other?" Here is the language of painful uncertainty. We shall
not marvel at this, if we look steadily at the circumstances. Let us
conceive John's feelings. The enthusiastic child of Nature, who had
roved in the desert, free as the air he breathed, is now suddenly
arrested, and his strong restless heart limited to the four walls of a
narrow dungeon. And there he lay startled. An eagle cleaving the air
with motionless wing, and in the midst of his career brought from the
black cloud by an arrow to the ground, and looking round with his
wild, large eye, stunned, and startled there; just such was the free
prophet of the wilderness, when Herod's guards had curbed his noble
flight, and left him alone in his dungeon.

Now there is apparent failure here, brethren; it is not the thing
which we should have expected. We should have expected that a man who
had lived so close to God all his life, would have no misgivings in
his last hours. But, my brethren, it is not so. It is the strange
truth that some of the highest of God's servants are tried with
darkness on the dying bed. Theory would say, when a religious man is
laid up for his last struggles, now he is alone for deep communion
with his God. Fact very often says, "No--now he is alone, as his
Master was before him, in the wilderness to be tempted of the devil."
Look at John in imagination, and you would say, "Now his rough
pilgrimage is done. He is quiet, out of the world, with the rapt
foretaste of heaven in his soul." Look at John in fact. He is
agitated, sending to Christ, not able to rest, grim doubt wrestling
with his soul, misgiving for one last black hour whether all his hope
has not been delusion.

There is one thing we remark here by the way. Doubt often comes from
inactivity. We cannot give the philosophy of it, but this is the fact,
Christians who have nothing to do but to sit thinking of themselves,
meditating, sentimentalising, are almost sure to become the prey of
dark, black misgivings. John struggling in the desert needs no proof
that Jesus is the Christ. John shut up became morbid and doubtful
immediately. Brethren all this is very marvellous. The history of a
human soul _is_ marvellous. We are mysteries, but here is the
practical lesson of it all. For sadness, for suffering, for misgiving,
there is no remedy but stirring and doing.

Now look once more at these doubts of John's. All his life long John
had been wishing a