such he is held up to us by Our Saviour in to-day's Gospel. There are, I confess, few personages in history that appeal to me so strongly as John the Baptist. Like all great reformers he was a man of one idea. From the moment of his birth — aye from that day when at the approach of the unborn Saviour he leaped for joy in his mother's womb, the one overmastering principle of his life was to prepare the way of the Lord, to point out to the world the Lamb of God, its Redeemer. This is the key to the mystery of his life. All his other thoughts were so absorbed in this one that his time not having yet come and having nothing else in life to accomplish, he, while yet a boy, fled from home and his aged parents and sought communion with God in the wilderness. What a strange wild life his was for long years, and how picturesque! He is the companion of wild beasts; his garb of skins, his girdle of leather, and his food of locusts and wild honey. Talk of vocation for the priesthood, and sacrificing all to follow Christ, but did ever other minister of Christ follow the promptings of the spirit as fully and as faithfully as did the Baptist? And when at length the time was ripe and the kingdom of God was at hand, how earnestly he threw himself into the work of preparing the way of the Lord, levelling the hills by his fierce denunciation of the empty externalism of the proud Scribes and Pharisees, filling up the valleys by his kindly bearing towards the despised publicans, his consoling words of counsel to the soldiers, and his promises of better things to come; making
