on, but in hope and awe--all his family
privileges, all that seems to make life worth having; and there aloft and
in the mountains, alone with nature and with God, feeding on locusts and
wild honey and whatsoever God shall send, and clothed in skins, he, like
Elijah of old, renews not merely the habits, but the spirit and power of
Elijah, and preaches to a generation sunk in covetousness and
superstition, party spirit, and the rest of the seven devils which
brought on the fall of his native land, and which will bring on the fall
of every land on earth, preaches to them, I say--What?

The most common, let me say boldly, the most vulgar--in the good old
sense of the word--the most vulgar morality. He tells them that an awful
ruin was coming unless they repented and mended. How fearfully true his
words were, the next fifty years proved. The axe, he said, was laid to
the root of the tree; and the axe was the heathen Roman, even then master
of the land. But God, not the Roman Caesar merely, was laying the axe.
And He was a good God, who only wanted goodness, which He would preserve;
not badness, which He would destroy. Therefore men must not merely
repent and do penance, they must bring forth fruits meet for penance; do
right instead of doing wrong, lest they be found barren trees, and be cut
down, and cast into that everlasting fire of God, which, thanks be to His
Holy name, burns for ever--unquenchable by all men's politics, and
systems, and political or other economies, to destroy out of God's
Kingdom all that offendeth and whatsoever loveth and maketh a lie--
oppressors, quacks, cheats, hypocrites, and the rest.

The people--the farming class--came to him with "What shall we do?" The
young priest and nobleman, in his garment of camel's hair, has nothing
but plain morality for them. "He that hath two coats, let him impart to
him that hath none; and he that hath meat, let him do likewise." The
publicans, the renegades, who were farming the taxes of the Roman
conquerors, and making their base profit out of their countrymen's
slavery, came to him,--"Master, what shall we do?" He does not tell them
not to be publicans. He does not tell his countrymen to rebel, though he
must have been sorely tempted to do it. All he says is, Make the bad and
base arrangement as good as you can; exact no more than that which is
appointed you. The soldiers, poor fellows, come to him. Whether they
we