Chapter I: THE TIME CHOSEN FOR THE LORD'S COMMENDATION OF THE BAPTIST.--It was

when John had fallen beneath his usual level, below high-water mark, that Jesus uttered his warmest and most generous words of appreciation--"Among them that are born of women, there hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist."

"But, dost Thou really mean, most holy Lord, that this one is the greatest born of woman?"

"Certainly," saith Christ, in effect.

"But he has asked if Thou art really the Messiah."

"I know it," saith the Lord.

"But how canst Thou say that he is to be compared with Moses, Isaiah, or Daniel? Did they doubt Thee thus? And how canst Thou say that he is not a reed shaken with the wind, when, but now, he gave patent evidence that he was stooping beneath the hurrying tread of gales of doubt and depression?"

"Ah," the Master seems to say, "Heaven judges, not by a passing mood, but by the general tenor and trend of a man's life; not by the expression of a doubt, caused by accidents which may be explained, but by the soul of man within him, which is as much deeper than the emotions as the heart of the ocean is deeper than the cloud-shadows which hurry across its surface."

Yes, the Lord judges us by that which is deepest, most permanent, most constant and prevalent with us; by the ideal we seek to apprehend; by the decision and choice of our soul; by that bud of possibility which lies as yet furled, and unrealized even by ourselves.

There is a remarkable parallel to this incident in the Old Testament. When we are first introduced to Gideon, the youngest son of Joash the Abi-ezrite, he is not in a very dignified position. He is threshing wheat by the wine-press, to hide it from the hosts of Midian, which devoured the produce of the entire country. There was no moral wrong in eluding the vigilance of the Midian spies, in transporting the wheat from the open country, where the wind might fan away the chaff, to the comparative seclusion and unlikeliness of the wine-press; but there was nothing specially heroic or inspiring in the spectacle. Yet, when the angel of the Lord appeared unto him, he said, "The Lord is with thee, thou mighty man of valour."

"Mighty man of valour!" At first there is an apparent incongruity between this high-sounding salutation and the bearing of the man to whom it was addressed. Surely such an address is far-fetched and fulsome; yet subsequent events prove that every syllable of it was deservedly true. Gideon was a mighty man of valour, and God was with him. The heavenly messenger read beneath the outward passing incident, and saw under the clumsy letters of the palimpsest the deep and holy characters which were awaiting the moment of complete discovery.

Is not this, in fact, the meaning of the apostle, when he says that faith is reckoned to us for righteousness? In the fullest sense, of course, we know that to each believer in Jesus there is reckoned the entire benefit of his glorious person and work, so that we are accepted in the Beloved, and He is "made unto us ... Righteousness." But there is another sense in which faith is reckoned to us for righteousness, because it contains within itself the power and potency of the perfect life. It is the seed-germ from which is developed in due course the plant, the flower, the bud, the seed, and the reproduction of the plant in unending succession. God reckoned to Abraham all that his faith was capable of producing, which it did produce, and which it would have produced had he possessed all the advantages which pertain to our own happy lot. There is thus the objective and the subjective: in virtue of the first, through faith in Jesus, all his righteousness is accounted to us; in virtue of the second, God reckons to us all that blessed flowering and fruitage of which our faith will be capable, when patience has had its perfect work and we are perfect and entire, wanting nothing.