PLAIN OF JEZREEL.

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nations. Pharaohs and Ptolemies, Emîrs and Arsacids, Judges and Consuls, had all contended for the mastery of that smiling tract. It had glittered with the lances of the Amalekites; it had trembled under the chariotwheels of Sesostris; it had echoed the twanging bowstrings of Sennacherib; it had been trodden by the phalanxes of Macedonia; it had clashed with the broadswords of Rome; it was destined hereafter to ring with the battle-cry of the Crusaders, and thunder with the artillery of England and of France. In that Plain of Jezreel, Europe and Asia, Judaism and Heathenism, Barbarism and Civilisation, the Old and the New Covenant, the history of the past and the hopes of the present, seemed all to meet. No scene of deeper significance for the destinies of humanity could possibly have arrested the youthful Saviour's gaze.

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CHAPTER VIII.

THE BAPTISM OF JOHN.

John than which man a sadder or a greater

Not till this day has been of woman born;

John like some iron peak by the Creator

Fired with the red glow of the rushing morn."-MYERS.

THUS then His boyhood, and youth, and early manhood had passed away in humble submission and holy silence, and Jesus was now thirty years old. That deep lesson for all classes of men in every age, which was involved in the long toil and obscurity of those thirty years, had been taught more powerfully than mere words could teach it, and the hour for His ministry and for the great work of His redemption had now arrived. He was to be the Saviour not only by example, but also by revelation, and by death.

And already there had begun to ring that Voice in the Wilderness which was stirring the inmost heart of the nation with its cry, "Repent ye, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand."

It was an age of transition, of uncertainty, of doubt. In the growth of general corruption, in the wreck of

1 On the elaborate chronological data for the commencement of the Baptist's ministry given by St. Luke (iii. 1, 2), see Excursus I., “Date of Christ's Birth."

sacred institutions, in those dense clouds which were gathering more and more darkly on the political horizon, it must have seemed to many a pious Jew as if the fountains of the great deep were again being broken up. Already the sceptre had departed from his race; already its high-priesthood was contemptuously tampered with by Idumæan tetrarchs or Roman procurators; already the chief influence over his degraded Sanhedrin was in the hands of supple Herodians or wily Sadducees. It seemed as if nothing were left for his consolation but an increased fidelity to Mosaic institutions, and a deepening intensity of Messianic hopes. At an epoch so troubled, and so restless-when old things were rapidly passing away, and the new continued unrevealed-it might almost seem excusable for a Pharisee to watch for every opportunity of revolution; and still more excusable for an Essene to embrace a life of celibacy, and retire from the society of man. There was a general expectation of that "wrath to come," which was to be the birth-throe of the coming kingdom-the darkness deepest before the dawn.1 The world had grown old, and the

1 Mal. iii. 1; iv. 2. The KKÓπtetai and Bάλλera of Matt. iii. 10 are the so-called praesens futurascens―i.e., they imply that the fiat had gone forth; that the law had already begun to work; that the doom was now in course of accomplishment. Probably the words "kingdom of heaven" (malkûth shamajîm) and "coming time" (olam ha-ba) were frequent at this time on pious lips; but the Zealots were expecting a warrior as Messiah; and the school of Shammai a legalist; and the Essenes an ascetic; and the philosophic schools some divine vision (Philo, De Execratt. ii. 435; Grätz, Gesch. d. Juden, iii. 218). It has been impossible for me here to enter into the vast literature about the Messianic conception prevalent at the time of our Lord; but it seems clear that Ewald, Hilgenfeld, Keim (as against Volkmar, &c.) are right in believing that there was at this time a fullydeveloped Messianic tradition. The decision depends mainly on the date of various Apocryphal writings-the Book of Enoch, the Fourth Book of Esdras, the Ascension of Moses, the Psalms of Solomon, the third book of the Sibylline prophecies, &c. See especially Hilgenfeld's Messias

dotage of its paganism was marked by hideous excesses. Atheism in belief was followed, as among nations it has always been, by degradation of morals. Iniquity seemed to have run its course to the very farthest goal. Philosophy had abrogated its boasted functions except for the favoured few. Crime was universal, and there was no known remedy for the horror and ruin which it was causing in a thousand hearts. Remorse itself seemed to be exhausted, so that men were "past feeling." 1 There was a callosity of heart, a petrifying of the moral sense, which even those who suffered from it felt to be abnormal and portentous.2

Even the heathen world felt that "the fulness of the time" had

come.

At such periods the impulse to an ascetic seclusion becomes very strong. Solitary communion with God amid the wildest scenes of nature seems preferable to the harassing speculations of a dispirited society. Selfdependence, and subsistence upon the very scantiest resources which can supply the merest necessities of

Judaeorum. He certainly proves that the 2nd Psalm of Solomon was written about B.C. 48.

1 πᾶν εἶδος κακίας διεξελθοῦσα ἡ φύσις ἡ ἀνθρωπίνη ἐδεῖτο θεραπείας (Theophyl.); Eph. iv. 19, άπŋλуNKÓTES. I have slightly sketched the characteristics of this age in Seekers after God, pp. 36-53; a powerful picture of its frightful enormities may be seen in Renan, L'Antechrist, or Döllinger, The Jew and the Gentile. It were better to know nothing of it, than to seek a notion of its condition in the pages of Juvenal, Martial, Suetonius, Apuleius, and Petronius. Even in the case of Dr. Döllinger's book, one cannot but feel that he might have attended to the noble rule of Tacitus, "Scelera ostendi oportet dum puniuntur, abscondi flagitia" (Tac. Germ. 12). Too much of what has been written on the abysmal degradations of a decadent Paganism resembles the Pharos lights which sometimes caused the shipwreck of those whom they were meant to save. There are some things which, as a Church Father says of the ancient pantomimes, quidem possunt honeste."

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ne accusari

2 πώρωσις τῆς καρδίας (Eph. iv. 17-19). ἀπολίθωσις (Epict. Diss. i. 53).

TENDENCY TO ASCETICISM.

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life, are more attractive than the fretting anxieties and corroding misery of a crushed and struggling poverty The wildness and silence of indifferent Nature appear at such times to offer a delightful refuge from the noise, the meanness, and the malignity of men. Banus, the Pharisee, who retired into the wilderness, and lived much as the hermits of the Thebaid lived in after years, was only one of many who were actuated by these convictions. Josephus, who for three years1 had lived with him in his mountain-caves, describes his stern selfmortifications and hardy life, his clothing of woven leaves, his food of the chance roots which he could gather from the soil, and his daily and nightly plunge in the cold water that his body might be clean and his heart pure.

But asceticism may spring from very different motives. It may result from the arrogance of the cynic who wishes to stand apart from all men; or from the disgusted satiety of the epicurean who would fain find a refuge even from himself; or from the selfish terror of the fanatic, intent only on his own salvation. Far different and far nobler was the hard simplicity and noble self-denial of the Baptist. It is by no idle fancy that the mediæval painters represent him as emaciated by a proleptic asceticism. The tendency to the life of a recluse had shown itself in the youthful Nazarite from his earliest years; but in him it resulted from the consciousness of a glorious mission-it was from the desire to fulfil a destiny inspired by burning hopes. St. John was a dweller in the wilderness, only that he

1 Joseph. Vit. 2, if the reading παρ' αὐτῷ and not παρ' αὐτοῖς be right. 2 As, for instance, in a fine picture by Sandro Botticelli in the Borghese Palace at Rome. Compare the early life of St. Benedict of Nursia.