John the Expanded

On the threshold of the New Gallery we are met by a portentous figure popularly known as John the Baptist. He was the earliest product of the influence of that Great Light which was about to transform the world. In order of time he is the first Christian. He discerned the greatness of Jesus when, outwardly, Jesus was not great. He was the earliest who fixed his eyes upon the miracle of Christ’s character. Nay, I am disposed to go further; with the exception, I think, of Thomas, he is probably the only man of the primitive band who was originally attracted to Jesus by the beauty of His moral nature alone. Neither Peter nor James nor the other John nor Andrew nor Philip nor Nathanael seems to have been at first so attracted;

they embraced the hope of a physical Messiah. 24

But this man cried, ‘Behold the Lamb of God! ‘It was indeed a voice crying in the wilderness. There were very few in the age of Jesus who could appreciate the miracle of a sinless life. Show them a wonderful boy in the home of Nazareth — a boy who can tell thoughts before they are spoken, calculate figures as soon as they are stated, get answers to prayers the instant they are offered — the home of Nazareth will be thronged to suffocation. But tell them that within that house there lives a thoroughly good child, a child of unique goodness — tell them that through all the years of his consciousness he has never been known to depart from a lamblike gentleness, never been seen to deviate from a pure affection, never been observed to waver in an unselfish spirit — you will attract no crowd around the cottage door. The traveller will pause not to wonder, the spectator will wait not to verify; it will seem to the world an ordinary, a commonplace thing.

It is the glory of John the Baptist that he perceived the miracle of Nazareth. This man saw the wonder precisely in the one spot where his contemporaries could see nothing. Alone of all the men in the New Gallery this man is first attracted and dominated by that life of Christ which preceded outward wonders — His life in the home. He had seen no outpouring of the wine at Cana. He had beheld no cleansing of the temple at Jerusalem. He had witnessed no healing at the pool of Bethesda. He had experienced no glimmer of glory on the Mount of Transfiguration. He had not even listened to the words of wisdom which have immortalised the Hill of Hermon. His vision was only of the child.’ The spirit of Jesus had to him taken the form of a dove. The kingdom of Christ which he had seen was the kingdom over Himself in the nursery. He had marked Him out as the future Messiah on altogether unique grounds. He had demanded a test that could be fulfilled in Nazareth. He had asked no prodigies. He had exacted no feats of prowess. He had required no evidence of supernatural knowledge. He had asked sinlessness — a blameless

He seems, on account of his desert life, to have lost sight of Him in His manhood; see John i. 33.

record in the cottage home. By His sustaining of that test, by His ability to pass through that ordeal, the Christ of the Baptist should stand or fall.

I have laid great stress on this point because, if I am not mistaken, we are often prone to take an erroneous view of John the Baptist. We figure a wild man of the woods, half savage and wholly physical — a man whose Christ was of the earth earthy, whose hopes were centred on an outward glory, whose cry was for the carnal, whose faith was in the flesh. We think of him with a kindly patronage — as wonderfully good for the dawn. We insist on allowance being made for him. It would be too bad, we say, to compare his rise with the rising of such lights as Peter and the sons of Zebedee. These men saw the Christ full-grown; this man had only the tradition of His NazaretJi; how can we expect the summer from the spring, why look to dawn for the brightness of the day!

Now, on such an opinion the view I have been advocating falls like a clap of thunder. For, according to my reading of John the Baptist, this representative of the earliest Christianity is the least primitive of all the Christians. So far from contrasting unfavourably with the apostles, he actually begins where they end. The latest word of these apostles is not the outward miracle but the blameless life; it may be said of every one of them that to their autumn years the Lamb is all the glory.’ But that can be said of the Baptist’s spring. He antedated their experience. While they were hunting after a sign of the flesh, he was pursuing a sign of the spirit. While they sought an eagle, he followed the track of a dove. While they waited for the strength of a lion, he placed all his hopes in the spotlessness of a lamb.

The truth is, the original defect of John the Baptist was of exactly the opposite nature to that commonly attributed to him. So far from beginning as a wild man of the woods, the thing he lacked was just the forest freedom. In his morning he was no son of liberty. He had the most exalted view of what it is to be a Christian — a more exalted view than any of his contemporaries; but for that very reason he would make no allowances. He was a red-hot revivalist, and his revivalism admitted no compromise. What he required was not enlightenment; it was expansion. Strange as it may seem, I hold that what all religious youth requires is not enlightenment but expansion. We think of youth as the bird of the wilderness flying reckless from bough to bough and destined, to get its wings clipped in the zenith of the day. That is a very good picture of physical youth, but it is not religious youth. Religious youth has exactly the opposite development. It is no bird of the wilderness; it is afraid to fly. It is too intense to be broad; it settles on a branch and dwells there. It sees the fire burning in a single bush; it hears the voice calling from only one tree. Its wings may be expected to-morrow, but its weights are for to-day. Its path is a narrow path, its view is a limited view; it sees through a glass darkly and it thinks it sees in full.

There are, in my opinion, two characteristics of the narrowness of religious youth, and they are both found in this figure of the Baptist. The first I would describe as the inability to wait, in other words, a tendency to see the future without intermediate view. This man points to his Christ and cries, ‘His fan is in His hand!’ — ready to be used. Youth habitually scorns the intermediate. It is commonly reckoned a proof of its expansiveness. In truth it is the reverse; it is its inability to fix the eye on any point but one. When a child cries, ‘Not to-morrow, nor to-morrow, nor to-morrow, but the next day!’ what does it mean.^ It is really making an attempt to annihilate from its thought the intermediate days as if they were so much useless lumber. That little word ‘not’ is equivalent to a suppression. It declares that the days between Monday and Friday are to be discounted, ignored, put on one side, and that the string of hope should draw the ends so close together as to prevent the impression of anything intermediate at all.

And this is the initial position of John the Baptist. He has a child’s inability to wait. His conception of the Messiah is beautiful beyond his time; but his conception of the Messiah’s fan is premature. When the hills look too near, there will be rain. I am afraidt his great revival preacher is preparing for himself a harvest of tears. It is grandly exciting, no doubt, to see the masses vibrating to the message that the fan is already in the hand. But the fan is in reality not yet within the grasp of the Christ. To the eye of the Baptist the hills look wonderfully near, but the deception will ere long reveal itself. When he stands in the midst of the crowd and cries, ‘Behold the Lamb of God! ’ he is on strong and trenchant ground; but when he predicts the immediate diffusion of the Lamb’s purity, he is skating on thin ice. His hearers may be enraptured to-day, but they will be anxious to-morrow and downcast the day after. The Baptist has promised too much. He has held up the Messiah’s winnowing fan in the light of the coming Sabbath — has held it so as to exclude the light of all intermediate days. He has excluded that light from himself as much as from his hearers. He has taken the child’s leap, that leap which indicates not breadth but narrowness — the exclusive concentration of the eye upon the lamp farthest away.

But there is a second characteristic of religious youth, and it also is exemplified in this great revival preacher. Religious youth is distinctly uncompromising. It never admits the possibility of any shades of opinion. A thing is either white or black, good or bad, lovely or deformed. This is a tendency, indeed, pertaining more or less to childhood in general. The average child has no degrees in his love. His heart is a clock where only two hours are indicated — twelve noon and twelve midnight. Ask if he likes any one; you will get an unqualified yes or no. We are in the habit of adducing this as evidence of the child’s outspokenness. But in truth the problem lies, not in speaking out, nor, for that matter, in speaking at all. It lies in the fact that the incipient mind is the imperative mind. I do not think it is a mark of strength, but the reverse; it indicates, not breadth, but narrowness. It implies a limit in judgment, as the previous tendency implied a limit in imagination. It is a mark of crudeness and nondevelopment; yet it is capable of existing side by side with the most exalted idea of purity.

Now, the preacher on the banks of Jordan revealed in pronounced colours this uncompromising spirit of youth. He denied the intermediate shades between night and day. Not only was the Messiah’s fan already in the hand; it was to be used drastically. ‘He will thoroughly purge His floor, and gather His wheat into the garner; but He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.’ The Baptist is in the same position as the servants of Christ’s parable. They wanted to consume the tares immediately, ‘Wilt Thou that we go and gather them up?* You will remerrpber the answer was, No; and you will remember why — ‘Lest while ye gather up the tares ye root up also the wheat with them.’ In nothing does the wisdom of Christ shine so resplendent over the wisdom of John. John thought there were two sets of men — one good and the other bad; to Christ the good and the bad nestled in one soul. John thought a fire would do all that was wanted; Christ feared it might do more than was wanted. John said, ‘If a man show stubbornness of will, beat it out of him ‘; Christ cried, ‘Not so; you will beat out not only the stubbornness but the will itself — will reduce the man to a state of passive imbecility where decision is hopeless and choice is impossible.’ John proposed to kill evil passion by putting an axe at the root of the tree; Christ said, ‘The root of the tree is not evil passion but good passion; would you make it impossible to sin by making it impossible to feel! would you debar from scenes of badness by debarring from the sense of sight! would you cure the temptation of the heart by making the heart a stone! ’

This, then, is the earliest aspect of John the Baptist — the fiery preacher of a very high Christianity — incapable of compromise, intolerant of middle courses, eager to reduce the outside universe into two hemispheres — heaven and hell! Take a parting look at the man! You will never see him again in this attitude. Something is going to happen, the curtain is about to fall. With all its intolerance, with all its uncompromisingness, with all its repelling severity, there is something in this figure transcendently grand. As it sways to and fro on the banks of Jordan, shaken with the pulsations of its own eloquence

— as it breaks forth, now in passionate invective, now in earnest pleading, now in prophetic fervour — I wonder not that the crowds listen and tremble. It is a soul walking on a narrow plank; but on that plank he walks with dauntless foot. The man speaks with conviction; and his conviction is his power. Alone of all the world he has seen the King in His moral beauty — has recognised that lamblike whiteness is better than imperial purple. Basking in that fair ideal of a spotless Christ, he demands a spotless world — demands it now, here, immediately. If the acceptance of Christ meant a change of outward government, men might be allowed to linger; but the acceptance of Christ meant purity, holiness, goodness — all that lies within a man’s own heart, ready for the waking touch of God. This was a kingdom that needed no armies nor weapons nor fortresses; why should it not come to-morrow, to-day, this hour!

So thought, so spake, John Baptist in the morning. But now, as I have said, the scene is about to vanish. Even as we gaze, the picture melts like snow. Jordan suddenly disappears; the voice of the preacher fades; the crowd upon the bank evaporates as a stream of hmehghts, and, where the hum of life resounded, universal silence reigns. We are on the borders of a great tragedy — one of the greatest tragedies in history. But what is that tragedy.? Perhaps there are few of us who have realised where consists the dramatic horror of the situation. Ask a Sunday-school child what was the tragedy that befell John the Baptist, he will answer without hesitation, ‘In the course of his teaching he denounced an illegal marriage of Herod, who put him in prison and caused him to be beheaded.’ And yet, that is not the dramatic element in the case of the Baptist. That was a tragedy to the man, but not to the preacher, not to the reformer, not to the Christian forerunner. WHiat was the tragedy to Sir Walter Scott? The loss of his money .-• Assuredly not; that might happen to the most undistinguished man. But when Scott faded in mind, when his powers became paralysed, when his right hand lost its cunning and his mighty brain ceased to be a highway for the nations, then came the real tragedy. It was not genius parting with money; it was genius parting with itself.

The Baptist’s tragedy was analogous to this. It was not his prison; it was not his peril; it was not his martyrdom — it was the fact that he wavered in his first faith. From the depths of his dungeon he sends a message to the ideal of his dreams, ‘Art Thou He that should come, or do we look for another y ‘Nothing, to my mind, in the whole history of the Baptist is half so tragical as that. And why.^” Because it is the man parting from his innermost self. It is as if Shakespeare had lost his passion, as if Tennyson had lost his culture, as if Keats had lost his colouring. If this man had kept his confidence undimmed we should have looked in vain for the element of tragedy; not the dungeon, not the persecution by Herod, not the axe of the headsman, could have made the final scene other than glorious. But when a cloud fell over his innermost self, when in the flood he lost sight of the bow, when his fcrzi/i wavered, when his one strong and seemingly invincible possession received damage on a rock of earth — this is the crisis of the drama, this is the tragedy of the scene!

Has the Gallery, then, here committed a Ijreach of art? Ought the hero to lose his particular point of heroism? We can understand misfortune, struggle, death; these may only brighten the man’s special beauty. But that the special beauty itself should be falsified, that the hero should be untrue to his own soul, that the curtain should fall precisely where his lofty ideal falls — is that a stroke worthy of artistic enthusiasm! Is it not specially ?^«worthy of that great Christian art whose aim is not to destroy but to fulfil, and which finds its highest glory when it gathers up the fragments that remain!

In this instance I do not hesitate to answer. No. I say that nowhere has Christianity been more optimistic than in allowing the Baptist’s faith to fail. No other stroke would have imparted full glory to the picture. What is it that the Baptist lacks throughout? It is expansion. His taint is narrowness. His ideal of Christ was magnificent, unique among his contemporaries. But he insisted that this ideal should become the immediate possession of the world. He had no place for the wavering, no provision for the stunted, no tenderness for the specially tempted. What this man needed was charity — a deeper sympathy with the infirmities of man. And how was he to get it.^ How is any man to get it.^ I know of only one way — he must be depressed in his strong point. Touch him in any other point, and you will fail. But touch him where he is strong, shake him where he has been immovable, and you open the first inlet for the entrance of human charity. The shaking of John’s faith was a process preparatory to his spiritual expansion. It prepared him for the answer he was about to receive. He had sent a message to Jesus, ‘Art Thou He that should come? ‘The reply was on the way, and it was virtually an exhortation to remember human frailty. Let me try to paraphrase this reply of Jesus.

‘John, it is just because I do not follow your method that I am He that should come. Your method is a drastic one. You want to begin by clearing out the chaff. You want me, when I enter the threshing-floor, to look round and be impressed with the absolute purity of all things. You want me to be able to say, “I see no blind here, no lame, no leper, no deaf, no dead in trespasses and sin, no poor and ignorant requiring to be preached to; it is ail radiant as a summer day.” But, my friend, when I come into the threshing-floor, that is not what I want to see. I wish to see the contrary. I wish to look round and see in the foreground the very men you have put out — the blind, the lame, the leper, the deaf, the spiritually dead, the poor and ignorant. I would have all these cleansed, but I would have them cleansed from the inside. I demand not that the blind should see before they climb the mountain; I ask not that the lame should leap ere they enter by the Beautiful Gate. Let there be no separation between the wheat and the chaff; gather them both into my garner and let me meet them there! Bring in Bartimeus; bring in the man of Bethesda; bring in the typical Magdalene; bring in the leper from the tombs! I shall meet the crowd as they are — unwashed, uncleansed, unbeautified; in their rags and ruin will I give them my hand. ’

That is a real paraphrase of the message from Jesus to John. And remember, when it came to John it came to a broken-down man — a man who had been shaken in the sphere of his proudest confidence. What a magnificent preparation for so grand a message! There was a time when John would have scorned to let Bartimeus in; but now his own eye had become dim. There was a time when he would have resented the admission of the man of Bethesda; but now his own feet had become weary. For the first moment in his life he felt himself part of that chaff which he had consigned to everlasting fire. There sprang up in his soul a fellow-feeling with infirmity. The ingathering of the wheat ceased to be the mark of Messianic greatness. To take up tenderly the withered flower, to plant again the fallen tree, to bind the heart that had been wounded, to raise the soul that had been bruised, to give a chance to the reprobate, to find a fresh start for the children of a corrupt heredity, to proclaim a new year in which the darkest life might begin once more — such was that unique ideal of heroism which gave to the dungeon of John’s closing days a light of glory which his brightest morning had never known!

I think, then, that the grandest period of the Baptist’s life was not the days of his wilderness freedom, but that lonely prison-house from which he only came forth to die. The hour of his physical chain was the hour of his mental enfranchisement. His morning was cribbed, cabined, and confined. He was like a man that never had an illness. He had no sympathy with bad health. His besetting weakness was his robust constitution. He could not make allowance for aches and pains, for reaction and weariness. He needed a special gift from God, and that special gift was a privation. Nothing but a privation could set the captive free — could unbar those gates of sympathy whose closure made life to him a desert. But at his evening-time there came that light. It was not the dungeon brought it; it was the shaking of his faith in his own robustness. That shaking was like the cloud on the Mount of Transfiguration. It removed Moses and Elias and revealed Jesus only. The man of law and the man of fire both faded from his horizon, and by his side there stood in undisputed presence the Man of Mercy. Sinai vanished like smoke; Carmel melted like a mimic scene; and, in all the vast expanse, the eye of the great preacher rested on one solitary hill — the love -lit brow of Calvary. With such a vision in his soul the Baptist could afford to die.

LORD, mine too has been this expansion of the inward life. It is the greatest boon a human heart can know. And yet, my Father, to me, as to the Baptist, it has come through pain. He thought his was an hour of mutilation, of infirmity, of bondage; he bewailed the cloud that had fallen over his faith. But the cloud was sent by TJice. Sometimes my faith needs a cloud. I may find it so dazzling that I may be blind to hope and charity. I may cry, ‘Destroy the unbelievers, O God; root them out, consume them, annihilate them! ‘When I say that, Thou sendest my faith a cloud. Thou veilest the heavens over Jordan; Thou hidest the dove descending; Thou utterest no more the voice of the morning. Thou makest me say, ‘I see it is a harder thing than I thought to be a believer; I have been too severe upon my brother-man.’ I bless Thee for these ecUpsing moments, O my God. I bless Thee that I have been touched with the feeling of man’s infirmities. I bless Thee that Thou hast put a temporary veil over the face of faith; it has unveiled her two sisters — hope and charity. When my sky was cloudless I despaired of those who could not see; when my faith was fearless I was wroth with those who could not believe. But my tremor has made me tender, my mist has made me merciful, my haze has made me human. I have gained more in my night than in my day. In my day I soared beyond sympathy; in my night I caught my brother’s hand. In ray day I was solitary on the wing; in my night I had companionship through weakness. In my day I believed only in the wheat; in my night I had a kindness for the chaff. In my day I had the feeling of a lonely majesty; in my night I had the fellowship of a common mystery. It was worth while, O Lord, to wear a chain so golden!