carries the matter a stage further: Was
the baptism of John, he asks, from heaven, i.e. from God, or was it
of men? Does God make His message clear, does He properly
authenticate Himself? And the uneasy weighing of alternatives,
summarized by the evangelist, leads to the answer that they could
not tell whence it was; and Jesus rejoins that he has nothing to say
to them about his authority. He had taken what we might call an easy
case--where it was evident that God had spoken; and this was all
they made of it--they "could not tell." It was plain, then, either
that these men did not recognize the obvious message of God ("the
word of God came upon John," Luke 3:9,), or that, if they did
recognize it, they thought it did not matter. For the insincere and
the trivial there is no message from God, no truth of God--how
should there be?

If we pursue this line of thought, we can see how, in Jesus'
opinion, a man may be sure of God and of God's word for him. If a
man be candid with himself, if he face the common facts of life with
seriousness and in the doing of duty, perplexities vanish. Such a
man is prepared for the Great Fact, by faithfulness to the little
facts, and then God dawns on him in them. This is put directly in
the Fourth Gospel (7:17), and in parable in the Synoptists. The
leaven works, till the whole is leavened; the uneasy process is over
and the result achieved. Or, it comes more quietly still--the seed
grows while the farmer sleeps and rises, night and day; the blade
springs up and the ear forms on the blade, the seed grows in the
ear; and the end is reached and God's Kingdom is a reality. Or, the
knowledge of God comes like a lightning flash--sudden, illuminative,
decisive. "The Son reveals" God to the simple, Jesus said (Matt.
11:27). The Son of Man may be a disputable figure--"Whosoever
speaketh a word against the Son of Man, it shall be forgiven him"
(Matt. 12:32)--but there is no forgiveness in this world, or in any
possible real world where God counts at all, for the refusal of the
spirit of Truth. So he taught, and all history shows he was
right--the refusal of truth is fatal. "Jesus," wrote Matthew Arnold,
"never touches theory, but bases himself invariably upon
experience." It is to experience that Jesus goes to authenticate his
message. The real facts of life lead you to God, as the red sky, and
the south wind, teach you to foretell the weather (Matt. 16:2; Luke
12:55).

"Eyes and ears," said th