His only grief was, that men received not his testimony. What a wonderful summary of Christian doctrine and consecration he gives. What are the struggles of a patriot for his country, compared with his eager devotion to lay down his life for his Friend, and to see his own glory die in the splendor of his Master? His meridian was past, and his sun was setting, and now when the shadows of night fell upon him, his ecstasy was this: He that cometh from heaven is above all.' Beautiful Baptist! The first great New Testament theologian. For thousands of years all study amongst Jews and Gentiles had failed to unveil the doctrines which he brought to light, and all after study has failed to exhaust them. More than a prophet,' none have discoursed so grandly on his Redeemer's person, office and love: and what new doctrine has any inspired writer revealed since ?

The imprisonment and martyrdom of the Baptist must now be noticed. The faithful son of Zacharias was hated for his fidelity. Herod Antipas, the tetrarch of Galilee, was a son of Herod the Great, and had married a daughter of Aretas, King of Arabia-Petræa, who was to him a faithful wife. Antipas had a half-brother, Herod Philip, not by the same mother, who had married Herodias, the daughter of Aristobulus, still another brother. Herodias, therefore, was granddaughter to Herod the Great and niece to Antipas. But Antipas fell in love with her, persuaded her to abandon her husband, divorced his own wife, and then married her. This woman took her young daughter, Salome, Philip's child, with her; and as the adulterous queen of Antipas, came to the Galilean tetrarchy and shared with him his vice-regal palace, where she reveled in guilty splendor. When the Baptist heard of this disgusting crime it stirred his indignation, and he bluntly rebuked the incestuous paramour in terms as stern as his upbraidings of the scornful Pharisees. As God's messenger he thundered in the ears of Antipas: It is not lawful for thee to have thy brother's wife!' Luke adds that he reproved him: For all the evils which Herod did;' a long and black list of crimes. For this cause he seized John and threw him into the dismal fortress of Machaerus, the Black Castle,' east of the Dead Sea, an outrage instigated by Herodias; for she was angry with him, and fastened on him like some ferocious animal clinging to its prey. She desired, says Mark, to put him to death but could not, for Herod feared John, knowing that he was a just and holy man. The imperiousness of truth which lifted John above the fear of rank and of death, made his person so sacred, that the stony heart of the adulterer was overawed. One glance of purity made the adulterous tyrant writhe in dread fetters. John was unarmed and alone. Herod was compassed by royal guards. Yet John hurled subtile arrows from an invisible quiver, which, piercing the armor of steel, made the king's heart faint.

'It is not lawful for thee to have her,' was the metal-point which made John's barb so keen. The Jewish laws had thrown a colossal rampart around the sanctity of marriage, a holiness which the whole Herodian family had set at naught, in one way or another. In the person of Antipas, the Baptist brought that whole house

44

JOHN'S APPEAL TO THE BIBLE.

hold up to the scrutiny of the Bible standard. His terrible appeals were made to the Scriptural law. He threw the whole question back, not on public scandal or the shock of public feeling, but on the supremacy of God's word. There he planted himself firmly in the eloquence of lamentation, protest, and demand. Unwilling to fawn, unable to varnish, he put one finger on the ulcer, and with the other resting on Lev. xviii, 16, he demanded obedience to Divine authority. Whatever the enactments of men might say in the case, the Law of God was the first and last source of his appeal. The craven Sanhedrin knew as well as John that Herod was trampling the law of God under-foot and defying Jehovah's mandate, but all its members sealed their lips to the barefaced disgrace. John frowned upon the triple crime through a 'thus saith the Lord;' and his daring fidelity to Revelation, as the only rule of life, wrote his name at the head of a long roll of Baptist martyrs, who have sealed the Truth with their blood.

At length Herod's birthday dawned, that day in the calendar around which he should have summoned all the years of his life for a sweet song, that Jehovah had sent him into the world an innocent babe. But instead, its celebration wrote this dark entry on his record: 'It were better for him that he had never been born!' Well might he have prayed with Job: That day, let not God from above seek for it. Let it not rejoice among the days of the year, nor come into the number of the months, neither let it behold the eyelids of the morning!' But with his birthday came the revelry of a court festival. Instead of sackcloth and ashes for his sins, and the turning over of a new leaf with the merciful anniversary, he gathered his generals and peers around him, took upon him his most hilarious mood, gave reins to his vanity and ostentation, spread his feast and lavished his wine, drowned his fear in the fumes of the cup and the strains of music, and when his brain Legan to reel under the adulation of nobles and the wassail-bowl, then a revengeful woman turned the day of birth into the night of death.

Wild abandon, wanton voluptuousness, and hot carousal, now ruled the royal banquet, and the call was issued for the pantomimic dance. Herod winced under John's rebukes, yet could bear them. Herodias could not. Her pride would not brook them, and revenge rankled in her heart. Her crafty soul knew that the ballet dancers would be asked for when the guests were well flushed with madness, and her dainty foresight had prepared for them a special treat. Vengeance had drawn its bow to the double strain and set its fiery arrow to a true wing, its blistering eye had spied the vulnerable point in the harness and laid. its hand to launch the bolt. And, in icy hatred she sent her beautiful young daughter, the future mother of kings, to dance for the company; her rage reminding us of science freezing water in a red-hot capsule. The grace and condescension of Great Herod's granddaughter so charmed the high-bred revelers of Galilee, that the drunken king swore to give her anght she asked, to the half of his kingdom.' The courtly throng were all ear for her request. One thought that she would

THE FIRST BAPTIST MARTYR.

45

ask for gems to further adorn her handsome person, another knew that she would demand the finest estate in the realin, and a third was sure that she would covet a narriage dower worthy of a princess. Delight intoxicated her, and she rushed to her mother's chamber for instructions. The royal dancer returned with the irony of fate upon her pale lips. Guilty plot and vengeful blood-thirst threw tragedy into the feast; the delicate girl craved the head of John the Baptist on a dish! But she proved her true Herodian blood, when she betrayed haste to stain the escutcheon of her forefathers with a new blot, by the imperative behest that the boon should be delivered then and there. I will, that immediately thou give me on a plate, the head of John!' She would carry the ghastly gift to her mother in her own hands, lest the head of a slave be palmed off upon her for John's, and so, her maternal soul should shudder and faint for the shedding of innocent blood.

Was he excited or Only this we know,

The thought that John's pulse should cease to beat on the day that his own caught the throb of life from the heart of his mother, sobered the drunken sovereign and brought him to his senses. But for his oath's sake he ended the struggle in his own breast, consented to the horrible demand; the executioner was commissioned. A shrill cry made the dismal dungeon ring, and the gory head of the great preacher lay gasping in the hall of the festal carouse, silenced forever. The sacred pen has left a veil over John's last feeling, his last word, his last act. serene? Did he pray for his murderers or depart in silence? the sword left his trunk bleeding in the prison, and sent his head to the feast. The celestial dreamer would have written: I saw a chariot and a couple of horses waiting for Faithful; who, as soon as his adversaries had dispatched him, was taken up into it, and straightway was carried up through the clouds, with sound of trumpet, the nearest way to the Celestial Gate.' Whether the viper uncoiled and stung the bosom of the murderess we have no record. Tradition says, that when the head of the martyr was brought to her and its glazed eyes pierced her, she transfixed the tongue with a bodkin in revenge for its rebukes.

Her shameful deeds, and those of her husband, drove them into obscurity and exile. Not, however, is the veil of revelation entirely drawn over Herod at this point, for Mark tells us, that in beheading John he slew his own peace. When the news reached him that Jesus was working every sort of good and benevolent work amongst the people, the specter of the murdered man stalked through his conscience, and he exclaimed: John, whom I beheaded, is risen from the dead.' Go where he would, or do what he might, in slumber or revelry, the stain of the Baptist's blood would not out, and the startling eye-balls of his image haunted him; those eyes through which holy love had gleamed, and heaven's fire had shot. All that was sensitive in him had long been seared as with a hot iron, yet twinges of pain crept through the festering canker in every apparition of this heartless tragedy. This son of him who restored the Temple to beauty and strength, found the sanct

uary of his own soul in ruins, and heard every-where the echoes of a still small voice, mocking the criminal who had broken its pillars and piled up its ruins. His spirit was in mutiny with itself; it wandered in chill, and damp, and dark places, where the shriek of murder made his ears tingle at every turn. His sire had heard the shrill scream of the babes in Bethlehem, and thirsted for the blood of the redeeming Infant, when Rachel aroused from her slumbers in her sepulcher, groaned and wept, and refused to be comforted, because the unrelenting butcher soaked the turf above her in the gore of her offspring. Nor did she resume her sleep of death till the echo of their piercing cry died away in her tomb, and instead thereof, her cold ear caught the songs of her little ones, who had soared from Bethlehem to the skies, singing hosannas to the new-born King; a chant from the first infant martyrs to the child born and the Son given. Then was she quiet; for Jehovah soothed her to rest, saying: Refrain thy voice from weeping, and thine eyes from tears: for thy work shall be rewarded, and thy children shall come again from the land of the enemy.' Ah! but there was no such soothing for godless Antipas. The blighted monarch saw nothing but the open door in the world of spirits, through which the headless Baptist had come back to torment him before his time.

This was the sole reward for his heartlessness, his indulgence of a woman more abandoned than himself. His caprice had made him a slave to his paramour's rage, and left him as helpless in her hands as the head of the Baptist on the cruel trencher. Herod's folly had entrapped him so completely, that while his conscience stickled in mock honor to break a rash and forceless oath, he could deliberately perpetrate the blackest crime known to mortals. His example of false shame is the most contemptible in history. Rather than brook the implication that he really was capable of a moral scruple, he went the full length of crime. What a choice; rather than allow a set of drunken men to shoot the lip at an empty, broken word, he would carry the blood of holy innocence in his skirts through life. Did a min. ister of his court ever look in his face again, without reading his spectral fear of the slain prophet? Clearly enough, after this, the ministry of Jesus himself was to him the savor of death unto death.' His heavenly words and Godlike acts were never reported, but Herod saw the dead man clothe himself afresh in all the sanetities of his being; he was John risen from the dead!' How could the tormented monarch know any interpreter of benevolence but the contortions of a trunkless head?

CHAPTER IV.

CHRIST'S WITNESS TO THE BAPTIST.

HEN John knew that his departure was at hand, he lovingly sent two of his

WHE disciples to ask whether Jesus were the Messiah, or should they look for

another. This act touched the heart of Jesus tenderly. John was not angry with Herod for his imprisonment, nor did he distrust his own mission or that of Christ; but for the sake of his disciples he sent them, that his own testimony might be confirmed, that their convictions might be established, and that now they might cling to Jesus only. Our Lord re-assured them by an appeal to their sense of sight and hearing. Go tell John the things that ye see, the blind, the lame, the deaf. are restored, and the dead are raised. Tell him the things that you hear, to the poor the glad tidings are preached.' If he cannot believe the first he must accept this last evidence, for no teacher but one from heaven would begin with the poor. This testimony confirmed their faith, and their Master's witness. When they were gone, Jesus said to the multitude: What went ye out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken with the wind?' He wished them to know, that the rough prophet who dwelt amongst savage beasts, did not quail now that he was in the grasp of the tyrant. Though confined within a dungeon of solid masonry, he was no more like a lithe reed, tossed by every gust, than when he thundered against the sins of the nation. This errand of inquiry, so far from indicating that John quailed, confirmed his integrity, and showed him to be the same self-conscious athlete as ever, just as resolute and firm. Went ye out to see a man clothed in soft raiment? They that wear soft clothing are in king's houses.' John was decreasing, but Jesus testified that he was no self-indulgent, easy-going preacher at the court of Galilee, seeking luxury, and fawning to pomp, because he was without that moral fiber, which men call steel. No, this son of the hoary desert was still hardy. Delicate living and gorgeous clothing were in the palace of Antipas, while the fortress of Machaerus was happy in the old austerities. Then Jesus gave his climax: Went ye out to see a prophet? Yea, and more than a prophet. Verily I say to you, Among those born of woman there has not risen a greater than John the Baptist. But he who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.'

A greater than all the prophets is not easily terrified, and Jesus pronounced John greater. No one prophet had prophesied concerning another; but other prophets had foretold John, as the messenger who should prepare the way of the Lord.' His character and office had both been predicted. Nay, he had foretold the