felt most keenly, the power of his
teachings and work upon the common people; for "all held John to be a
prophet;" "but the Pharisees and lawyers rejected the counsel of God
against themselves, being not baptized of him," John.

To all human appearance, the influence of the baptism and teachings of
John, upon the common people, saved our Lord's life upon this and
probably other occasions, for the scribes and chief priests sought
opportunity to destroy him; but they feared the _common people_. In
this we discover traces of the good accomplished by John's mission,
which was "to make ready a people prepared for the Lord;" and this
people was the _common people_.

Our Lord, however, had a much higher thought and loftier end in the
question he put to these men than that of merely saving his life by
the facts involved in the question.

When a minister, either diplomatic or religious, on foreign soil, is
asked for his authority, it is absolutely necessary for him to produce
satisfactory credentials of his investment with the office and the
honor he may claim. Our Lord's credentials must be clear and
satisfactory, beyond those of any other minister, because no others
ever have been or can be subjected to such a rigid scrutiny and to
such scathing tests as those were which he bore. They must present a
more imposing front than that of the power to work miracles. Others
had wrought miracles before. Moses had made the bottom of the Red Sea
dry ground; and with a single stroke of his rod had cleft a mighty
rock to the gushing forth of a flood of water from it. Elijah had
raised the widow's dead son, and had kept her cruse of oil and her
barrel of meal replenished; so that the famine came not nigh her door.
The walls of Jericho had fallen under the sound of Joshua's band of
rams'-horn trumpeters; and, in fact, miracles had, in one way or
another, been connected with almost all the events recorded in the
Jewish Scriptures. On the evidence of these facts the scribes and
Pharisees said to him in scorn: "Art thou greater than our fathers,
which are dead? and Moses, and the prophets, which are dead?"

You may now perceive how necessary it was for our Lord to have some
higher claim to authority, in the eyes of these unbelieving Jews, than
they were willing to see in his power to work miracles. This higher
testimony to his authority was given by his Father, signed and sealed
by the Holy Spirit, in the presence of witnesses, as Jesus cam