This, then, was the scene of the history of the years of our Lord's public life: this Palestine, with its teeming population of mingled nationalities, with its administrative divisions, its political parties, its sects and schools, the domination of Rome giving a certain unity to its political constitution, and the Jewish religion and municipal law giving a certain unity of national life.

HEN a monarch makes a royal progress, a forerunner or harbinger or courier goes before him to give notice, that everything may be duly prepared for his coming; so John the Baptist goes before the Lord Jesus, "to prepare the way of the Lord." Usually the harbinger goes on his way, no one looks at him a second time, or remembers him after he is gone; but John is a remarkable person; the functions he fulfils are important; for a little while he and his ministry occupy the foreground of the history, and claim our attentive consideration.

John is so important a person in the history of the Christ that he himself was the subject of more than one ancient prophecy; for he is the "Voice" of Isaiah proclaiming "Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God"; he is the "Messenger" who, Malachi foretold, "should prepare the way before Him";2 and the "Elijah" of the same prophet, who was to be sent before the Advent of the Lord.

1 Isaiah xl. 3.

2 Malachi iii. I.

3 Malachi iv. 5.

His birth was attended by remarkable circumstances. It was announced to Zachariah by the angel Gabriel in the Holy Place of the Temple; he was born like Isaac of a mother past the age of childbearing; his name was divinely given to him before his birth; the voice of revived prophecy declared him in his earliest days to be the prophet and forerunner promised of old time: "Thou child shall be called the Prophet of the Highest, for thou shalt go before the face of the Lord to prepare his ways."1

A single sentence contains his history from the day on which these words were spoken of him during the thirty years which passed away until the Gospel brings him upon the stage again : "The child grew, and waxed strong in spirit, and was in the desert till the day of his showing unto Israel.” If we also recall to mind that the angel had directed that the child should be brought up as a Nazarite from his birth, and had declared that he should be filled with the Holy Ghost even from his mother's womb, we shall have before us all the knowledge we possess of John's early years.

The desert mentioned was probably that which lay between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea. But we have seen that this was the very locality in which the Essenes had their head quarters, and the story of

1 Luke i. 76.

Josephus indicates that besides the large communities on the shore of the Dead Sea there were individual recluses scattered over the neighbouring desert. John would appear, to people who knew anything of him, to be one of these. And there, in the solitude and mortification, in the reading and prayer and contemplation of the ascetic life, John was trained for his office and work.

The contrast between this ascetic life of John in the desert and the life of domestic charities and homely duties which Jesus led in the home at Nazareth is very sharp and striking, and naturally attracted the attention of their contemporaries :-John with his attenuated figure and features, his prophet's mantle of rough hair cloth girded with a leather thong, his dark dishevelled Nazaritic hair flowing over his shoulders, his dark deep-set eyes, now with the mystic's dreamy inward look of habitual meditation, now flashing with the fire of prophetic inspiration; Jesus with his calm and gracious presence, his golden hair and outward-looking observant eyes, his white tunic, woven without seam, which loving hands had made, girded after the fashion of the day with a scarf of many colours, and the striped blue robe; the contrast in their mode of life, John holding aloof from men, "neither eating nor drinking"; Jesus freely mixing with his fellows, accepting invitations to marriages and to feasts.

In allusion to the objections which people made then, as they do now, some objecting to John's asceticism and some to the absence of it in Jesus, the Lord replied "Wisdom is justified of all her children." Probably the stern, self-denying, unworldly ascetic is the most efficient preacher of repentance, and renewed religious earnestness, to a religious world like that to which the Baptist had to preach, formal and proud, wealthy, worldly, and self-indulgent. While it was of the essence of Christ's example to show the pattern of a holy life, not in an exceptional mode of life, but in a life led under the ordinary conditions; thus hallowing the common human life and showing all men how they may hallow their own lives after the pattern of His.

At length, at the age of thirty years,1 "the word of the Lord came to John in the wilderness," that is the prophetic inspiration came upon him, and he came forth into the fertile populous Jordan valley, and began to preach REPENT, FOR THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN IS AT HAND.

His remarkable appearance, like "one of the old prophets risen again," naturally attracted the attention of the people; his declaration "the kingdom of

1 It was the age at which the law (or custom) allowed the sons of Aaron to enter upon their priestly functions.