Abraham, the outward sanctity, the elevation of spirit above the world, show themselves in a purer form than in John; and yet we hear even him avowing that he had need to come to Jesus Christ, that Christ was alone the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world. We must believe that John made real to his own consciousness the peculiar significant features of the priestly office, its function as a mediator between Jehovah and sinful men, and that by this means there must have been given a startling emphasis to his declaration that Christ was the Lamb of God. Of John it was declared that among those who were born of women there had not arisen a greater than he. There may have been, in this statement, a tacit reference to the priestly character of John, and to the pre-eminent degree in which the priestly qualities were exhibited in him; and yet it was added, by our Lord, that he that is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than John. The time for the cessation of the priestly office had come; the best of priests was to be the last. Sacrifices and offerings were to be required no more; and with them was to disappear all need of sacerdotal functions. A more spiritual kingdom was to be organized; and every man, independently of all human or angelic mediation, was to come boldly to the throne of grace, on which is seated the Shepherd and Bishop of our souls; and the man who can enter into the significance of this spiritual kingdom - a kingdom independent of meats and drinks and offerings and ritualistic services is greater than the best of those who are subject to a law of ceremonial observances. It can hardly be regarded as other than a fanciful supposition, that the severe and stern language in which John was wont to address his auditories, was due to a certain fierceness of temper characterizing the tribe of Levi. It has been ascribed, also, to a military element alleged to belong to the Jewish priesthood. One is altogether at a loss, however, to discern in the priestly character any traces of such an element. The severity of John's language may be attributed, with better reason, to the fact that his mind was engrossed to such a degree by that which is unearthly that he was thus in the habit of looking at moral evil in its true colors, divested of that deceptive show of unreal beauty with which one who is conversant with men, and busy in the eager pursuit of simply worldly purposes, comes at length to clothe it. John, so used to solitary communion with God and with spiritual objects, saw in sin only that which was evil and loathsome. He sympathized too thoroughly with the mind of Jehovah to regard it in any other aspect; and he could speak of it only in those stern tones which suited with such distinct conceptions of its odious qualities. And surely these tones of rebuke were none too stern and pungent in order to rouse to anything like a proper moral sensibility — such as was demanded by the near approach of him whose fan was in his hand a nation so spiritually degraded as were the Jews. John the Baptist was a Nazarite, as well as a priest, in spirit, if not in name and form. He was to be great in the sight of the Lord, and was to drink neither wine nor strong drink. We know how well his life tallied with this prediction. He was in the deserts; his raiment was of camel's hair; a leathern girdle was about his body; and his meat was locusts and wild honey. He acquired in this way a resemblance to the old prophets. It has been affirmed that he was literally a Nazarite, and had taken upon himself their peculiar vows. The principle on which these vows are said to have been based, — that evil is the necessary concomitant of matter and the result of contact with it, that the soul can attain to perfect purity only as it keeps the flesh in subjection and suppresses every appetite and desire whose seat is in the body, — is not exclusively an Oriental doctrine. Few doctrines have been of wider influence than this. It has been maintained not by Christians exclusively; for it is well known how thoroughly pervaded with this doctrine are Brahminism and Buddhism. It is not strange, then, that its presence should be discerned among the Jews at a very early period. At the same time, we are not at liberty to believe that the Bible at all countenances the idea of any necessary connection between matter and moral evil. Matter, in all its manifold forms, and with all its properties, whether essential or accessory, is the product of God's creative energy. The body of man, with all its appetites and susceptibilities, is the offspring of the same Divine power; and these various forms of material existence were all pronounced by the Creator to be very good. False and unscriptural, therefore, as we conceive the underlying principle of asceticism to be, yet its existence is by no means an astonishing fact. Fruitful of evil as the bodily appetites have ever been found to be in many of their manifestations, it is not wonderful that their utter subjugation, and that by the most violent means, should often have been aimed at, because regarded as the necessary condition of moral growth. The abstract principle on which asceticism rests—that the body must not be allowed to gain control over the spirit- no one, of course, can blame. The exaggerated forms which this principle has often taken, and the violent means by which it has attempted to secure its intended results, alone deserve censure. One would not, perhaps, be justified in affirming that all the manifestations of an ascetic spirit which we detect in John were exactly in accordance with the Divine mind in regard to him. He may, or may not, have been left in regard to this, to a certain extent, to the freedom of his own will. It is enough that an ascetic spirit was manifested by him. His favorite dwelling-place was in the desert. His food and apparel were of the coarsest description. In every way he mortified the flesh. As his raiment was not such, so neither were his manners such, as were found in kings' houses. Few things would be so likely to give him a strong influence over men as these peculiarities. They were among the causes which gained for him the title and the influence of one of the old prophets. It is a very obvious thought, that John's peculiar mode of life was not that in accordance with which the children of the kingdom were expected to model theirs. Jesus Christ did not so model his. There is nothing in his teachings, there is nothing in his example, to warrant the notion that a literal abandonment of the world, or the violent extinction of every natural instinct, is required of men. There are enjoyments in which the follower of Christ is justified in participating; Christ so took part in a marriage festival, and mingled in banquets with his fellow-men. He condemned no one merely for engaging in worldly pursuits. So far, indeed, as the life of John indicated a comparative contempt for that which is earthly, so far as it showed that moral good, that rigid conformity to the law of God was preferable to any worldly emolument, so far it merits universal imitation. The spirit which animated John should be cultivated, even if it fail to manifest itself in the same outward form. One of the final causes of John's asceticism may have been to illustrate in a striking and palpable, not to say exaggerated, form, the nature of that unworldly temper which all men are required to cultivate; just as it was one of the final causes of the character of Christ to show that it was not needful, in order to reach a spiritual elevation above the world, to sever one's self literally from the world. One can be in the world without being worldly, can mingle with men without being sinfully like them. The vow of the Nazarite, such as we may suppose to have been assumed by John, in spirit, if not in form, involved, as one of its most important features, a complete consecration to the special service and worship of God. This, very obviously, was the import of the vow in the case of Samuel. Even before his birth he was devoted to the life of a Nazarite; and his whole subsequent career bore witness to the correct insight into the nature of the vow which had been gained by him, and to the thorough and uncompromising earnestness with which that vow, in all its comprehensive significance, was fulfilled by him. A similar consciousness we may suppose to have actuated John. And it is not difficult to recognize the fitness of such a spirit— involving, as we have seen that it did, the complete consecration of one's self to God—to John's special function as the forerunner of Christ. It seems to have been a matter of importance that a perfect ideal, at least so far as that was practicable, of a sanctity that could be reached without a personal knowledge of the historical Christ should be held up to the view of men, so that they might see that, as in this respect as well as others, there had not risen a greater than John the Baptist, yet even the least in the kingdom of heaven was greater than he. It has been suggested that the retirement and long residence of John in the wilderness may have had, as one of its impelling motives, the wish to fulfil more completely that portion of the Nazaritic vow which forbade all contact with a dead body. The Nazarite was required to shun such contact in every conceivable instance, and with the most scrupulous care. He could not close the eyes of his dead parents, nor stand by the side of their graves. So far as he was concerned, the dead were to bury their dead. That natural affection which ordinarily prompts one to linger by the side of a dying friend, and to be eager to perform every service even to the lifeless remains, the Nazarite was required to suppress. Was it meant, in the fact that John in spirit, if not in form, took this vow, to give an outward illustration of what Christ required of his disciples-that they should hate father and mother, compared with him, and not stop, when the summons to duty was given, to bury even the parent? Did not John give in this a real, it may be outwardly an exaggerated, pattern of what every one is required to be in spirit, if not in outward form? John practised this self-renunciation, this disengagement of himself from all carthly ties, by a literal separation of himself from the world. In this point of view, no one had surpassed him. But the man who enters into the kingdom of heaven learns to practise the same virtue in a higher and nobler form. He learns how to be in contact with the world, and yet not to be polluted by it. He does not avoid the sin of excessive attachment to worldly kindred by literally forswearing that attachment, but, what is better, by restraining it within its proper bounds. It has been said that the best safeguard against temptation is distance from temptation. But this maxim is unworthy the man of a truly Christian courage. The one who actually confronts the enemy, and overcomes him, deserves more honor than he who remains unhurt by shunning the sight of his foe. It would be a rash assertion that Nazaritic asceticism has no features in view of which its adoption as a mode of life may be recommended. There have, without question, been periods in the world's history when a resort to asceticism on the part of individuals may certainly have been expedient, if not obligatory. That it was ever meant to be the common mode of life, that the religion of Christ properly understood leads to it or justifies it, that the avowed end of the honest ascetic — the strictest moral purity, the closest communion with God - cannot be gained save by means of asceticism, are assertions which the scriptures do not uphold. There never, probably, was a better illustration of the power of asceticism in the production of Christian virtue than what was given in the person of John the Baptist; and it still remains true that, while among those who were born of women there had not risen a greater than John the Baptist, he that is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than John. John, also, was a prophet. The process through which one who was called to be a prophet gained the requisite knowledge was neither the deductive and syllogistic nor the inductive method. There is a region of truth where neither of these processes can have play. The spiritual world, the infinite God by whose presence it is pervaded, the intense hopes and fears, the aspirations after holiness, and the conviction of sin, -- the spiritual world is one in It is here that the intuitional Truth is seen. The intrinsic the consciousness of a close relation to the eternal, and of a capacity for, and a yearning after, moral perfection, which truth is reached by another method. power is called especially into exercise. evidence which it ever possesses compels the assent of the mind. It is not deduced as an inference; it is not a generalization from observed facts. The conviction of its being the truth is not the result of a comparison of the intuitions of one mind with those of another. Such a comparison is scarcely possible. One man cannot always give to another such a verbal statement of his convictions as shall exactly and completely represent them, and thus render a comparison practicable. One cannot so give utterance to his emotions in view of some pre-eminently beautiful object or some singularly glorious achievement as to make it sure that the hearer shall apprehend the exact quality and intenseness of his emotions; and yet, whenever such honest utterances are made, even in an inadequate and imperfect form, they give rise to a corresponding mental condition in the susceptible hearer, such as enables him to verify their justness by the perception of their harmony with his own consciousness, and, at the same time, may have the effect, in their turn, of giving intenseness and purity to his emotions, and of widening the field of intellectual vision which he is able to traverse. If it be not true that in every mind, however constituted and however circumstanced, religious sentiments and religious knowledge exist in some degree of purity, it would still seem indisputable that in all minds there is the susceptibility of religious sentiment, that in few minds is there a perfect lack of that sentiment. There are objects around every man - the sky over his head and the earth beneath his feet, the sunshine and the storm, the processes of growth and decay everywhere going on, the inscrutable relations he sustains to others, the affections and modes of conduct felt by him to be obligatory even in spite of himself, the anticipation of recompence and the dread of retribution sure to arise in view of the discharge or the neglect of such obligations, these are sure to awaken into action the religious sentiment. They conduct the mind to religious truth. They arouse the belief in a holy Jehovah. They create, almost necessarily, the conviction of an existence beyond the grave, on the one hand, of bliss; on the other hand, of suffering, as the unavoidable result of a godly or a sinful life. The various systems of religion which have existed in the world, instead of being the result of any scientific process, would seem rather to have been the product of moral intuitions. The religious susceptibility is quickened, the action of which sooner or later gives birth to notions and doctrines that at length shape themselves into a system of religion. The product of this mental state is Brahminism and Buddhism and the Grecian and Roman mythology; and we are not wrong in believing that that action of the Holy Ghost on the mind whose result has been the system |