some surprise. "Ye offspring of vipers, who warned you to flee from
the wrath to come?" The strong epithet he used of them suggests that
they came as critics, because they were unwilling to surrender the
leadership of the religious life of Israel, and were anxious to keep in
touch with the new movement, until they could sap its vitality, or
divert its force into the channels of their own influence.

But it is quite likely that in many cases there were deeper reasons.
_The Pharisees_ were the ritualists and formalists of their day, who
would wrangle about the breadth of a phylactery, and decide to an inch
how far a man might walk on the Sabbath day; but the mere externals of
religion will never permanently satisfy the soul made in the likeness
of God. Ultimately it will turn from them with a great nausea and an
insatiable desire for the living God. As for _the Sadducees_, they
were the materialists of their time. The reaction of superstition, it
has been said, is to infidelity; and the reaction from Pharisaism was
to Sadduceeism. Disgusted and outraged by the trifling of the
literalists of Scripture interpretation, the Sadducee denied that there
was an eternal world and a spiritual state, and asserted that "there is
no resurrection, neither angel, nor spirit." But mere negation can
never satisfy. The heart still moans out its sorrow under the darkness
of agnosticism, as the ocean sighing under a starless midnight.
Nature's instincts are more cogent than reason. It was hardly to be
wondered at, then, that these two great classes were largely
represented in the crowds that gathered on the banks of the Jordan.

II. LET US BRIEFLY ENUMERATE THE MAIN BURDEN OF THE BAPTIST'S
PREACHING.--(1) "_The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand_." To a Jew that
phrase meant the re-establishment of the Theocracy, and a return to
those great days in the history of his people when God Himself was
Lawgiver and King. Had not Daniel predicted that in the days of the
last of the great empires, prefigured in Nebuchadnezzar's dream, the
God of heaven would set up a kingdom which should never be
destroyed--which should break in pieces all other kingdoms and stand
for ever? Had he not foreseen a time when One like unto a son of man
should come to the Ancient of Days to receive a dominion which should
not pass away, and a kingdom which should not be destroyed? Had he not
foretold that the greatness of the kingdoms under the whole heaven
sh