build up, but it was given to him
to pull down all false foundations. He knew that the highest truth of
spiritual life was to be given by One that should come after. What he
had learned in the desert was contained in a few words--Reality lies
at the root of religious life. Ye must be real, said John. "Bring
forth fruits meet for repentance." Let each man do his own duty; let
the rich impart to those who are not rich; let the publican accuse no
man falsely; let the soldier be content with his wages. The coming
kingdom is not a mere piece of machinery which will make you all good
and happy without effort of your own. Change yourselves, or you will
have no kingdom at all. Personal reformation, personal reality, _that_
was John's message to the world.

It was an incomplete one; but he delivered it as his all, manfully;
and his success was signal, astonishing even to himself. Successful it
was, because it appealed to all the deepest wants of the human heart.
It told of peace to those who had been agitated by tempestuous
passion. It promised forgetfulness of past transgression to those
whose consciences smarted with self-accusing recollections. It spoke
of refuge from the wrath to come to those who had felt it a fearful
expectation to fall into the hands of an angry God. And the result of
that message, conveyed by the symbol of baptism, was that the desert
swarmed with crowds who owned the attractive spell of the power of a
new life made possible. Warriors, paupers, profligates--some admiring
the nobleness of religious life, others needing it to fill up the
empty hollow of an unsatisfied heart; the penitent, the heart-broken,
the worldly, and the disappointed, all came. And with them there came
two other classes of men, whose approach roused the Baptist to
astonishment.

The formalist, not satisfied with his formality, and the infidel,
unable to rest on his infidelity--they came too--startled, for one
hour at least, to the real significance of life, and shaken out of
unreality. The Baptist's message wrung the confession from their
souls. "Yes, our system will not do. We are not happy after all; we
are miserable. Prophet, whose solitary life, far away there in the
desert, has been making to itself a home in the mysterious and the
invisible, what hast thou got to tell us from that awful other world?
What are we to do?"

These things belong to a period of John's life anterior to the text.