Digging Deeper for such a time as this: *** Part 3 of 3 *** _______________________ JOHN THE BAPTIST JOHN AND HEROD For Herod had laid hold on John, and bound him, and put him in prison for the sake of Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife. For John said unto him, It is not lawful for thee to have her.—Matt. 14:3, 4. 1. WHEN we last heard of John he was baptizing in Ænon, near to Salim. The scene has changed. The Baptist has become the prisoner of Herod Antipas. Herod has two palaces in Peræa, one at Julias, the other at Machærus. John was imprisoned at Machærus. Machærus had been built by Alexander Jannæus, but destroyed by Gabinius in the wars of Pompey. It was not only restored but greatly enlarged by Herod the Great, who surrounded it with the best defences known at that time. In fact, Herod the Great built a town along the shoulder of the hill, and surrounded it by walls fortified by towers. From this town a farther height had to be climbed, on which the castle stood, surrounded by walls and flanked by towers one hundred and sixty cubits high. Within the inclosure of the castle Herod had built a magnificent palace. A large number of cisterns, storehouses, and arsenals, containing every weapon of attack or defence, had been provided to enable the garrison to stand a prolonged siege. Josephus describes even its natural position as unassailable. 2. What was the reason of John’s imprisonment? According to the Synoptists, it was due to the spiteful hatred of Herodias because he had rebuked Herod for making her his wife in flagrant defiance of the law of Israel. Josephus, on the other hand, says that Herod put the prophet to death because he “feared lest the great influence John had over the people might put it in his power and inclination to raise a rebellion; for they seemed ready to do anything he should advise.” The two statements, however, are not irreconcilable; and certainly the evidence of Josephus, whose interests as an historian lay altogether in the political direction, is not such as to cast any suspicion on the trustworthiness of the more detailed and more intimate Gospel narrative. It may very well have been the case that, while John’s death was really due to the implacable hate of Herodias, Herod felt that this was hardly an adequate ground, or one that he would care to allege, for the execution of the Baptist, and so made political reasons his excuse. Assuredly there was nothing of the political revolutionary about John; yet his extraordinary influence over the people and the wild hopes raised among certain classes by his preaching might make it easy for Herod to present a plausible justification of his base deed by representing John as a politically dangerous person. 3. We might wonder how it could happen that a man like Herod, who notoriously lived in a glass house, so far as character went, should be willing to call in so merciless a preacher of repentance as John the Baptist was—before whose words, flung like stones, full many a glass house had crashed to the ground, leaving its tenant unsheltered before the storm. But it must be remembered that most men, when they enter the precincts of the court, are accustomed to put velvet in their mouths; and, however vehement they may have been in denouncing the sins of the lower classes, they change their tone when face to face with sinners in high places. Herod, therefore, had every reason to presume that John would obey this unwritten law; and, whilst denouncing sin in general, would refrain from anything savouring of the direct and personal. But John said to Herod, “It is not lawful for thee to have her.” “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 unworldliness to men 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.” So John was cast into prison. ¶ When staying at a country house, amongst men of great literary reputation, when the host, then but slightly known to him, made use of some Rabelaisian expression—unaware perhaps for the moment that he was entertaining a clergyman—Jowett said quite simply, “Mr. ——, I do not think myself better than you, but I feel bound to disapprove of that remark.” This attitude was maintained consistently in later life, but with differences of method, in accordance with his increasing knowledge of men and things. At a Scotch shooting lodge, somewhere in the sixties, he insisted on going down to the smoking-room with the others at a late hour, and when the conversation of the younger men took a doubtful turn, the small voice that had been silent hitherto, was suddenly heard—“There is more dirt than wit in that story, I think.” Once again, in the eighties, when at Balliol after dinner some old companion ventured on dangerous ground, he quietly said, “Shall we continue this conversation with the ladies?” and rose to go. I THE DEPUTATION TO JESUS 1. The imprisonment was a weary time, and its protraction was due to the play of opposing influences on the mind of the vacillating tyrant. In the first flush of his resentment, Antipas would have had him executed had he dared; but, knowing how greatly the multitude revered the prophet, he dreaded an insurrection should he destroy their idol. He therefore kept John under arrest, and presently a still more powerful dread took possession of him. He had repeated interviews with the prisoner, and his guilty soul quailed before that fearless man, so helpless yet so majestic. “He was much perplexed, and gladly listened to him.” It was the supreme crisis in the tetrarch’s life. His conscience was stirred, and he was disposed to obey its dictates and yield to the importunities of the Holy Spirit; but, alas, he was hampered by his evil past. Herodias held him back. For her sake he had sinned, and now that he was minded to repent, he was fast bound by the fetters which he had himself forged. She was bitter with all a bad woman’s bitterness against the Baptist for his denunciation of her infamous marriage, and clamoured for his death. Torn this way and that, the tetrarch had neither executed his prisoner nor set him at liberty, but had held him in durance all that weary time. It seems that he showed him not a little indulgence and made his captivity as easy as possible, allowing his disciples free access to their master. Imprisonment was not, indeed, in the ancient world exactly the same thing as it is among us. A prisoner frequently enjoyed a great deal of freedom, and he could generally be visited by his friends, as is indicated in the parable which says, “I was in prison, and ye came unto me.” Hence the Baptist received information of what was taking place outside, and he was able to send messages to whomsoever he desired. ¶ People were kinder in these old days, and did not throw men into the lowest dungeons of towers, as happens with us. Captives were simply guarded, in places where others could approach them. Such was the prison of Joseph in Egypt and of Paul the Apostle in Rome. Many sat with them, and conversation went on. Others stood about the doors and exchanged remarks with the prisoners. We read in Demosthenes that Æschines, when in prison, was boycotted by the remaining captives, so that no one would eat with him or light his lamp. From this we see that even prisoners had their rules of government. Briefly, then, prisons in former times were merely places of secure guardianship, as even the lawyers say: A prison should be a place of ward, and not a torture house. 2. It is very touching to remark the tenacity with which some few of John’s disciples clung to their great leader. The majority had dispersed: some to their homes, some to follow Jesus. Only a handful lingered still, not alienated by the storm of hate which had broken on their master, but drawn nearer, with the unfaltering loyalty of unchangeable affection. They could not forget what he had been to them—that he had first called them to the reality of living; that he had taught them to pray; that he had led them to the Christ: and they dare not desert him now, in the dark sad days of his imprisonment and sorrows. These heroic souls risked all the peril that might accrue to themselves from this identification with their master; they did not hesitate to come to his cell with tidings of the great outer world, and especially of what He was doing and saying whose life was so mysteriously bound up with his own. “The disciples of John told him of all these things” (Luke 7:18, R.V.). It was to two of these choice and steadfast friends that John confided the question which had long been forming within his soul, and forcing itself to the front. “And John calling unto him two of his disciples sent them to the Lord, saying, Art thou he that cometh, or look we for another?” From first to last I knew I must decrease: This in the Wilderness hath been my peace. Now in my cell He hath deserted me.… I wonder, is He Christ—can it be He? I have sent messengers to ask Him plain Is He the Christ? Before they come again I see Him on the road … I am sufficed! He is the Lamb of God, He is the Christ. I pointed others to Him and they went; I was deserted, yet in heart content: Now He deserts me, as His pleasure is— His pleasure, stricter than His promises. So bold I spoke to sinners of the axe, Who am just now a bit of smoking flax— He would but quench me if I saw Him nigh … Far off let Him abide, and I will die! 3. Doubt was in the question; and let none wonder that this man of energy and faith should doubt. The agony of doubt is often the portion of the highest faith. Job took the honest complaint of his spirit to God, and the love of God did not refuse him. So it proved with John. In his lone hour of doubt he turned to Christ, as naturally as Job in the hour of his doubt turned to God. And he did not turn in vain. Now here is a man pre-eminently fitted to stand alone—a man who at first might be deemed independent of the assistance of inward or spiritual strength. Yet this man leans on Christ. He recognizes Christ as his superior, not merely in the way in which a man might recognize another from a literary or intellectual point of view as his superior; he recognizes Christ as a very present help in trouble, as One from whose life he can derive life, as One who can solve his doubts, as One who is the bridegroom of the spirits of men. An ascendancy like this may rebuke the imagination of those who think that religion is all very well for the weak, but that the strong can stand alone. It is a mistake to suppose that the mighty men of the earth need no help from the power of faith. It is indeed true that for a while men may live without realizing their need, but there are times in which the strongest are weak. If a man is noble he feels it when temptation is upon him; if he is hopeful he feels it when failure is his portion; if he is loving he will feel it in the hour of sorrow; if he is hungering for righteousness he will feel it in the presence of sin. And if not at such times as these, yet afterwards, when the joys of life decrease, and our powers of enjoyment grow feeble; when success falls from our side; or when even our pleasure in success dies into nothingness; then, when we are face to face with the remediless weakness of humanity, we Stretch lame hands of faith, and grope And gather dust and chaff, and call To what we feel is Lord of all, And faintly trust the larger hope. Something of this sort probably passed through John’s mind in his prison at Machærus. He felt that the joy of life had vanished with his opportunity of activity, and, like so many from whose life sunlight has passed away, he found it hard to believe that the sun was shining anywhere. ¶ Nothing, to my mind, in the whole history of the Baptist is half so tragical as that. And why? Because it is the man parting from his innermost self. It is as if Shakespeare had lost his passion, as if Tennyson had lost his culture, as if Keats had lost his colouring. If this man had kept his confidence undimmed we should have looked in vain for the element of tragedy; not the dungeon, not the persecution by Herod, not the axe of the headsman, could have made the final scene other than glorious. But when a cloud fell over his innermost self, when in the flood he lost sight of the bow, when his faith wavered, when his one strong and seemingly invincible possession received damage on a rock of earth—this is the crisis of the drama, this is the tragedy of the scene! 4. Christ’s answer was one well fitted to the character and disposition and faith of John. “Go your way, and tell John what things ye have seen and heard; the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, the poor have good tidings preached to them. And blessed is he whosoever shall find none occasion of stumbling in me.” In other words, “Go and report to John that God is still actively working in the world, that the needs of humanity are not forgotten, that the sorrows of humanity are consoled. Tell John that though there may be darkness in Machærus, and deep darkness in the heart of the captive there, yet God’s sunlight of love is still shining in the world. Tell him that the faith which can live only in the sunlight is not the faith which he himself once possessed. Tell him that the joy of souls that are noble may be found in suffering. Tell him that the delay and the seeming heedlessness of Divine power is never a loveless or unwise delay. Blessed is he whose heart does not stumble because Divine love does not act as selfishness or as despair may desire; blessed is he who in darkness can trust the Divine wisdom of the Divine love. Blessed is he whosoever shall not be offended in Me.” Such a message implied the highest trust in him to whom it was sent. It was a salutary message, for it carried comfort and invigoration. It did not merely console and soothe; it was calculated to stimulate and to inspire. It was just what the Baptist needed; it spoke to his manhood and to his faith. It was like the call of the officer on the field who bids his troops stand in the hour of danger. It was the message which, calling to courage and high trust, fell upon the captive’s ear as the hour of his martyrdom drew nigh. He was to suffer as well as to serve; and his faith at the last is sustained by the message which assured him that God’s love was not dead, and that patience as well as courage was needed in the discipline and education of faith. “Blessed is he who is not offended in me.” ¶ Christianity not only lives, but it grows and holds the field. It lives, despite all the mistakes of its theology, notwithstanding all the persevering efforts of the Church to misrepresent and to falsify it. What is the meaning of all this? There seems only one explanation. Christianity came not as a theory but as a life—a new kind of life. And its fortune has been like that of a savage who is indeed alive, but whose explanation of his life, of his body and his soul, is the most grotesque misrepresentation of the reality. When he gets some anatomy and physiology he will find some better though still inadequate theories. Christianity has persisted because men, apart from their crude thinking about it, have felt the thrill of its life. It has persisted because age after age it has offered to the soul its hidden manna; has ministered as nothing else has done to its moral and spiritual hunger. Have we not here another illustration of our doctrine of loose ends? Are not the evidences left in this condition in order that we each may find our own evidences, may become men of faith by taking all the risks of it, the risk-taking being part of our spiritual education? Coleridge in his Aids to Reflection, has put it all in a nutshell: “Evidences of Christianity? I am weary of the word. Make a man feel the want of it, and you may safely trust to its own evidences!” 5. John had often borne testimony to Jesus, and Jesus now bears glad witness to his great worth and work. In society men are commonly praised to their face, or the faces of their friends, and blamed behind their backs. Jesus does the opposite in the case of John. Gossip waits only till the door is shut behind a visitor before canvassing every defect in his appearance and ripping up the seams of his character. Jesus probably knew that the bystanders were charging the Baptist with vacillation and cowardice. His faith, once so assured, was shaken; adversity had broken his spirit. In the minds of the people, now that the messengers of John are gone, Jesus will not seem to be using words of fulsome flattery. It is clear that Jesus was not willing for the inquiry of John and his reply to have the effect on the crowd of depreciating John. Jesus was not willing for the people to draw injurious inferences from what had just occurred, so He began at once, as the messengers departed, His defence of John. The opening words—“What went ye out into the wilderness for to see? A reed shaken with the wind? But what went ye out for to see? A man clothed in soft raiment? Behold, they which are gorgeously apparelled, and live delicately, are in kings’ courts”—appear intended to protect John from the unfavourable impressions which may have been made by his own message. The question, “Art thou he that should come, or look we for another?” might have suggested in John a certain fickleness, when contrasted with the emphasis of his earlier testimony; and it suggested an impatience which might be attributed to dissatisfaction with the hardships which he was enduring. Was John, then, a changeable mortal, sighing for release and comfort? From such a caricature Jesus lifted the minds of the listeners to the image of the real John, as he appeared in the days of his prime. ¶ How little can we realize what a tremendous force is wielded by the concentrated will of a man wholly convinced of the Supreme Reality before whom he stands, and bending all his deepest faculties in a mighty longing for an object “inwrought” within his soul by the Spirit of God! A force as real as that which bears the electric message through the ether, and far more wonderful, is in the hands of God to direct at His will. Is it strange that it should prevail? Describing the pre-eminent greatness of John the Baptist, our Lord singled out the fact that he first taught men to “force on” the Kingdom of heaven (Matt. 11:12). He and those who entered into his teaching were not minded to wait passively for a heavenly inheritance that might or might not come after long ages: like bandits they would “take it by force.” The original form and meaning of this saying cannot be recovered with certainty, but the paraphrase I have given seems to present the most probable view of it. II THE DEATH OF JOHN The final scene presented in the narrative of John is the one preceding and immediately connected with his martyrdom. 1. Herod Antipas, to whom, on the death of Herod the Great, had fallen the tetrarchy of Galilee, was about as weak and miserable a prince as ever disgraced the throne of an afflicted country. Cruel, crafty, and voluptuous like his father, he was, unlike him, weak in war and vacillating in peace. In him, as in so many characters which stand conspicuous on the stage of history, infidelity and superstition went hand in hand. But the terrors of a guilty conscience did not save him from the criminal extravagances of a violent will. He was a man in whom were mingled the worst features of the Roman, the Oriental, and the Greek. Yet even this man heard John gladly, and did many things because of him. Even Herod was not all bad. Deep down, under all the hard crust of evil that had covered over his life, there was something that could yet be touched. His eye could be made to see fair visions of a life unlike his own, visions which he would long to clutch and keep. He was able to wish his past undone. Moods of tenderness, for long unwonted, returned. There were moments when he felt broken. He longed to escape the entanglements which bad men and worse women had woven around him. Such moods were perhaps temporary; he forgot them, and became again what he had been before. Such moods we all have at times; and we often wonder what their meaning may be, what worth they have in God’s sight, what possibilities may be in them for ourselves. But “our pleasant vices,” it has been well said, are made “instruments to plague us.” From the moment that he carried away his brother’s wife there began for Herod Antipas a series of annoyances and misfortunes which culminated only in his death, years afterwards, in discrowned royalty and unpitied exile. 2. The Baptist had no cause to apprehend immediate danger from Herod; but behind the tetrarch there stood another figure, whose attitude was ominous. This was Herodias. What Jezebel was to Elijah in the Old Testament, Herodias was to the Elijah of the New Testament. She was worse. Elijah escaped from the deadly hate of Jezebel, and, as he had prophesied, her bones were devoured by the dogs of Jezreel; but John did not escape the vengeance of his enemy. ¶ It has often been said that women are like the figs of Jeremiah: when good, they are very good, but when bad they are very bad. For men at most differ as heaven and earth, But women, worst and best, as heaven and hell. 3. Herodias had very good reasons for hating John; for if Herod put her away as John advised, where was she to go? For her the enjoyment and glory of life were over for ever. A woman’s hatred is different from a man’s. It sees its purpose straight before it, and no scruple is allowed to stand in its way. Herod, bad man as he was, feared John and reverenced him. Not so Herodias; for her there was no halo round the prophet’s head. Either he must die or she be banished from the sunshine, a disgraced and ruined woman; and she did not hesitate a moment between the alternatives. The birthday of Antipas had come round, and, to celebrate the occasion, he summoned his leading nobles and officers to a banquet in the princely castle of Machærus. In the midst of the revel an unexpected diversion was introduced by Herodias. She had, by the husband whom she had so shamelessly abandoned, a daughter named Salome, who by and by became the wife of Philip the tetrarch of Trachonitis. The young princess, a mere girl some seventeen years of age, was sent by her wicked mother into the banquet-chamber to entertain the wine-inflamed company by executing a lewd dance before their lascivious eyes. It was a shameless performance, unbefitting alike a princess and a maiden. Nevertheless it evoked rapturous applause, and the gratified host assumed an air of maudlin magnificence. He was only a humble vassal of Rome, but in popular parlance he was styled “the King,” a reminiscence of the days of Herod the Great; and his vain soul loved the title. He summoned the girl before him, and, sublimely oblivious of the fact that he durst not dispose of a single acre of his territory without the Emperor’s sanction, vowed, in a strain of Oriental munificence, to grant whatever boon she might crave, were it half of his kingdom. She went out and consulted with her mother, and that wicked woman, exulting in the success of her stratagem, bade her request the head of John the Baptist served up, like some dainty viand, on a trencher. The tetrarch was deeply distressed, and would gladly have withdrawn from his engagement; but, according to that age’s code of honour, he durst not, and sorely against his will he sent an executioner to behead the prophet in his cell. The deed was done, and the dripping head was brought on a trencher into the banquet-hall and presented to Salome. She bore the ghastly trophy to Herodias; and it is said that, not content with feasting her eyes upon it, that she-devil emulated the barbarity of Fulvia and pierced with a bodkin the once eloquent tongue which had denounced her sin. Just for the sake of them that sat with him At meat, King Herod kept his sinful oath And slew the Baptist, though his heart was loth To crown his record with a crime so grim. We live in fuller day; his light was dim: Yet oftentimes we make high heaven wroth By deeds which stay our souls’ eternal growth, To satisfy some senseless, social whim. We laugh with flippant scorn at what full well We know we should adore on bended knees; We trample our ideals ’neath our feet: And this for no great cause approved of hell, Which devils might applaud; but just to please The whims of them that sit with us at meat. 4. Wherein lay the greatness of John, and what was the work he did? His greatness lay largely perhaps in his genuineness, in the grasp of reality which he had of human life. He saw it in its simplicity and its reality. He laid an emphasis on sin and duty. He was a man who looked behind conventionalities, and stripped off coverings, and showed men as they are. But if this had been all, he would not have been the greatest of those born of women. The painter who paints reality merely, however graphic and powerful his delineation may be, fulfils only half his task. He must also teach us by showing us what should be, what might be. Nay, we look that he should be in some sense prophetic, and encourage us with visions of what will be in a better future. It is not the real, but the ideal, in art and in all things, in which power to make us better resides. And John did not merely show what men are, or what they should be; he had visions of what they were to be, of what God was about to make them. He had presentiments of a Divine day, which was about to dawn. He did not tell men their duty merely, and leave them with the impossible task of fulfilling it. He knew that power to fulfil it came from on high; and he was gifted to perceive that the power was at hand, and about to be revealed. He showed men not earthly things only, but heavenly things. He did not say “Repent,” but “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” “I baptize with water: but there standeth one among you, who will baptize with the Holy Ghost and with fire. Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world,” he said, pointing to Christ. Like Moses preparing Joshua to lead his people into a land which he himself may see only from afar; like David preparing the materials with which Solomon may build the temple which he himself had longed to build, but which is never to bear his name; like every true prophet who has the “intuitive grasp of novelty, whose mind discerns, though it may not understand, the coming of a change long before it can be known by other men,” John the Baptist, that strange figure watching and waiting in the desert for some mighty event which his heightened powers could feel in its approach, but could not see, remains the type of self-effacement, the type of a passing generation which can recognize the rise of new ideals and nobler aims, and leave them room to develop in God’s own time. It is this that makes men great, whatever they be, whether inventors or statesmen—the vision of the future, of possibilities which men cannot yet realize. And especially here lies the greatness of the preacher—in his sensibility to the nearness of something not yet manifest, to a revelation of Christ which is at hand—that, in all he is doing, he feels himself on the marge, on the outskirts, of a great manifestation of Christ, when He shall baptize with the Holy Ghost, and take away the sin of the world. And this is his message still to us. God has come nigh. The Redeemer is here. Receive Him. The Kingdom of God is among you. The door is open. Enter in, that you may see the light. “The word of God came to John in the wilderness.” This is the irony of the situation, that through this fanatic in the wilds of Judæa came an uprising of spiritual force, a shattering word of God which has run on from that day to this. Not from the throne of all the Cæsars, not from the haughty tributaries of empire, not from the priestly circle at Jerusalem, although Herod’s splendid temple was their shrine, and a great inheritance seemed to invest them with authority, but from a rude, passionate soul, touched with flame. Not all the dignities of that age could produce one authentic word of God possessing permanence and revelation; not one influence that had within it the powers of a world to come. But it was given to this man to see the heavens opened, and the Spirit descending like a dove upon the Son of Man. That was the supreme event, at that historical juncture, as the spiritual event must always be, even in the most dazzling periods of secular splendour. You may conclude that you have failed to analyze any great movement that means progress or enlightenment until you can lay your finger here and there and say, “There came the spirit and the word of God.” ¶ John the Baptist, that strange figure watching and waiting in the desert for some mighty event which his heightened powers could feel in its approach but could not see, is the real link between two levels of humanity. Freed by his ascetic life from the fetters of the obvious, his intuitive faculties nourished by the splendid dreams of Hebrew prophecy, and by a life at once wild and holy, which kept him closer than other men to the natural and the supernatural worlds, he felt the new movement, the new direction of life. Though its meaning might be hidden, its actuality was undeniable. Something was coming. This conviction flooded his consciousness, “inspired” him; became the dominant fact of his existence. “A message from God came upon John,” speaking without utterance in the deeps of his soul. He was driven to proclaim it as best he could; naturally under the traditional and deeply significant images of the Jewish Scriptures and apocalyptic books. Hence he was really its Forerunner, the preparer of the Way.… If he is to be taken as a true harbinger, as an earnest of the quality of the Christian life; then, how romantic, how sacramental—above all, how predominantly ascetic—that life must seem! Nothing here forecasts the platitudinous ethics of modern theology. Deliberate choice, deep-seated change, stern detachment, a humble preparation for the great re-making of things: no comfortable compromise, or agreeable trust in a vicarious salvation. As a matter of fact, in the lives of that small handful in whom the peculiar Christian consciousness has been developed, the demands of John the Baptist were always fulfilled before the results promised by Jesus were experienced. Asceticism was the gateway to mysticism; and the secret of the Kingdom was only understood by those who had (in the literal meaning of the Greek of Matt. 3:2) “changed their minds.” Thine, Baptist, was the cry, In ages long gone by, Heard in clear accents by the Prophet’s ear; As if ‘twere thine to wait, And with imperial state Herald some Eastern monarch’s proud career; Who thus might march his host in full array, And speed through trackless wilds his unresisted way. But other task hadst thou Than lofty hills to bow, Make straight the crooked, the rough places plain: Thine was the harder part To smooth the human heart, The wilderness where sin had fixed his reign; To make deceit his mazy wiles forego, Bring down high vaulting pride, and lay ambition low. Such, Baptist, was thy care, That no objection there Might check the progress of the King of kings; But that a clear highway, Might welcome the array, Of Heavenly graces which His Presence brings; And where Repentance had prepared the road, There Faith might enter in, and Love to man and God. Hastings, J. (Ed.). (1915). In The Greater Men and Women of the Bible: Mary–Simon. Edinburg: T&T Clark. - via Logos 5 #diggingdeeperforsuchatimeasthis #christjesus #vineofchristministries #theword #studyscripture #god #biblestudy #bible #jesus #faith
Posted on: Mon, 27 Jan 2014 00:49:55 +0000
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