or pleased) by hearing his words, Herod,
who feared lest the great influence John had over the people
might put it into his power and inclination to raise a rebellion (for
they seemed ready to do anything he should advise), thought it
best, by putting him to death, to prevent any mischief he might
cause, and not bring himself into difficulties, by sparing a man
who might make him repent when it was too late. Accordingly
122

ON THE STEEP SLOPE 1 23
he was sent a prisoner to Machaerus . . . and was there put to
death." 1
Doubtless Josephus gives the ostensible reason, the reason that
appeared on the face of the warrant ; doubtless, also, it was a true
one. But it was the only one of which he was cognisant, and to
him it was sufficient ; he sought for, and probably suspected, no
other. The standpoint of the historian was that of a watcher and
chronicler of political currents and events. These only does he
see. He was not within even the wider circle of the Baptist's
influence, much less within the inner one of personal acquaint
ance or discipleship, where reasons more minute, and more exact
and forceful, could have been given.
The evangelists give another reason (which, however, does not
shut out that of Josephus), to see the incidence and feel the force
of which we must go back and wide a little in our history.
Herod Antipas not only knew the explosive nature of the
people over whom he reigned, but was well enough acquainted
with their history and literature to know the immense value they
set upon the person and work of a prophet. They looked upon
one of this high order as being specially inspired, in closest
communication with Jehovah, almost himself semi-divine. And
now one of that great spiritual order which all had thought a
vanished race, which had formed the best and most sacred part of
their nation's heritage, whose lives and works had shone luminous
through the darkening years, is actually in his territory and
within his reach.
Does an invitation, in the first instance, come to him from the
palace ? Probably so ; but if it does, then without question, fear,
or hesitation, the prophet accepts it Jehovah's hand holds open
another door, and he must enter. The prophet draws no line of
demarcation, his message is for all, rulers and ruled alike. The
demand for righteousness knows none of our social distinctions.
But while he is making his way through the valleys and along
the hill-slopes toward the palace of the tetrarch, — probably at
1 Jos. Antiq. xviii. 5. 2-

124 THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
Tiberias, which he had rebuilt, and where he had erected a
splendid palace, — with the people through whose neighbourhood
he passes dogging his footsteps, watching his every movement,
and gladly, yet with awe, ministering to his few and simple
wants, let us see who it is into wbosejpresence he will shortly
come. The chronicle of the Herodian family is, for by far.the .greater
part, a chronicle of the "-sensual_.„carnal,.and.devilish "..order. It
is not an attractive or a savoury task to study such a mass of
moral decadence and defilement. But enough must be shown,
even if but in outline, to place in its true significance the visit of
John, and to give us the key to the tragedy that followed.
Herod Antipas, the tetrarch of Galilej_____was ,th__^__sgi______f_.tliat
rlMcd,_misn^m____(_Liiie,^Gj^at__ whose character can only be
summed up as a compound of unprincipled lust and unscrupulous
bloodshedding. Antipas lacked the strength of willof his father,
but equalled him in lack of conscience. To him, as to his father,
no sanctities of home, character, or relationship were sacred if
they stood in the way of his gross, degraded passion, or the
schemes of his ambition.
His wife was the daughter of Aretas, king of Arabia Petraea,
whose dominions, lying on the east of the Dead Sea, included the
city and castle of Machaerus, the latter of which he, while retain
ing the ownership, assigned to his daughter, and her husband as
one of their palaces. On one of his visits to Rome, Herod lodged
with his half-brother, Herod-Philip, — not the tetrarch, as is often
supposed, but the only Herod living in a private station.1 The
hospitality of his brother he repaid by intrigue with his wife,
i " Herod Philip I. (Philip, Mark vi. 17) was the son of Herod the Great
and Mariamne, and must be carefully distinguished from the tetrarch Philip.
He married Herodias, the sister of Agrippa i„ by whom he had a daughter,
Salome . . . Herod Philip 11. was the son of Herod the Great and Cleopatra.
He received as his own government, Batanea, Trachonitis, Auranitis, (Gaulo-
nitis), and some parts of Jamnia, with the title tetrarch (Luke iii. 1). . . . He
married Salome, daughter of Herod Philip 1. and Herodias." — Smith's
Dictionary of the Bible.

ON THE STEEP SLOPE 125
Herodias, " who was the daughter of Aristobulus their brother,
and the sister of Agrippa the Great." She admitted his address,
and "an agreement was made for her to change her habitation,
and come to him as soon as he returned from Rome : one article
of the marriage also was this, that he should divorce Aretas'
daughter" (Jos.). But the faithlessness and machinations of
her husband became known, by some means, to the faithful
and high-spirited wife, and "she desired him to send her to
Machasrus, which is a place on the borders of the dominions of
Aretas and Herod, without informing him of any of her intentions.
Accordingly Herod sent her thither, as thinking his wife had not
perceived anything : now she had sent a good while before to
Machaerus, which was subject to her father, and so all things
necessary were made ready for her by the general of Aretas'
army, and by that means she soon came to Arabia, under the
conduct of the several generals, who carried her from one to
another successively, and she soon came to her father, and told
him of Herod's intentions." 1
Aretas did not make known his secret purpose of revenge, but
steadily prepared for war, leaving territorial matters as before.
Herod therefore saw no danger from far-off Arabia, and con
tinued to hold the castle of Machaerus as his own, as the sequel
shows. And now the way was open for the guilty pair to be married, if
we dare call their adulterous and incestuous union by such a
high and holy name. So__they live together, — Herod, whose
divorced wife is st___j_l__alivg ; andjlerodias, his sister-in-law and
niece, whose husband is also still alive.

Toward their Galilean residence the stern Baptist comes,
meditating many things, but calmly resolute on the one clear
duty before him. No account is given us of their meeting, but
we can imagine it. We see the tall form of the prophet at the
palace door ; the bending sinuosity of its soft-raimented attend
ant ; the ushering into some silent, gorgeous room, — for the
1 Antiq. Bk. xviii. 5. 1.

126 THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
Herods had great taste in architecture, and loved display. We
can see the tetrarch in his robes of office, as near the kingly
purple as he dares to go, and assuming the " pomp and circum
stance" of kings as much as may be, entering in through the
parted curtains. Before him stands the respectful but unbending
form of the rugged prophet of the desert, his camel's hair mantle
and his long rough staff contrasting strangely with the soft
luxuriousness of his new surroundings, and about him " the smell
as of a field which the Lord hath blessed."
" Consider the meeting of these two men from the opposite
-f^renteijiFTi^ character, and in jthe.most
QJ______o___ite_ conditions. The one brought forth in silken luxury, the
other cradled in nature's roughest couch ; the one bred in the
midst of plenty and pleasure and power, the other in the midst of
hoary deserts and savage creatures, and fed upon locusts and
wild honey, and within whose lips no luxury had ever passed ;
the one clothed in incorruptible truth, stripped of every ornament
and grace, the other adorned with every ornament and grace of
life divested of sincerity and truth." 1
We do not know whether Herodias, like an earlier Drusilla,
joined Herod, another Felix, and stood before John, another
Paul ; but the probability is she did. It was not the first time,
nor the last, that wrong, deep and high, sat in power, while the
royalty of truth and right stood before it, either as a prisoner, or
in danger of becoming one.
To ordinary men the temp|ali_vn„i_s. jstrong to modify^ Jhe
message.._m^acc9r^nce_v__i^_&e^u_djence. It is not a difficult
matter to thunder forth in generalities of condemnation to an
assembled multitude ; but it is quite another matter to stand to
the same guns, firingj____err___^|)__ii_iduals-in -" thou- art~the man ! "
And the wickedness of the people is more often castigated than
" wickedness in high places." Are not the edges of truth some
times softened in the presence of wealth, or genius, or power, and
is not the head sometimes bowed before " the golden image
1 Ed. Irving.

ON THE STEEP SLOPE 127
wl-iicfi Npl-iiirl-iadnPTTar fhp king has set up" ; or in "the house
of Rimmon, when my masteFTeaneth upon my arm"? Still
greater is the requirement made on courage when the individual
application is as an axe laid to the root of " the wicked in great
power, spreading himself like a green bay-tree."
" It is refreshing," says Robertson of Brighton, " to look upon
such a scene as this, — the highest, the very highest moment, I
think, in all John's history ; higher than his ascetic life. For,
after all, ascetic life such as he had led before, when he fed upon
locusts and wild honey, is hard only in the first resolve. When
you have once made up your mind to that, it becomes a habit to
live alone. To lecture the poor about religion is not hard. To
speak of unworldlme.s torrien with whom we do not associate,
and who do not see our daily inconsistencies, that is not hard.
To speak contemptuously of the world when we have no power of
commanding its admiration, that is not difficult. But when God
has given a man accomplishments, or powers, which would enable
him to shine in society, and he can still be firm, and steady, and
uncompromisingly true ; when he can be as undaunted before the
rich as before the poor; when rank and fashion cannot subdue
him into silence ; when he hates moral evil as sternly in a great
man as he would in a peasant, there is truth in that man. This
was, the test to which the Baptist submitted.") "
But~fhe _Sger__^uJ56ii -whose vision had risen eternal- -things,-who
had beheld the " Lord, sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up,
whose trainTiTled^the temple " ;, upon whose lips the seraphim had,
laid the consecrating fire, and whose commission was directly of
G_od, were not likely men toJ^a_le_their ineffectual .fires" before
a " man, vain man, drest in a little brief authority." Mosesdid
not falter before Pharaoh, nor Nathan before David, nor Elijah
before Ahab. Neither "did Herod overawe the Baptist.
John had convinced the people oFtKeir sins ; had shown that
repentance meant to go and humbly "do the first works" of
charity and social helpfulness ; he had hurled his fierce ana
themas and most scathing epithets at the " highly respectable "

128 THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
and smugly religious ; without fear or favour he had applied the
code of divine ethics to particular cases, telling the tax-collectors
to be honest, and the soldiers to be humane, truthful, and obe
dient. And the same principles he does not shrink from applying
now. It is not on the far and general horizon that the lightnings
play of "righteousness, continence, and judgment to come" ;J_e_
"rep_o__:d_J_______roj__^
with swift directness does^ the_ final __stroke descend — " It is not
lawful for thee to have thy brotherls. wife !"
Into the free, pure air outside the prophet strode, leaving Herod
to settle within himself the stirred " dregs of conscience still within
him"; and Herodias to plot her deep revenge. "Therefore
Herodias had an inward grudge against him," as Mark, with one
of his graphic touches, says,1 " and wished to kill him." Here is
the direct and inner reason of John's arrest and imprisonment,
" for the sake of Herodias, his brother Philip's wife." And it is
in accordance with the fierceness and relentless hatred of Herod's
paramour. Only for a brief while does John retain his liberty. The hand
of arrest is shortly laid upon him, and he is consigned to the
gloomy border fortress of Machaerus.2 It would seem, from the
probabilities of the case, and from the gospel narratives, which
show Herod's court shortly after to be at Machaarus, that Herod
took John with him there as a prisoner, in order to have him near
him. Away from him, John was not safe from his wife's venge-
1 'H 3s 'Hfaitiius IvtixM aiiTU, Mail ijfcXei' aiirov (Ksroxrl/Viw (Mark vi. 19).
/¦* 2 The reasons given for John's imprisonment by Matthew and Mark hardly
coincide. According to the former, the arrest of the Baptist arose from
Herod's personal initiative, and "he would have put him to death," but that
"he feared the multitude, because they counted John as a prophet." While
Mark's account shows it to have been owing to the danger John was in from
Herodias, who " set herself against him, and desired to kill him ; but she
could not, ... for Herod kept him safe." Matthew's account needs
reconciliation, for if Herod had longed for an opportunity to put John to
death, he would have seized it gladly when it presented itself at the feast ; but
the record says, " the king was grieved," and with this the account of Mark
also agrees.

ON THE STEEP SLOPE 1 29
ance. She wished to kill him, but could not ; for " Herod feared
John, knowing that he was a righteous man and a holy, and kept
him safe."
When away from his wife, he often brought his prisoner out,
and after every conversation with his faithful monitor Herod was
troubled ; to hear him was like bringing out his better nature into
the light and air for a while. But he was too weak to decide
upon the only righteous course. Hp put bis conscience, as he.
jlidjhe prophet, into, prison agam1although " he was much per
plexed, and heard him gladly." He was
"Between the full-incensed points
Of mighty opposites,"
his conscience and his passion. He found that
" Boundless intemperance
In nature is a tyranny."
Too powerful a hold had Herodias uppn_him. Both sacred and
profane history afford many and well-known instances of men
who became, similarly, slaves of tyrannous and guilty passion.
The degradation of the best becomes the worst. A virtuous
woman is the crowning ornament of life's temple, but a woman
who has lost that which makes the charm and strength of woman
hood, defiles the temple. And she may develop a power as
fascinating as it is fatal. Brilliant, beautiful, and unscrupulous,
with heart and moral sense repressed by main force, despite their
protests, and the forces of her nature running into unnatural
channels, she will develop Medusa coils, and woe to the man on
whom they fasten. Cruel as the grave, they will drag him down
to the deeps of sorrow, humiliation, and death.
Such a woman was Herodias ; and John was to her not so
much a reproof as a menace. Could the prophet bring the king
over to his side, what was her position worth ? And if he should
send her away, where could she go ? Therefore she " bore him
an inward grudge " ; and deeply did she plot, keenly did she
watch, and heavily did she stake to " remove " him. The sleek
and hungry tigress, and the man she wants to make her victim,
9

130 THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
are in their wrong places, as " in the corrupted currents of this
world" they often are; the man is in the cage, the tigress
outside the bars. Yet for the present she cannot "get at" him;
from his wife's vengeance, " Herod kept him safe."
The Baptist's incarceration was not so strict but that he
could freely see his disciples. His person and safety secured,
there is no call nor desire for the rigours of close confinement.
From his prison as headquarters he directs the work and jour-
neyings of his active agents. Like Jesus after him, and Wiclif,
and Wesley, John's mission was spread by itinerant preachers,
and to him from time to time they made their reports, and from
him sought counsel and direction.
The growing influence of Jesus, the works He did, His power
with the people, and His departure, as the Gospels show, on such
matters as prayer and fasting, from the method of the Baptist,
must often have been the theme of perplexed conversation between
the prisoner and his preachers. At last, in anxious doubt, John
sent a deputation of his disciples to Jesus, to know if He to
whom he had given testimony as the Messiah was indeed and of
a truth the One to whom all had looked forward as the nation's
deliverer.' We can well understand how John, in this gloomy fortress
prison, should get down-hearted. His had been a life of freedom,
going on God's free earth and in God's free air where he would,
but now, a prisoner, he is condemned to a life of inactivity, in the
cold and dampness of a cell.
Yet this is by no means the chief reason of John's depression
and pessimistic outlook. The personal element is very secondary.
It is the growing doubtful question whether his life's work has not
been a failure. No longer is he able to be a voice crying, " Pre
pare in the wilderness the way of the Lord." His soul has burned
in longing for the kingdom of heaven to come, and in this prison
1 See Matt. xi. _. This verse is a side light on the accepted Messiahship of
Jesus in the writer's mind : in fact, he assumes it as unquestioned : '"O ii
'lua..rri5 axoOa-ug iv tu $nr[Aur*,piai roc ifyx TOW Xplfrov, xipt^as 5i« -ray fiudyTM xt/rou."

ON THE STEEP SLOPE 131
the unconcerned and heartless days and dreary nights come and
go without a sign. The world rolls on as if the Lord were not
mindful of His own, but had left the world's affairs to take their
course. And-HeOcLJwlw>Jfr4ie--TratH-eeked, for whom he had been
willing to take the second place, whose sandal-latchet he had felt
unworthy to loose, because He was the Lord's anointed to this
high office, and who at the baptism had been manifested as such,
—He is not fulfilling the. Messiahshlp.asJieJxad expected..
He had expected to hear a far louder voice than his own call
from the deeps the great tide of national righteousness, which
should bring to its desired haven the vanished theocracy. That
tide was at its lowest ebb, and almost forgotten, but when it
should come in on the flood, in the might of it they would rise
and claim their land for God. The prophetic mind has always
lo_)k__L__or__j__ig_____^ the mainpart of the prophet's
function t o__pj qclaim .it Doubtless the great prophet earnestly
inquired of his evangelists, as they from time to time visited his
gloomy prison to report their work and receive directions, whether
He to whom he had borne witness were setting Himself to realise
the kingdom, and whether there were any signs of an insurrec
tionary movement, or whispers of secret instructions from Jesus as
the "head centre," the whole of which had for their purpose to cast
the invader out of the land, and "restore the kingdom to Israel."
But there are no such signs or sounds ; Jesus is disappointing
all their hopes. His career is developing itself in unexpected
ways. He refuses to be made a king. There is no axe, no fan,
no quenchless fire. He preaches longsuffering, His works are
not of vengeance, but of mercy. In short, neither the person
of Jesus, nor His sayings and doings, nor His kingdom, were
such as John expected. " What wonder, then, if the eye of the
caged eagle began to film ? " And can we not deeply sympathise
with the man who sees the ruin of .his hopes, but is powerless to
pre______ntit; who feels like i______brokeni instrument, cast aside and
forgotten; Jfeete that. " my way j_____,hjd from the Lord, and my judg
ment is passed over from my God" ?

132 THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
('At first we are surprised at the answer which Jesus returned to
John, an answer which simply pointed him to the very works
which had helped to raise the prophet's doubts :— " The blind
receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the
deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel
preached unto them." That is, Jesus reaffirms the significance
of these works, and asks John to find in them the true evidences
of Jehovah's Messiah. And, as we have already seen, that the
Messiah should do suchworks was part of the original concept of
His character and activity.
And surely these works are such evidence. These are the
works, — works of mercy and help, tidings of hope to the
poorest and lowest, which have been characteristic of the world's
Messiahs, — those saviours of their fellows who have had the
same mind in them that was also in their great Master. It has
also been the fate of such to raise doubts, and sometimes censure
and opposition, in their sincerest friends and fellow-helpers. The
well-known histories of Luther and of Wesley, as well as those of
other reformers, afford illustrations of this. Such have always
frightened their friends by going beyond the fences of precedent
on to the heath, even though their purpose was to reclaim it and
bring it into cultivation.
It is both significant and instructive to note the nature of the
reply of such. It has never been a quotation, but always an ipse
dixit. There has been no appeal to authority, to preconceptions
of " oughtness " in the methods of their work. It has ever been
the practical reply of Jesus, pointing to good works and beneficial
fruit as their justification. In fact, this is the only reply that can
be given. Yet it is amply sufficient, and entirely decisive. Every
religious movement finds its justification, its only but its complete
justification, in its rebuke of disease and suffering, its ameliora
tion of the social environment, its offering to the sorrow-stricken
"the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness" ; in its pro
clamation of an evangel that brings men to know that the tender
mercies of God are infinite, and opens to the least and lowest the

ON THE STEEP SLOPE

133

doors of an eternal hope, — a hope that is full of immortality and
everlasting life.
This was the reply of Jesus to his forerunner's doubting
message. For all that lay beyond it, Jesus does not enter into
explanations ; He asks John to trust Him, — "Blessed is he who
shall not stumble at Me." But the Baptist's was a limited vision ;
in this respect, as in so many others, "he who is least in the
kingdom of heaven is greater than he."
And asjohn listens to the reply, brought by his itinerantsj)ver
hill_and_4^1e from-far-nff Galil.__p.____ again the_old numb feeling
comes^ back1___jijt. now _w_tl_.-a_i»._dd__L touch of sadness ;¦— ",I,t_.
mustbe__ri_gl____J_43^^ .
decrease..'i__A_-LJaehij^thaseJ_t-t_es-v waU&=an_Lgate§_..4he- strong
spintj[_£J__g_[__]_^^ bj^ofjost
liberty and of broken, vanishing Jhopes.-
-1- -Tin, -__._.. 11 -_n-^--~-~«*«^«^g"w»ac«- - - - - w *

CHAPTER XI
Over the Precipice
Not long had Herodias to wait before "opportunity gave the
leer of invitation." Herod's birthday approached. It was to be
celebrated in the castle of Machagrus, with all the pomp and
circumstance the Herods loved.
This important border fortress stood, as Josephus tells us,1
"on the border of Arabia, and had a prospect toward that
country." " The nature of the place was very capable of afford
ing the surest hopes of safety to those who possessed it . . .
for what was walled in was itself a very rocky hill, elevated to a
very great height." " It was also contrived by nature that it
could not be easily ascended, for it is, as it were, ditched about
with valleys on all sides, and to such a depth that the eye cannot
reach their bottoms . . . for that valley which cuts it on the
west extends to threescore furlongs, and did not end till it came
to the Lake Asphaltitis ; on the same side it was also that
Machaerus had the tallest top of its hill elevated above the rest."
Approaching it from the river Callirhoe, travelling due south, and
crossing the Wady Z'gara, with its stupendous ravine, Dr.
Tristram tells us that it has precipitous cliffs eight hundred feet
high on one side, and runs down by a series of steps three
thousand eight hundred feet to the Dead Sea.
Herod the Great had recognised the strategic value of the
mountain and castle already there ; " he therefore surrounded a
large space of ground with walls and towers, and built a city
1 Wars of the Jews, Bk. vii. v. vi,
134

OVER THE PRECIPICE 135
there, out of which city there was a way which led up to the very
citadel itself on the top of the mountain ; nay, more than this, he
built a wall round that top of the hill, and erected towers at the
corners, of a hundred and sixty cubits high ; in the middle of
which place he built a palace, after a magnificent manner,
wherein were large and beautiful edifices. He also made a great
many reservoirs for the reception of water, that there might be
plenty of it ready for all uses, and those in the properest places
that were afforded him there. Thus did he, as it were, contend
with the nature of the place, that he might exceed its natural
strength and security (which yet itself rendered it hard to be
taken) by those fortifications which were made by the hands of
men. Moreover, he put a large quantity of darts and other
machines of war into it, and contrived to get everything thither
that might anyway contribute to its inhabitants' security, under
the longest siege possible."
As the tetrarch's birthday approached, the city of ten thousand
inhabitants on the slope of the hill, as well as the castle and
palace on its summit, is in increasing commotion. The invited
guests begin to arrive : at first daily, then almost hourly ; the
nobles, the army officers, and the most prominent government
officials ; and the many-coloured cavalcades wind up the steep
road to the citadel. Arriving there, they are greeted by the
open-handed, pleasure-loving host, and by the smiling hostess,
whose deep and secret train is laid. She
" Looks like the innocent flower,
But is the serpent under't."
The "convenient day" at last arrived. We do not know the
free, cheerful diversions of that day, but we do know the events
of the night that closed it. And the day has sped ; the night
has come. The great banquet-hall, with its purple hangings and
rich appointments, is lit up by a thousand golden lamps, which,
suspended from the roof by silver chains, cast bright radiance
upon the feast below. The cares of office are laid aside by host

136 THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
and guests alike ; choice viands load the board ; the best wine
the palace boasts freely flows.
_At length the feast is over ; silent and quick attendants remove
the broken remains, and the floor is cleared. The next item on
the programme of the night's orgy is a dance. Hot with wine
and meat, the passions "of the host and his guests must next be
inflamed. In the feasts of Eastern courts, it was usual for the
indecent and suggestive dance to form a part, and the dancers
were, as was to be expected, mostly of a certain class. But the
guests can hardly believe their eyes when the daughter of the
hostess herself enters as the dancer. We dare not attempt to
describe that dance.
(But she has danced, this princely maiden, descendant of the
Maccabees, and now she stands before the king, with heaving
breast and sparkling eyes, in all the intoxication of her innocent
youth and beauty, to receive the dancer's customary gift. The
infatuated king replies, "Ask what thou wilt, to the half of my
kingdom, and I will give it thee, I swear it." Flushed with her
success, the girl flies to her mother,1 waiting behind the hangings
of the door, — " What shall I ask ? the king has promised me any
thing, to the half of his kingdom ! " The supreme moment has
come ; the deep plot, carefully prepared, in which she has so
boldly played her daughter, is on the verge of success. " Ask for
the head of John the Baptist ! " and the fierce eyes of the mother
show no sign of relenting at the questioning gaze turned up to
them. We long to find evidence that Salome revolted from the
"horrible request, but are not able, — "immediately, with haste,"
1 According to the Authorised Version, there is a. discrepancy between
Matt. xiv. 8 and Mark vi. 24. The former says, " And she, being instructed
beforehand by her mother " ; the latter, " And she went forth and said to her
mother, What shall I ask?" The Revised Version heals the breach by
rendering the former, "And she, being put forward by her mother" ('H si
xpa{3i{3oitr8iio-ec. ira rvis pWTpls aii-rns), a meaning which allows of Salome coming
out of the banquet-hall, as Mark relates she did. We certainly feel relieved
when we find that Salome is spared the charge, which the Authorised
Version's rendering of Matthew would allow, of being a deep-scheming fury
like her mother.

OVER THE PRECIPICE 137
. c
she went into the banquet-hall, and amid its silence said. ^Forth
with give me, in a platter, the head of John the Baptisr! "
The king had never dreamed of this. " He was grieved and
exceedingly sorry." He sees how he has been outwitted ; how,
behind all, his wife's fell purpose has " stalked like a ghost." But
he sees no way of escape from his oath. And he who has broken
most of the laws of God, and trampled upon the sanctities of
home and character, now proceeds to stand upon his honour, —
"for his oath's sake."
No innocent course is open to him. He had to make his
choice between two evils, — to break his word, or to kill John.
But, in the first place, he had promised that which was not his ;
and if in the intoxication of the time he thought at all, he must
have known it was a promise entirely beyond his power to fulfil.
Then what would the emperor say to his giving half his kingdom
away to a dancer, or indeed to anybody ? And, further, the head
of John the Baptist did not come into the catalogue of the property
of his kingdom; it formed no part of its available assets; it was not
his to give. As anyone may see, this is the position Herod ought
at once to have taken. But what clear thinking is possible when
a man is drunk? and what firm resolution when the will is
enslaved ? And so, although John's "Virtues
Pleaded like angels, trumpet-tongued, against
The deep damnation of his taking off,"
the order was given, and one of the soldiers told off to execute it.
One would not, for all the wealth of the Herods, have been that
soldier. Roman though he was, stern, " careless of the single life,"
how he must have loathed his task.
We need not follow too closely behind him as he goes down
the stair to where John broods in darkness and solitude, bearing
up his noble heart against the circumstances that wear and the
doubts that assail it. We had better perhaps remain in the hall
of the feast and the dance, with the sobered revellers, whose

138 THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
attempts at laughter are spasmodic and feeble, whose movements
are uneasy, and upon whom there has fallen an oppressive silence,
for they know of the tragedy being enacted below.
The great prophet is dead !" Nor steel nor poison,
Malice domestic, . . . nothing
Can touch him further."
With the silent bitterness of deep contempt the soldier carries
the head and places it upon the trencher. They hear him coming
toward the hall. It is given to the dancer-princess, who carries
it to her Jezebel mother. Her revenge is now complete. It is
terrible ! But of the two heads, the living that bends over the
dead, the gleam of satisfied revenge in its eyes, the less repulsive
is that upon the platter. It is even more pleasant to think of the
execration of the guard-room than of the gloating of Herodias
over her prey ; for, soldiers though they were, and familiar with
deeds of blood, they must have appreciated the noble character
and the strong, pure life of the prisoner they had guarded. They
certainly knew enough to know that his beheading was not so
much an execution as a murder.
So sank the sun of John's life, behind sombre clouds, blood-
tinged, bringing up again the old, dark mystery, — why, if the God
of righteousness reigns, such lives are permitted to come to such
ends. Right, in prison and beheaded : Wrong, on the throne
and at the feast.
" And his disciples came, and took up his body, and buried
him, and went and told Jesus."

CHAPTER XII
Jesus: and Nemesis
The estimate of Jesus on His forerunner may fitly conclude our
study of his life. It was spoken to the multitude who had heard
the doubting message from the prison, and all of whom " counted
John as a prophet." Did it strike the tender soul of Jesus that
the people before Him would feel His answer to be somewhat
harsh to the prophet whose circumstances bespoke their pity?
For He has not answered his question, He has simply pointed
out His Messianic works, and based upon them, if not a veiled
reproof, at least a request that sounds like a warning, — "and
blessed is he, whosoever shall find none occasion of stumbling in
me." Are they coming to the conclusion that the message might
have had a tenderer tone ? then Jesus will remove that by showing
He did not lack any sense of the greatness and value of John.
He not only knew generally what was in man, therefore in the
Baptist among the rest ; He was his kinsman and his friend ; He
appreciated him more highly than they all.
" What went ye out into the wilderness to behold ?" Not alone
to answer them and put them down does Jesus raise this and its
companion questions, but also to elevate by each answer His
hearers' conception of the magnitude alike of the character and
work of the Baptist. Men do not put themselves to the trouble
of leaving homes and occupations and going toilsomely into the
broken, barren wilderness to gaze upon a lonely bunch of reedy
grass swaying to and fro, tossed about with every wind. Nor
was the prophet such a feeble character that that is his fitting
139

140 THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
illustration ; in him dwelt nothing fickle nor inconstant. He was
rather like one of the firm-based hills among which he walked,
and which he had made his silent companions. Neither
circumstances nor men had made him waver in his integrity ; the
sinning ruler had met with a rebuke as strong as the sinning
subject. From the straight line of truth he never deflected, nor
did he temporise to gain, nor to keep it after it had come
unsought, that popularity which is proverbially fickle. The \
" way of the Lord " he prepared was the way he trod himself, —
" straight," though it led to the dungeon and to death.
Neither was it a supple courtier who aroused their attention and
interest in the desert. One who studies comfort, luxury, ease ;
the server of his time ; who falls in with his surroundings and
asks no awkward questions ; soft-tongued to flatter, and flexible
to every whim of his lord, is not likely to be found out there
in the wilderness. Its bareness, coldness, hard fare, and rough
life would go completely across the soft fibre of his nature and be
unendurable, while its isolation would breed in him a most
intolerable ennui. John's character corresponded with his dress,
his food, his surroundings. In him the spiritual was ever first,
and the flesh a poor second. The sins of the time, the felt
presence of Jehovah, the nearness of the expected kingdom, shut
out even the consideration of creature comfort. The perfumed
ease and cushioned life, the " gorgeous apparel " and " delicate
living " of kings' houses were as far as the poles asunder from his
desires. The desert and the prison he could, he did, face, yet ,
even as he faced them he had no longing for the courts of kings.
" What then ? a prophet ? yea, I say unto you, and much more
than a prophet." There was no need for Jesus to emphasise the
power and fruitfulness of his preaching, for " all the people, and
the publicans, . . . had been baptised with the baptism of John."
But it had been as though he had seen God and talked with
Him, and had come for no other purpose in this world but to
declare His whole counsel and commandment. The living coal
from off the heavenly altar had touched his lips, consecrating and

JESUS : AND NEMESIS 141
endowing him ; as a lamp well lit and bright, he burned, — with .
all his faculties and with an earnestness which had made
no reservations. Distinct from the surface-glancing lustre of
platitude and social custom, he burned, shining so that all eyes
were drawn to the brightness of his light, a light of hope that
gladdened all. The effect of his preaching had been greater
than that of the law and the prophets who had prophesied
before him. For from his day the kingdom of heaven had been
energised with new forces, — a new unit of power, which, more
over, unified. We have seen both the methods and the truth
which accomplished this. Under him the slumbering instincts
of God's property-right in, and lordship over, them, had been
thoroughly aroused. These truths he had re-vitalised ; no longer
were they the dead legacy of a vanished past ; they were the
people's choicest and most vital inheritance.
But why " much more than a prophet" ? Because he was the
link of union between the two Dispensations. The deep signi
ficance of the Old he summed up in himself and carried to its
highest point of development ; he felt also the disquieting move
ments of the New. With the left hand he took hold of the
/departing, unwillingly relaxing his grasp ; with the right he
seized, though hesitatingly, the coming, Age. Yet his was the
privilege of time, and of relation to the Messiah which all the rest
yof the prophets had necessarily lacked, — the runner before His
'chariot, the clamant voice, " Prepare ye the way of the Lord."
" In his career it was given him to do two things, — to inaugurate
a new rdgime, and also to nominate a successor ,far greater than
himself." x
The more we try to study and to realise the character and
work of John, the more does his figure grow upon us. We see
the meaning of his training in the quiet priestly home, and of the
long banishment in the wilderness ; we listen to the trumpet-call
for repentance and preparation for the coming King, to his
demand for righteousness of life, to the calm, stern rebuke of
1 Ecce Homo,

142 THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
wickedness in high places ; and we feel the truth of the Master's
eulogium, — " Among them that are born of women there hath not
arisen a greater than John the Baptist." But that part of his
work which was of main importance after all was, and still is, to
point to the world's Redeemer, — " Behold the Lamb of God,
which beareth the sin of the world."
Under the approval and benediction of the Son of God John
passes from the pages of history. But not into " the infinite
azure of the past." Such a death rather - contributes momentum
to such a life than stops it, a momentum whose pulsations do not
lessen but increase their force with the lapse of years. For the
spiritual world is an inverted cone whose base is "in the
heavenlies '' and whose apex touches the earth ; the higher we
rise into it, the wider becomes the circle of the action of its
forces. The best in us is touched and vivified, coals are kindled by
such fires from Jehovah's mouth. It is impossible to extinguish
them. Jehoiakim may run his penknife through the record of
the law and cast it into the brazier on the hearth, but the law
itself is not burned, that remains. Herod may " kill the body "
of the Baptist, but the Baptist's spirit and truth and power
remain; God has taken care to add them to the spiritual treasures
of His children.
It is not the comedies, but the tragedies that are charged with
humanity's uplifting. The balance-wheel of the moral world is
compensated. But what of those by whom the offences come ?
Has the soul of justice inherent in the whole of things any
accounts to settle with them ? Are we permitted, now and again,
to see the retributive mills grinding, slowly ? Do evil deeds
" return to plague the inventor " ? Does " even-handed justice
commend the ingredients of the poisoned chalice " to the lips of
the wrong-doer ? Is Herod allowed to escape and to have no
bands in his life or death ? Let us turn to the Gospels.
One short passage in the Synoptists is a small window in an
otherwise blank wall, — blank, that is, as far as the Scriptures are

JESUS : AND NEMESIS 143
concerned. But a small window may afford an extensive view.
The fame of Jesus, of His wonderful teaching and His " mighty
works," spread in widening circles, as in the case of John before
Him, and also reached and agitated Herod. " When Herod
heard of the fame of Jesus, he said, It is John whom I beheaded :
he is risen from the dead." To what a condition of restless
conscience, ever-present foreboding, are these few words the
index-finger ! v
To an Eastern mind his crime was the greatest of all, — he had
laid sacrilegious hands upon and destroyed one of Jehovah's
anointed, one upon whose head Jehovah's consecrating hand
had been laid, whom Jehovah's voice had commissioned. The
King's messenger he had seized and killed ! What broodings by
day ! The sense of an ever-present, silent, overhanging venge
ance ! " Upward he dares not look." Nor will " all great
Neptune's ocean wash this blood clean from his hand." The
spectre of the murdered prophet will not lie. " It haunted him,
and would give him no rest. When Christ's fame arose," says
Irving, " he sought to see Him that he might be satisfied it was
not the Baptist. Such way had this servant of God made upon
this arch-servant of the devil, that he had not only sway in life,
but in death domineered over him. From his ashes he spoke to
the tyrant His blood spoke loud from the inmost dungeon of
the palace into the ears of the prince ; it planted thorns in his
unholy couch ; it slew his enjoyment with his mistress, and
rankled like poison in his breast."
And what startings and tossings on his unholy couch in the
dark, dead night !
" The affliction of those terrible dreams
. . . shake him nightly."
That one should rise from the dead presented no difficulty to
the minds of Herod's contemporaries, except the Sadducees. And
Herod was a Sadducee. But, as Wesley finely says, "Sad-
duceeism staggers when conscience wakes." And he had enough

144 THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
of that which doth make cowards of us all to split off the veneer
of a cultured scepticism and show the grain of the real soul
below. External trouble also menaced him. Aretas would not brook
the insult to his daughter. " So Aretas made this the first
occasion of his enmity between him and Herod, who had also
some quarrel with him about limits of their country of Gamalitis.
So they raised armies on both sides and prepared for war, and
sent their generals to fight instead of themselves ; and when
they had joined battle, all Herod's army was destroyed by the
treachery of some fugitives . . . Now some of the Jews thought
that the destruction of Herod's army came from God, and that
very justly, as a punishment of what he did against John who was
called the Baptist." 1
But Herod owed his final fall to his wife.
" The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
Make instruments to plague us."
Her " vaulting ambition overleaped itself, and fell on the other
side." Higher dignity still than that for which she left her
"former" husband, tempted her. Closely related to ambition
is envy, which cannot bear to see another prosper. Herod had a
brother, Agrippa, who before-time had been a poor man, even to
living on Herod's bounty, but whom Caius had raised to be
"king of Philip's tetrarchy, who was now dead." Herodias
reproached her husband for being contented with his position,
instead of aspiring to at least as great a dignity as his brother.
At length he yielded to her expostulation, and, accompanied by
her, set out for Rome, to make his request of the emperor.
Agrippa, on learning their intentions and preparations, sent
" presents to the emperor, and letters against Herod," in which
he accused him of having been confederate with Sejanus, and
of being now confederate with Artabanus, king of Parthia, in
opposition to the government of Caius ; " as a demonstration of
1 Anliq. xviii. 5.

JESUS : AND NEMESIS 145
which he alleged that he had armour sufficient for seventy
thousand men in his armoury. Caius was moved at this informa
tion, and asked Herod, when he arrived, whether what was said
about the armour was true ; and when he confessed that there
was such armour there, for he could not deny the same, the truth
of it being too notorious, Caius took that to be a sufficient proof
of the accusation, that he intended to revolt. So he took from
him his tetrarchy, and gave it by way of addition to Agrippa's
kingdom ; he also gave Herod's money to Agrippa, and by
way of punishment, awarded him a perpetual banishment, and
appointed Lyons, a city of Gaul, to be his place of habitation." x
As for Herodias, we are glad to find the relieving trait of
faithfulness in the fall she had brought upon her husband.
Between this Lady Macbeth of the New Testament and that of
the great dramatist there is a very close analogy. It is con
summate art which relieves the lurid and deepening gloom of the
latter tragedy by the touch of free, sweet, innocent, and loving
external nature. Macbeth's castle, though it has deep plot and
dark passion within, has yet " a pleasant seat " and " nimble air,"
which tempt "the temple-haunting martlet " to " make his pendent
bed and procreant cradle " upon its " coigns of vantage." " Where
these most breed and haunt, the air is delicate."
Then the terrible plot takes hold again. But we find the
parallel to this relief, in the human character that is rapidly
descending to Avernus. Unsexed Lady Macbeth is, and filled
from the crown to the toe full of direst cruelty ; every just and
tender instinct is repressed by a fierce and fiery hand ; yet she
cannot quite stop up " the access and passage to remorse," there
are still " compunctious visitings of nature." Even in the very
hour of Duncan's murder, heaven — the heaven of her childhood,
of her quiet home, and innocent life, and peaceful surroundings
— " peeped through the blanket of the dark," and held her hand.
"Had he not resembled
My father as he slept, I had done't."
1 Antiq. xviii. 7.

146 THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
In like manner we find a mitigating trait in Herod's wife. Bad
enough, unscrupulous enough she was, as we have seen. But
" when Caius was informed," says Josephus, " that Herodias was
Agrippa's sister, he made her a present of what money was her
own, and told her it was her brother who prevented her from
being put under the same calamity with her husband." But
she made this reply : " Thou indeed, O emperor ! actest after
a magnificent manner, and as becomest thyself, in what thou
offerest me ; but the kindness which I have for my husband
hinders me from partaking of the favour of thy gift ; for it is not
just that I, who have been made a partaker in his prosperity,
should forsake him in his misfortunes. Hereupon Caius was
angry at her, and sent her with Herod into banishment."
If this act of nobleness cannot redeem her character for us, at
least let it mitigate the severity of our censure. And as our
thoughts follow her into exile, let us
" Leave her to heaven,
And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge,
To prick and sting her."
In the judgment of posterity the positions of Herod and his
victim have been reversed ; — " the name of the wicked shall rot,"
does rot ; " but the righteous shall be had in everlasting re
membrance." The final encomium of Jesus upon His great fore
runner carries us with it completely and without reserve, — " none
born of women was greater than he."
' ' Careless seems the great Avenger
Truth for ever on the scaffold, Wrong for ever on the throne :
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above His
own."

NOTE A
On St. Luke i. 5 — 11. 52
We are met on the threshold of our inquiry by a remarkable fact.
It is on Luke alone we depend for the narrative of the birth of
John, with its attendant marvellous circumstances. Matthew,
Mark, and John the Evangelist begin their notices of the
Baptist with his preaching and his baptism.
The whole beginning of Luke's Gospel is, in fact, unique and
striking. There is first the exordium (i. 1-4), strictly Greek in its
style and character, giving the reasons why he writes the Gospel.
Then follows the section (i. 5-ii. 52), which, as far as the literary
organisation of the Gospel is concerned, is sui generis, and is
purely Hebrew in its character and tone. At iii. 1, we begin on
the Greek level again, so to speak, and so continue. If we were
to run on from i. 5 to iii. 1, we should find it quite easy and natural,
and without any sense either of literary or grammatical hiatus.
The conjunction Se would then possess its rhetorical-intro
ductory force, in place of the resumptive force it now possesses.
At first sight, then, this section (i. 6 — ii. 52) seems to have rather
an external adhesiveness to Luke's Gospel than to be in fibrous and
organic union with it. This impression is strengthened when we
enter on it. Its vitality and movement are its own. We suddenly
find ourselves standing upon another range and in another
atmosphere of thought. Both are different from the range and
atmosphere in any other part of the Gospel. We take a step,
and lo ! we are in a genuine Hebraic scene, and breathe a
genuine Hebraic air. By the simple change of proper names, we
147

148 THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
could imagine ourselves reading one of the exquisite idylls of the
Old Testament. Angels, visions, predictions, songs of praise,
miracles, are in the air about us ; divine events, that touch
and move the earth, are before our eyes. These birth stories,
and each of their accompaniments, are stamped with Hebrew
characters. So distinct and separate is this section, that the question at
once rises as to whether it is an interpolation. It is true that
Marcion (about 140 A.D.) deleted it, but then he deleted other
portions as well ; all, in fact, which did not fit in with his heretical
teaching. His deletion does not appear to possess any critical
value. Its forming an integral part of the Gospel does not seem
to have been questioned. The ancients received it as such, the
Church confirmed the view, the best MSS. possess it, and the
critics decide for including it. No other than the orthodox con
clusion as to its retention seems possible.
Then how did it come into its place here ? is the next question
that arises, the answer to which leads us a little back and wide of
the specific question to the general one of the composition of the
Gospel. In the first place, we have to correct the impressions of
our historical perspective. It is difficult for us to realise that our
written Gospels have not always held in the Christian Church
their present position of high regard and paramount authority.
Yet such is the case. The first " gospels '' were oral ; traditions,
in the pure sense of the word. " The men who were enabled to
penetrate most deeply into the mysteries of the new revelation (in
Christ), and to apprehend with the most vigorous energy the
change which it was destined to make in the world, seem to have
placed little value upon a written witness to words and acts
which still, as it were, lived among them." 1
The whole of their religious training had been averse from
writing. They already possessed, in the Scriptures of the Old
Testament, a body of revelation in written form which to them
was divine, complete, and final. Everything was to be decided
1 Westcott's Introduction to the Study of the Gospels, ch. iii.

NOTE A 149
by an appeal to it as Jehovah's law. All that was left for them to
do was interpretation. The Scriptures we now call the Old
Testament were, to the Jews of this period, a majestic structure,
designed by Jehovah Himself, and built and finished by prophet,
poet, and priest : the plan was perfect, the execution exact,
nothing needed alteration or addition. The Rabbis and scribes
were the certificated guides and interpreters, whose work was to
explain the meaning and purport of the whole ; but the idea of
expansion or alteration would have been as sacrilege.
Nor had the first preachers of the new gospel any idea of
adding to the sacred books. Their simple aim was to show that
Jesus was Messiah, and to support and establish it by an appeal
to those writings which all held sacred and authoritative. This
—Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah — was their only gospel, and
the only chance of its acceptance with their countrymen was its
agreement with their Scriptures. To them they uniformly and
finally appealed. Let the recorded speeches and discourses of
the apostles be read, and this position will at once be proved and
illustrated. Theirs was a "ministry of the word." It did not
need to be committed to writing, not only because tradition was
strongly against writing (" Commit nothing to writing " was one
of the rabbinical maxims), but also because all they had to do
was to show that the facts of Jesus of Nazareth's life, works,
death, and resurrection were all foreshadowed in the Messianic
prophecies, and that, conversely, His life satisfactorily fitted them
all. There was the end.
Further, the apostolic Church was instinct with the vitalising
idea of the speedy return of Jesus. "The Lord is at hand" is a
constantly recurring, warning note. And as He would soon be
here again to "usher in the new time of the 'age to come,' the
claims of the present possessed an urgency which threw the idea
of a literary provision for the future into the shade. Who would
record the apostolic recollections for the sake of a posterity that
would never see the light? And who would devote to such
unprofitable labour the hours and the strength which might yet

150 THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
avail to rescue some lost souls from the doom that must other
wise overtake them ? " x
It is not difficult to conceive the causes which must, in the
nature of things, have necessitated the composition of the
Gospels. The lives of the first preachers of the new gospel were
those of itinerating Evangelists. In their eager endeavour to go
through the cities of Judah before the Son of Man came, and to
reach as far as might be the outlying world prior to that final
event, their stay in each place in which they preached was
necessarily brief, determined by the success of the work, or the
importance of the place, or both. It was almost impossible that
the few converts to the new faith, mainly of the poorer classes,
could absorb and memorise, verbatim et literatim, the oral gospel
they had heard and believed. And as the preacher on his part,
when about to pass on, would naturally want to leave some more
permanent memorial than his spoken words for the establishment
and edification of his converts, so would they on theirs desire
" some solid ground to rest upon."
A further strong need for written records is found in the
variable nature of tradition itself. Its inevitable tendency is to
expand, to receive new interpretations and new additions. So
wide is human speech, so different the mental idiosyncrasy oi
each narrator from every other, that, if the elementary statement
may be pardoned, it is impossible, while tradition is so fluid, to
make it rigid and exact. For the sake, then, of the substance
itself of the faith once delivered to the saints, it would become
ultimately necessary to reduce it to writing. Even then the
records will, must, bear evidences of those variations it received
before it was put into permanent form.
Another reason is found in the extension of the privileges of
the gospel to the Gentiles. On accepting it, these were intro
duced to an altogether new world of ideas. The Old Testa
ment Scriptures were to them an unknown land. The truths and
hopes which had sustained the Jewish body politic through good
1 Carpenter's The First Three Gospels, 2nd ed., p. 63.

NOTE A 151
and evil report, through success and reversal, was a new aliment
to the Gentile convert. It was not indigenous to their soil. For
their instruction as well as edification, the written record must
have soon become essential.
By no means the least of these reasons was the delay in " the
coming of the Lord." There is no question, as indicated above,
that throughout the entire Christian Church in the apostolic age,
the expectation of the return of Christ in the clouds of heaven
was supreme. But all things " continued as they were from the
beginning." Members and officials, — the "eye-witnesses," be
came old and began to die off. The " reaper whose name is D eath "
cut down some of the apostolic twelve. Therefore a strong need
arose for the conservation of the gospel traditions, so that they
might be handed on intact to another generation.
Thus, from the itinerating habits of the first ministers, the
difficulty of maintaining the gospel message in its purity, the
necessities of the Gentile Churches, and the invasion of death
during the delay of Christ's coming, it became imperative that the
gospel-content should be reduced to the permanence of writing.
Notes and memoranda of the facts, incidents, and miracles of
Christ's life, of His sayings and discourses, would naturally be
made, and left with the infant Churches for their edification when
they came together for fellowship.
" It is certain from the testimony of St. Luke that various
narratives of the whole or of parts of the apostolic tradition were
current." That these were, as Dr. Westcott says, "unauthoritat
ive or partial documents " may be granted, but, as he also says,
" at the same time they may have exercised a considerable influence
upon the mass of Christians, preserving among them the general
form and substance of tradition." 1 Again, to quote the same
authority, " parts of the tradition may have been committed to
writing from time to time ; many, as St. Luke says, may have
attempted to arrange the whole in a continuous narrative, but
still it remained essentially a tradition in the first age, and as
1 Introd. pp. 205, 206.

152 THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
such found its authoritative expression in our Gospels." Meyer
holds the belief that these partial narratives may have existed in
great numbers.1 Dr. Ewald holds that "reminiscences of the
teaching of individual men, and documents of a partial nature
which were not originally designed to be regarded as anything
else than partial, were the chief sources at the command of the
first three Evangelists." z
It is now generally conceded that both the first and the third
Evangelist made use of the Gospel of St. Mark. The evidence
for this is extensive and readily accessible. But many scholars
hold the view that, in addition to this common source, they had
another document, — the " Logia." And the question is whether
they derived their additional matter from this, or from the
scattered and fragmentary accounts of which mention has been
made. For reasons which need hardly here be discussed (are
they not written by Dr. Stanton?), it seems probable that the
belief in the influence of the " Logia," supposing it to exist, will
have to undergo considerable modification. " We may say that
the theory that both St. Matthew and St. Luke used the ' Logia'
is open to many grave objections, and that it seems at all events
impossible to suppose that they both used it to anything like the
extent ordinarily assumed."
Finding myself in such agreement with Dr. Stanton on the
composition of St. Luke's Gospel, I may perhaps give the sum
mary of the case in his words. " There is, as I have said, strong
reason to believe that St. Luke made use of the Gospel according
to St. Mark. The latter probably wrote soon after St. Peter's
death, say about A.D. 65 ; St. Luke's work may be placed soon
after A.D. 70. He felt that he possessed much additional in
formation which deserved to be recorded, and which, no less
than his predecessor's narrative, was derived from ' eye-witnesses
of the word.' A considerable portion of this additional matter is
peculiar to St. Luke's Gospel, and there can be absolutely no
1 Commentary on Luke, p. 261.
2 As summarised by Dr. Stanton, Expositor, February 1893.

NOTE B 153
reason to suppose that it is not the fruit of his own collection of
material. The third Gospel contains, however, a certain number
of passages which are almost word for word the same as passages
in the first Gospel, while for the most part the context and
setting in these very instances are quite dissimilar in the two
Gospels. The most natural account in these cases seems to be
that there must ultimately here be documentary links between
the two, but that the written accounts in question passed into the
two Gospels by different courses. They had been obtained by St.
Luke in a fragmentary form independently, and without the know
ledge of the manner in which they were arranged by St. Matthew."
Returning now to the section under consideration (Luke i. 6-
ii. 52), I believe that, from its special and singular character, we
have here one of those partial and fragmentary narratives which
St. Luke found in documentary form, and which he adopted in
the compilation of his Gospel. Possibly, probably, he " worked
over" it, and made it his own. For the religion of this literary
man, the companion of St. Paul, was hampered by no modern
doubts respecting miracles or supernatural occurrences and
appearances ; while its Hebrew form and setting, instead of
raising any suspicion as to its authenticity, would be to him a
further evidence of it.
To enter upon the section itself in detail would lead us wide of
our purpose, and would, moreover, raise the whole question of
the supernatural, for which volumes rather than a note would be
required. Great names could be put on parade on both sides.
But even if we adhered to the sceptical regiment, we should hold
the interpretation of its first fact as given in the first chapter of
this work, that Zacharias and Elisabeth were " advanced in their
days," that is, as to the hope of offspring.

NOTE B. "Son of God."

Though the conclusion has been arrived at that to the Baptist
the phrase " Son of God " had a purely Messianic meaning, yet it

154 THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
would be unsatisfactory to leave the whole of this important sub
ject there, seeing that the future held for it such a remarkable
development. It is desirable briefly to indicate its doctrinal
expansion, at least to the limits of the New Testament.
It is very evident that there is a great difference between the
Christology of John the Baptist and John the Evangelist, and
between that of the Baptist and that of St. Paul. St. John's
Gospel was written to apply to Jesus the higher elements, indeed
the highest, of the Messianic concept, and to interpret His
discourses, His acts and controversies, from this high standpoint.
It is granted, on all hands perhaps, that, rightly or wrongly, this
Gospel contains statements about Jesus and reported statements
from Jesus which imply, not only the ordinary ideas of the
Messiah which, as we have seen, are current in the Synoptists,
but a high metaphysical relationship with God which involves, if
not actual paternity, a specially close spiritual community of
being. With this high note the Gospel itself opens : " In the beginning
was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was
God," etc. This is very different from the material and human
opening of the former Gospels. But it is well known that, long
anterior to the time of Christ, the wisdom of God had been
strongly personified in the Hebrew writings. Consider the
striking passage, Prov. viii., which is all concerned with the
personification of wisdom, a personification which (vers. 22-31) is
stated to have been pre-existent to all creation —
"The Lord possessed me in the beginning of His way,
Before His works of old.
I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning,
Or ever the earth was.
When there were no depths, I was brought forth,
When there were no fountains abounding with water.
Before the mountains were settled,
Before the hills was I brought forth, etc.
In the whole of this magnificent passage, wisdom is personified

NOTE B 155
as present with God in every step and act of creation, and as
taking a delight in all.
Now, is it not almost inevitable that from conceptions like
these there should be developed, or through them there should be
revealed, the doctrine of a being at once distinct from, and yet
one with God ? Certain it is that John's Gospel recognises and
teaches this, unless we are to understand all through that he
describes simply an idealistic relationship of Jesus to the Father.
" He was in the world, and the world was made by Him, and the
world knew Him not." "The Word became flesh, and dwelt
among us." " No man hath seen God at any time ; the only
begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, He hath
declared Him" (ch. i.). According to this Gospel, also, Jesus
Himself claims this pre-existence. In His conversation with
Nicodemus, Jesus says, " No man hath ascended into heaven, but
He that descended out of heaven, even the Son of man." " God
sent His Son into the world" "that the world should be saved
through Him" (ch. iii.). When Jesus claimed to work miracles
by the power of " My Father," "the Jews sought the more to kill
Him, because He not only brake the Sabbath, but also called
God His own Father, making Himself equal with God" (ch. v.).
This high strain runs through the discourse which follows, in the
same chapter. He is "the true bread which came down out of
heaven." And when this statement mystified, not only the Jews,
but His own disciples, He said to the latter, " What then if ye
should behold the Son of man ascending where He was before ?"
(ch. vi.). That the Jews regarded these claims as Messianic is
seen from the next chapter, where the people say, " Is not this He
whom they seek to kill? . . . Can it be that our rulers indeed
know that this is the Christ?" Their only difficulty was that
they knew whence Jesus came, but no man knew whence the
Christ was to come, — there was no difficulty in understanding the
import of His work and claims.
In the next chapter we have Jesus' long controversy with the
Pharisees as to His relationship to the Father, in which He again

156 THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
makes the claim to " come forth " and " come from " God, and at
the end of which He states, " Before Abraham was, I am." And
through all the Gospel, never does Jesus abdicate or modify this
claim. It is maintained through His exposition of Himself as the
Good Shepherd, through the discourse in the upper room, through
His last high-priestly prayer.
There is no doubt that these claims and statements were
Messianic: the question is, were they only Messianic? did they
mean that the thought and purpose of God became an actuality —
"were made flesh" — in Jesus, and that this was the -jr^papcet
which dwelt in Him? or did they mean a distinct claim to actual
personal filiality of nature ?
Let us turn briefly to St. Paul. According to him, the Christ
was the Almighty's agent in the leading of the children of Israel
through the wilderness, and in their sustentation, for " they drank
of a spiritual rock that followed them ; and the rock was Christ"
(1 Cor. x. 4, 9). But Christ existed before the creation, was the
agent of it, in fact (see Prov. viii. before quoted). " In Him were
all things created, in the heavens and upon the earth, things
visible and things invisible, whether thrones, or dominions, or
principalities, or powers ; all things have been created through
Him, and unto Him; and He is before all things, and in Him all
things consist (hold together) " (Col. i. 16, 17; comp. Eph. iii. 9 and
Heb. i. 2). According to Col. i. 15, He is "the image of the
invisible God, the first born of all creation." (As also 2 Cor. iv. 4 ;
Phil. ii. 6.) " It was the pleasure of the Father that in Him
should all the fulness dwell " (Col. i. 19). " In Him dwelleth all
the fulness of the Godhead bodily" (Col. ii. 9).
All of these St. Paul, of course, applies to Jesus as the Christ.
Again, the question for us is — Is this high teaching simply the
more exalted part of the Messianic idea, or does St. Paul here
and all through his writings teach that Jesus partook of the
nature of God as a human son partakes of the nature of his
human father ?
Office, or nature, that is the choice. The Church has chosen

NOTE B 157
and advocated the latter view. The development of the doctrine
proceeded, until at length the title "Son of God" had come to
mean "God of God, Light of light, very God of very God,
begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father," —
i.e. the entire and complete divinity of Jesus' nature and person.
Whereon another great alternative rises, — Does this dogma
represent the completeness of this section of the " all truth " into
which the Spirit was to lead His Church? or is it that the more
exact and mathematical Western mind exalted a poetic and
spiritualised idea and phrase into the position, and gave it the
authority, of scientific literality? These high and much dis
puted though most important questions cannot be discussed
within the limits of a note.
Returning to St. John and St. Paul, however, we can see at a
glance that they have advanced very far beyond the standpoint of
John the Baptist, whose conception was, as has been stated, that
the title " Son of God " was purely Messianic. In the possession
of truth and privilege, " the least in the kingdom of heaven is,"
as Jesus said, "greater than he."

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