^ Christina G. RossettL
The Forerunner.
Literature.
Austin (Q. B.), The Beauty of Goodriess, 190.
Cook (F. C), Lincoln's Inn Sermons, 279.
Davies (J. P.), The Same Things, 10.
Gould (S. Baring), Village Preaching, 2nd Ser., i. 25.
Hare (J. C), The Mission of the Comforter, i. 325.
Hutton (R. E.), The Crown of Christ, i. 53.
Liddon (H. P.), Sermons on Special Occasions, 117.
Ritchie (A.), Sermons from St. Ignatius^ Pulpit, 29.
Rutherford (W. G.), The Key of Knowledge, 63.
Smellie (A.), In the Hour of Silence, 191.
Vaughan (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit), xxi. Nos. 1200-1203.
Wilson (J. M.), Clifton College Sermons, ii. 216.
Sermons for the Christian Seasons, 2nd Ser., iv. 177.
Sermons for Sundays, Festivals, and Fasts, 2nd Ser., ii. 380.
Christian World Pulpit, xiii. 40 (Baldwin Brown) ; xxi. 323 (Rowland) ;
xxxiv. 182 (Gledstone) ; Ixvi. 74 (Williams). Contemporary Pulpit, 2nd Ser., ix. 349 (Rowland). Expositor, 3rd Ser., vii. 280 ; 5th Ser., vi. 359. Expository Times, v. 185 (Keeling). Old and New Testament Student, ix. 164. Preacher's Magazine, i. 508 (Garrett).
The Forerunner.
The voice of one that crieth, Prepare ye in the wilderness the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a high way for our God.— xl. 3.
All the four Evangelists refer these words to the ministry of St. John the Baptist. In the Baptist they received their highest and complete fulfilment. But their first and historical reference is to the return of the Jewish captives from Babylon. The Lord was the King of the chosen people ; and in the vision of the prophet, the promised return to home and freedom was to be a triumphant procession across the desert, headed by Israel's invisible Monarch. The cause of the holy people was the cause of God ; their bondage and shame in Babylon, although a heaven- sent punishment, had been a humiliation for the majesty of Jehovah before the face of the scoffing heathen ; their triumphant return would be the work of God, it would also be the manifes- tation of His glory. No obstacle should stop the path of His resistless advance : " Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low : and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain : and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together : for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it."
Clearly there is here a wider reach of meaning than any which can be satisfied by the actual prospect or history of the return from Babylon. Say what you will about the highly poetical form into which the prophet has undoubtedly thrown his fervid thought, still here is the thought beneath the form which clothes it. If it would be a degrading mistake to resolve this passage into a mere description of some vast engineering operation : if valleys were not literally to be filled up, and mountains were not literally to be levelled, something, at any
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rate, was to take place in the moral, social, or political world which should correspond to this vigorous imagery. And that something was to interest, not merely the Jewish race and their heathen neighbours, but the whole human family : " All flesh shall see it together." It is clear that the particular, local, temporal deliverance melts before the eye of the prophet — as, gazing on it, he describes it — into a deliverance, general and world-wide in its significance, extending in its effects far beyond the limits of time. The deliverance of deliverances is before him. He sees the great escape from bondage, of which all earlier efforts at freedom were but shadows ; he sees it afar off, the pathway of mankind across the desert of time from the city of chains and sorrow, whereof Babylon was the earthly type, to the city of freedom and glory imaged in Jerusalem.
And thus it is that the Evangelists so unhesitatingly apply the passage to St. John the Baptist. St. John was the immediate forerunner of the Deliverer of humanity ; St. John, as a hermit of the desert and a preacher of repentance, supplied, by his life, the connecting link between the literal and spiritual senses of the prophecy ; St. John gathered up in himself, embodied and represented the ages of prediction and expectation. He was the mind of the Old Testament in a concrete form, laying down. its office and proclaiming its work of preparation finished, when the Reality which it foreshadowed had come,^
1[ The prophet's mind is haunted by the vision of perfectness. He has seen it. Not in some dream of shadowy romance has his mind toyed with the bright imagination, but in his hours of deepest commerce with the unseen has this great thing been unveiled, and he has gazed upon its holy beauty. It may lie in dim distances. It may be the final issue of many a bitter conflict and many a dreadful struggle. It may tax the faith, and try the hope, and wear away the strength of generations of holy men and women before its fine glory shall be translated into the actual fact of life. But there it is — a profound and actual reality. His inspired imagination has run forward to greet it, his sometime despondent heart has rested in its certainty. " The glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together." That is the revelation, that the certainty, the hope, and the joy. The world may have no eyes for the glory of the vision, the wise may