the prophets of Baal were standing
bewildered by their altar, he did not flinch from arresting the whole
crowd of them, leading them down to the valley of the Kishon brook
beneath and there slaying them, so that the waters ran crimson to the
sea. This fearlessness was also conspicuous in the Forerunner, who
dared to beard the king in his palace, asserting that he must be judged
by the same standard as the meanest of his subjects, and that it was
not lawful for him to have his brother's wife.

To each there came moments of depression. In the case of Elijah, the
glory of his victory on the brow of Carmel was succeeded by the weight
of dark soul-anguish. Did he not cast himself, within twenty-four
hours, beneath the juniper tree of the desert, and pray that he might
die, because he was no better than his fathers--a mood which God, who
pities his children and remembers that they are dust, combated, not by
expostulation, but by sending him food and sleep, knowing that it was
the result of physical and nervous overstrain? And did not John the
Baptist from his prison cell send the enquiry to Jesus, as to whether,
after all, his hopes had been too glad, his anticipations too great,
and that perhaps after all He was not the Messiah for whom the nation
was waiting?

Both Elijah and John the Baptist had the same faith in the baptism of
fire. We never can forget the scene on Carmel when Elijah proposed the
test that the God who answered by fire should be recognised as God; nor
how he erected the altar, and laid the wood, and placed the bullock
there, and drenched the altar with water; and how, in answer to his
faith, at last the fire fell. John the Baptist passed through no such
ordeal as that; but it was his steadfast faith that Christ should come
to baptize with the Holy Ghost and fire.

Each of them turned the hearts of the people back. It was as though
the whole nation were rushing towards the edge of the precipice which
overhung the bottomless pit, like a herd of frightened horses on the
prairie, and these men with their unaided hands turned them back. It
would be impossible for one man to turn back a whole army in mad
flight--he would necessarily be swept away in their rush; but this is
precisely what the expression attributes to the exertions of Elijah and
John. The one turned Israel back to cry, Jehovah, He is God; the other
turned the whole land back to repentance and righteousness, so that
publicans and soldi