nd expecting that the kingdom of God would come. The
kingdom of God is Right triumphant over Wrong, moral evil crushed,
goodness set up in its place, the true man recognised, the false man
put down and forgotten. All his life long John had panted for that;
his hope was to make men better. He tried to make the soldiers
merciful, and the publicans honest, and the Pharisees sincere. His
complaint was, Why is the world the thing it is? All his life long he
had been appealing to the invisible justice of Heaven against the
visible brute force which he saw around him. Christ had appeared, and
his hopes were straining to the utmost. "Here is the Man!" And now
behold, here is no Kingdom of Heaven at all, but one of darkness
still, oppression and cruelty triumphant, Herod putting God's prophet
in prison, and the Messiah quietly letting things take their course.
Can that be indeed Messiah? All this was exceedingly startling. And it
seems that then John began to feel the horrible doubt whether the
whole thing were not a mistake, and whether all that which he had
taken for inspiration were not, after all, only the excited hopes of
an enthusiastic temperament. Brethren, the prophet was well nigh on
the brink of failure.

But let us mark--that a man has doubts--_that_ is not the evil; all
earnest men must expect to be tried with doubts. All men who feel,
with their whole souls, the value of the truth which is at stake,
cannot be satisfied with a "perhaps." Why, when all that is true and
excellent in this world, all that is worth living for, is in that
question of questions, it is no marvel if we sometimes wish, like
Thomas, to see the prints of the nails, to know whether Christ be
indeed our Lord or not. Cold hearts are not anxious enough to doubt.
Men who love will have their misgivings at times; that is not the
evil. But the evil is, when men go on in that languid, doubting way,
content to doubt, proud of their doubts, morbidly glad to talk about
them, liking the romantic gloom of twilight, without the manliness to
say--I must and will know the truth. That did not John. Brethren, John
appealed to Christ. He did exactly what we do when we pray--and he got
his answer. Our Master said to his disciples, Go to my suffering
servant, and give him proof. Tell John the things ye see and
hear--"The blind see, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, to the poor
the Gospel is preached." There is a deep lesson wra