CHAPTER II

JOHN THE BAPTIST

THE years spent at Nazareth, quiet and unmemorable as they seemed in outward events, must have been characterised by much inward stress of spirit. All growth is painful, and it is only through contention and dubiety of mind that the soul finds the full compass of its powers. He who pictures these hidden years at Nazareth as a perfect idyll of peace and contentment is surely forgetful of the normal processes by which unusual genius is developed. Men of genius have rarely been comprehended by their relations, and their development has usually been marked by variance and collision. One of the sadly wise sayings of Jesus was that a prophet has no honour in his own country, and it is doubtless reminiscent of His own experience. Other events showed that His own brothers-or stepbrothers, as they probably were-and even His mother, failed to understand His aims. With all the exquisite sweetness of His disposition there was united a force and daring of temper that must have been extremely disconcerting to these simple-minded friends and kinsfolk. The rising stream of new religious life was already beginning to submerge the old landmarks of Mosaic tradition. Teachers like Hillel and Philo were uttering axioms which Jesus was hereafter to fashion into a new ethical revelation. Quickened by the growing life within Him,

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stimulated by the new life around Him, Jesus must often have spoken His mind to this humble audience in Nazareth in such a way as to excite their indignation and their fear. They probably regarded Him as a freethinker whose genius was His peril. It was so, many centuries later, that Spinoza, the most "God-inebriated" of all modern Jewish minds, was regarded by his contemporaries; and the theological animus of the conventional Jew is something that centuries cannot change.

How many times did Jesus climb those stony paths to the broad plateau above Nazareth that He might escape household contention, and find Himself alone in the healing silences of Nature? How many times was the heart of Mary pierced by the sword of a great fear as she watched the strange unfolding of a mind whose subtlety and depth she could not comprehend? That these things really happened we need no Gospel to assure us. Nothing is more remarkable in Christ than that from the moment of His public ministry He has nothing to learn. There is no doubling back upon the path of truth, no hesitation; for Him the problem is solved. But this perfect finish of mind must needs have had its processes, and of these processes Nazareth was the theatre. The prime effort of His life was to settle religion on a broad and true base. To do so much that the Jew regarded as essential to piety had to be set aside as trivial. Customs to which tradition had given the sanctity of duties, traditions which had usurped the place of truths, had to be disregarded. Full truth is only reached by iconoclasm. The strain of spirit in such intellectual adventures is great; their effect upon others who only partly comprehend is disruptive and full of pain. And it was by such disciplines as these that Jesus reached His full development of mind. Side by side with much that was idyllic in the life at Nazareth ran sequences of suffering, reaching onward to the tragic.

Many times Jesus must have asked, in those long meditations on the hills of Nazareth, why it was He waited, for what it was He waited, and when the call to public service would become precise and ineluctable. They were not the questions of an ambitious mind, but of a mind keenly conscious of advancing destiny. These questions were now about to be answered, and the patiently awaited sign was to be given.

In the fifteenth year of the reign of the Emperor Tiberias there arose in the deserts of Judea, lying between Kedron and the Dead Sea, a young preacher of singular individuality and force by the name of John. He at once attracted attention as much by the manner of his life as by his message. It is characteristic of the voluptuousness of the Oriental mind that it is constantly regulated by a strong ascetic tendency. Strange and even fearful abstinences are practised in the East to-day, and those who practise them are esteemed holy. John had from his boyhood been trained in the most austere asceticism. He had elected to live in the desert, not far from the shore of the Dead Sea, where at that time many anchorites dwelt. He is vividly described to us as wearing raiment of camel's hair, with a leathern girdle upon his loins-the traditional dress of Elijah—and feeding upon locusts and wild honey. Far from the false and fevered life of cities, living amid scenes of incomparable desolation and sterility, finding in them a school of solitude and discipline, John nursed the fires of a passionate and impetuous spirit. None of the sweet influences of nature were here, and had they been they would have made no appeal to him. The land was not only savage in itself, but it seemed scarred and bruised by the hand of visible judgments that had passed over it. And the man was fitted to the scene. He was virile, terrible, untameable, a true son of the wilderness, into whose blood all the harshness and grandeur of the desert had entered.