ing forward anxiously to "the last days" of their economy, for the "last of the ages," the age of the Messiah. There was nothing unfamiliar to them in the idea of "a new covenant. The Gentile nations, weary of their impotent efforts to save themselves, and more or less informed of the sublime prophecies of the Jewish Scriptures, were also ready to hail the promised Saviour. All governments had failed. Roman imperialism had in it, at this time, the seeds of its own destruction. All religions had failed. The intelligent secretly rejected the gods they professed to worship; acknowledged superstitions were merely utilized to hold the ignorant multitudes in subjection. The moral condition of the world was appalling. A race in despair was ready, as never before, to listen to a Divine Leader. The time had come for "the messenger of the covenant" to make his appearance among men.

We come, then, to this book of the New Covenant for the clearest and fullest revelations of grace and truth yet made known to man.

THE MORNING STAR.

John the Baptist was the Morning Star that heralded the approaching Sun of Righteousness. For more than four hundred years there had been a famine of the word of the Lord-an awful silence, not once broken by the voice of inspiration. Heathen oracles had grown dumb, and the Gentile world was abandoned to indifference or despair; the Jewish prophets also had ceased, and the Jewish people, subjugated and oppressed by foreigners, and with nothing better than Pharisaic formalism and hypocrisy, or Sadducean materialism to comfort their hearts, were sitting in the valley and shadow of death. As Canon Farrar says:

It was an age of transition, of uncertainty, of doubt. In the growth of general corruption, in the wreck of sacred institutions, in those clouds which were gathering more and more darkly on the politi cal horizon, it must have seemed to many a pious Jew as if the fountains of the great deep were again being broken up. Already the scepter had departed from his race, already its high priesthood was contemptuously tampered with by Idumæan tetrarchs or Roman procurators; already the chief influence over his degraded Sanhedrim was in the hands of supple Herodians or wily Sadducees. It seemed as if nothing were left for his consolation but an increased fidelity to Mosaic institutions, and a deepening intensity of Messianic hopes. There was a general expectation of that "wrath to come " which was to be the birth-throe of the coming kingdom-the darkness the deepest before dawn. The world had grown old, and the dotage of its paganism was marked by hideous excesses. Atheism in belief was followed, as among nations it has always been, by degradation of morals. In

iquity seemed to have run its course to the very farthest goal.

Phil

osophy had abrogated its boasted functions except for the favored few. Crime was universal, and there was no known remedy for the horror Remorse itself and ruin which it was causing in a thousand hearts. seemed to be exhausted, so that men were "past feeling." There was a callosity of heart, a petrifying of the moral sense, which even those who suffered from it felt to be abnormal and portentous. Even the heathen felt that "the fullness of time" had come (Life of Christ, pp. 103, 104).

"Man's extremity is God's opportunity." It was now God's time to work. Driven by the failure of all their experiments in religion and government to lift their eyes to heaven for a relief which earth and time had never yielded to their search, the dumb despair of wretched humanity was answered by the light of the morning star-the harbinger of a glorious day.

John was God's elect man for this high mission, sanctified from the womb for the great work (Luke i. 15). Sprung from a long line of priestly ancestors, and born of parents who were not only inheritors of priestly dignity, but personally righteous before God (Luke i. 6), and consecrated from childhood to the abstemious life of a Nazarite, there can be no doubt that his godly parents, aware of the peculiar work to which he was predestined, would be at special pains to educate him for his special life-work. How long he remained at home before his retirement into the wilderness, and what intercourse, if any, he had with his parents after that retirement, we can only conjecture. We infer from the brief statement of Luke, that he went early into the wilderness and remained in it until the time of his public manifestation to Israel, having little, if any, intercourse with the people. Although of a priestly line, he seems never to have ministered at the altar-for his mission was to turn the people away

from a burdensome ritual which had served its purpose, and which had become hollow and meaningless, and grossly corrupted by the commandments and traditions of men. Nor does he appear to have ever visited Jerusalem to confer with the high-priest or the doctors of the law; for in these degenerate times the high-priesthood was bought and sold, and the high functionaries in the temple and in Moses' seat were mostly hypocrites, bigots, and self-seeking, haughty, corrupt men, busying themselves with empty ceremonial trivialities and with covetous schemes of self-aggrandizement, to the neglect of justice, mercy and faith. Nor did he mingle with the people of the land, for they were "a wicked and an adulterous generation," incapable of sympathizing with him or helping him in his preparation for the revolutionary work entrusted to him. Child of nature and of grace, he was hidden away from these contaminations, and reared in a rude and dreary wilderness, subsisting on locusts and wild honey, and drinking water from the brooks, clad in a coarse garment of camel's hair, held in place by a leathern girdle-the girdle of the poor-and finding a couch under some spreading tree or in some cave among the rocks. In this awful solitude he led a life of meditation and prayer, schooling himself to self-denial, taming the fierce fires of passion that ever burn in the souls of strong men, educating himself amid the simplicities of his rude life into a hate and scorn of the shams and falsehoods and corruptions of the conventional life from which he had voluntarily expatriated himself, and in communion with Nature and Nature's God seeking fellowship with righteousness and holiness. We may well suppose that the Old Testament Scriptures were his constant study; nor

is it unlikely that the Spirit with which he was filled from infancy illuminated for him the sacred page, guided him into the knowledge necessary for a proper understanding of his own mission, and so far lifted the veil of the future as to allow him to see the path in which he was to walk.

Such an ancestry, and such an education prolonged to his thirtieth year, produced the peculiar type of man needed for the peculiar work assigned to him. He was uncorrupted and unembarrassed by any familiarity with the traditional trivialities and corruptions which it was to be his mission to rebuke and extirpate. No family or ecclesiastical ties bound him to compromise with the deep-rooted evils which, with strong and brave heart, he was to pluck up. His perpetual contemplation of the integrities of Nature had made him the uncompromising foe of all shams and hypocrisies. His long schooling in self-denial had given him surpassing moral strength. His constant communion with God had lifted him above the fear of man, and enabled him to view human conduct from an angle of vision and in a pure light that revealed the conventional iniquities and sanctified enormities of the age in an aspect unrecognized by the multitude, and prepared him to launch thunders of rebuke against formalism, hypocrisy and pious frauds, that would make the whole land tremble -thunders of indignation that could only break from a heart thoroughly schooled in and devoted to truth and righteousness. His life having been spent away from priest, altar, and sacrifice, in that personal communion with God which only the humble and contrite heart can know, he was void of all sympathy with the pompous ritual and traditional ceremonies, the ob