SERMON III. THE PRECURSOR. (THIRD SUNDAY IN ADVENT.) ST. MATT. xi. 10. For this is he, of whom it is written, Behold, I send My messenger before Thy face, which shall prepare Thy way before Thee. IN N the Gospels for the two last Sundays in Advent, the figure of St. John the Baptist is only less prominent than that of the coming Saviour. The Gospel for to-day apparently was not appointed on account of the message which the Baptist sent to our Lord out of his prison, but to illustrate the great position which belonged to him in relation to the history of the Redemption and of the world. Our Lord says expressly that in the Baptist the words of Malachi,' which had been pondered over so anxiously by every religious Jew for four centuries, had at last their complete fulfilment. "This is he, of whom it is written, Behold, I send My messenger before Thy Face, which shall prepare Thy way before Thee." This explanation of the prophecy followed necessarily from our Lord's own claim to be the true Messiah. If He was the Messiah, He must, the Jews knew, have had such a forerunner as had been foretold by prophecy; and there was no one who answered to this character so well as St. John, while St. John did altogether answer to it. Until it was fulfilled, prophecy, from the nature of the case, had a vague sound in the ears of those who heard it. Each prophecy, they thought, might possibly apply to a great many persons. Each of the separate prophecies which, as we Christians see, have their fulfilment in our Lord, or His Redemption, or His Church, might have been previously supposed to apply to very different persons, works, or institutions in the future. To the Jews between Malachi and our Lord, there 1 Mal iii. I. might have seemed to be much room for free conjecture as to who the Lord's messenger would be; they generally believed that the Prophet Elijah1 would return to earth and would by doing so realize the prediction. Prophecy ceases to be indefinite; it is explained, or, as we should say, it is clenched by the appearance of its object. When our Lord came, those who received Him ceased to have any doubts on the score of the prophecy of Malachi. The Baptist said of himself that he was not Elijah, when he was questioned on this head by a commission sent to him by the Sanhedrin. He meant that he was not literally that prophet returned to earth from another world. But it was, nevertheless, true that he had come in the stern religious spirit and popular power of Elijah; and so our Lord said that in the Baptist the Jewish expectations about Elijah were fulfilled. "If ye will receive it, this is Elias, which was for to come." 19 2 It being granted that Jesus was what He claimed to be, it followed that St. John was the messenger sent before His Face to prepare His way before Him. I. That our Lord should have had a precursor at all may at first sight seem singular; we may think that He was sufficiently His own herald and introduction, and that He could not well be recommended to the thoughts and hearts of men by one altogether His inferior. The greater may introduce the less, we say to ourselves, not the less the greater. But the arrangement before us is very much in harmony with God's general providences. God does not seem as a rule to allow any great truth or blessing to burst upon the world without some sort of preparation. It may be urged that prophecy had already been such a preparation; that prophecy had described beforehand Christ's Person, His Work, His Kingdom; that it had educated the Jewish people to look out for Him, or that it might well have done so; that, if it did not suffice, nothing else would suffice; and that, viewed in the light of prophecy, St. John's mission seems to want an object, to be an unmeaning repetition of what had already been done. But prophecy itself predicts St. John. Prophecy and the Baptist were both preparations for Christ prophecy a remote, St. John an immediate preparation. Prophecy educated religious souls among the Jews to look out for a Messiah; St. John pointed Him out to them. St. John's 1 St. Matt. xvii. 10; St. John i. 21. 2 St. Matt. xi. 14. : business was first of all to gain the ear of his countrymen; then to say, "The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand; "1 then, "Behold the Lamb of God!" St. John, in the kingdom of grace, was like those gifted men in the world of thought or of practical life, who are always just ahead of the masses around them. They have the inspiration, not of supernatural grace, but of natural genius, itself a gift of God, but of a different order of value and power. They are like lofty mountains whose summits the sun has already lit up, at an hour when he has not yet risen upon the plains beneath. Truth has come to them before coming to all; it has come to them as its predestined forerunners. The speculative truth which everybody will recognize ten years hence, they see now. But they are alone on their watch-towers if they say what they think, it is only to be smiled down as enthusiasts. The practical discovery, of which everybody will proclaim the high importance in another generation, they advocate now; amid the discouraging criticisms of friends who advise them not to risk capital upon a wild venture. The social improvement or public reform, which nobody will think of challenging when at no distant date it has become law or custom, they plead for now, when it is denounced as reaction or revolution, and is universally unpopular. Many such men will occur to our memories in modern English history. They abound in literary, in commercial, in political, in professional life. They seem to illustrate a law of God's providence. Rarely does He so take us by surprise as to dispense with some similar preparation for that which He is going to teach us or to do for us; there are hints and indications, more or less plain, of His Work and Will. We see the signs of the Son of Man in the course of events, or in the intellectual heavens. We note the streaks of dawn which tell of the coming Day. II. A work like that of St. John's demands many high qualities; but two beyond others. Of these the first is courage. It is not every man who has always the courage to publish the advent of truth, even if he anticipates it. In many ages it has been very perilous to do It has always been, and is now, more or less difficult. Many a man has fondled truth in his secret soul, comprehending its preciousness to others as well as to himself, yet not 1 St. Matt. iii. 2. 2 St. John i. 29. so. daring to proclaim it. If bodily torture or loss of goods be not before his eyes, at least there is probably a hostile block of public opinion, with its coarse weapons of denunciation, and its lighter shafts of ridicule; and he cannot bear that. He shrinks back into himself; he is willing to believe that he is modest, or incapable, or too much before his time, or too much behind it, as the case may be. He does not look his real motives in the face; and we will not be hard on him, unless we can be sure that, in his position, we should do better than he. That St. John was courageous, it is unnecessary to say. He had no scruple in bidding the most influential classes in the country, the Scribes and Pharisees, when they came to receive his baptism, to repent. They were offended at being asked to imagine that they had anything to repent of. He warned them of the wrath to come. They had no notion that it had anything to do with them. He tore off the veil which concealed their secret ground of confidence. They were not to say within themselves that they were the descendants of Abraham; since God could, if He pleased, raise up new children to the father of the faithful out of the very stones around them.1 To say this to men whose genealogy was their all-to whom bloodrelationship with Abraham was as precious as is living union with Christ to a Christian-required courage. And to follow it up by insisting that judgment was near; that the axe was laid to the root of the old tree of Jewish national life; and that not to bear moral and spiritual fruit was to be hewn down presently and cast into the fire; 2-this required more courage still. The Baptist was not less brave in his dealings with the great. He was no court preacher such as there have been from time to time in Europe, who left out of his message all that might offend kingly ears. Herod Antipas, Tetrarch of Galilee and Peræa, was living incestuously with the wife of his brother Philip-not Philip the Tetrarch, but another son of Herod the Great, who was spending his days in retirement at Rome. The Baptist did not permit himself to excuse this breach of the Law of God, by the doctrine that kings cannot be expected to observe rules which are binding by God's ordinance, and in conscience, upon private people. Herod, too, was under a law, whether he acknowledged it or not; and St. John simply told him the truth, which his own conscience echoed. lawful for thee to have thy brother's wife." 3 1 St. Matt. iii. 7-9. 66 "It is not Those few words cost St. John his life. The vicious and sensual woman whose character was involved determined to have her revenge. St. John was thrown into a gloomy fortress on the shores of the Dead Sea, where, after a revel in which the daughter of Herodias again overruled the mind of the weak king, the fearless preacher ended his days by martyrdom.1 For courage of this description there are two necessary conditions. First of all, there must be a firm, definite conviction that certain things are true-worth working for, worth suffering for, worth dying for. Such a conviction is the very foundation-stone of all higher moral life. When all seems hazy, indefinite, uncertain, a mere outline which fades away into the mist, a mere balance of equally poised probabilities, high moral effort is impossible. Men will not work, suffer, die, for a will-of-the-wisp, whether in matters of practical life or in matters of religious belief. And one of the evils which the modern sceptical spirit has inflicted upon this generation is that it has, beyond any other cause, impoverished our moral life. By sapping all earnest conviction as to the truth of the Creed, the trustworthiness of Holy Scripture, the mission and nature of the Christian Church, the Divine and Everlasting Person of Jesus Christ, the reality of the work of the Holy Spirit, the power and grace of the Sacraments, it has eaten out the very heart of Christian courage; it has done even more to damage the moral than the intellectual life of religion. St. John had the most sharply defined convictions, with which he went to work. He knew that a new spiritual society, to be called the Kingdom of God, was on the point of being set up upon the earth.2 He knew that his countrymen must either repent of their many sins against truth and grace, or perish. He knew that the One central Figure in human history, a Being Who existed while he himself was yet unborn, was on the point of appearing among men." What mattered it to him if Jewish mobs and Roman soldiers, if Scribes and Pharisees, Sadducees and Herodians, thought otherwise? He at least must go forward, come what might; his robust conviction was the secret of his courage. 4 Another condition of such courage is independence. 1 St. Matt. xiv. 6-10. 2 Ibid. iii. 2. 3 St. Luke iii. 8, 9. By |