about One--"Of whom Moses in the
law and the prophets did write." Let us remember those words for we
shall hear them again. That One was called the Messiah--He whom we call
Jesus, the Christ, the Saviour of the world. He had not then come. _We_
look back to the time when He did come: those boys looked forward to the
time when He _would_ come. The Messiah was the great subject in the
homes of the pious Jews, and in the synagogues where old and young
worshiped on the Sabbath.

[Illustration: CHRIST AND ST. JOHN _Winterstein_ Page 34]

_CHAPTER IV_

_The Great Expectation in John's Day_

Moses wrote of a promise, made centuries before the days of John, to
Abraham--that in the Messiah all the nations of the earth,--not the Jews
only--should be made happy with special blessings. Isaiah and other
prophets wrote of the time and place and circumstances of His coming,
and of the wonders He would perform.

The Jews understood that the Messiah would descend from David. They
believed that He would sit "upon the throne of David," ruling first over
the Jews, an earthly ruler such as David had been, and then conquering
their enemies; thus being a great warrior and the king of the world.

But they were sadly mistaken in many of their ideas of the Messiah. They
had misread many of the writings of the prophets. They had given wrong
meanings to right words. They made real what was not so intended. They
overlooked prophecies about the Messiah-King being despised, rejected
and slain, though God had commanded lambs to be slain through all those
centuries to remind them of the coming Messiah's cruel death. Each of
those lambs was a "Lamb of God." Remember that phrase; we shall meet it
again. They looked for wonders of kinds of which neither Moses nor the
prophets had written. Many did not understand what was meant by the
kingdom of God in the hearts of men, as differing from the earthly
kingdom of David. They did not understand that Messiah's kingdom would
be in the hearts of all people.

With such mistaken views of the Messiah at the time of which we are
writing, the Jews had not only the great expectation of the centuries,
but the strong belief that Messiah was about to appear.

A great event had happened which made them especially anxious for His
immediate coming. The Jewish nation had been conquered by the Romans.
The "Glory of All Lands" was glorious only for what it had been. Galilee
was a Roman province which, like th