the chariot, and
shouts, 'The king! the king!'

His message is summed up in two sentences, two blasts of the trumpet:
the call to repentance, and the rousing proclamation that the kingdom of
heaven is at hand. In the former he but reproduces the tone of earlier
prophecy, when he insists on a thorough change of disposition and a true
sorrow for sin. But he advances far beyond his precursors in the latter,
which is the reason for repentance. They had seen the vision of the
kingdom and the King, 'but not nigh.' He has to peal into the drowsy
ears of a generation which had almost forgotten the ancient hope, that
it was at the very threshold. Like some solitary stern crag which
catches the light of the sun yet unrisen but hastening upwards, long
before the shadowed valleys, John flamed above his generation all aglow
with the light, as the witness that in another moment it would spring
above the eastern horizon. But he sees that this is no joyful message to
them. Nothing is more remarkable in his preaching than the sombre hues
with which his expectation of the day of the Lord is coloured. 'To what
purpose is the day of the Lord to you? It is darkness and not light'; it
is to be judgment, therefore repentance is the preparation.

The gleam and purity of lofty spiritual ideas are soon darkened, as a
film forms on quicksilver after short exposure. John's contemporaries
thought that the kingdom of heaven meant exclusive privileges, and their
rule over the heathen. They had all but lost the thought that it meant
first God's rule over their wills, and their harmony with the glad
obedience of heaven. They had to be rudely shaken out of their
self-complacency and taught that the livery of the King was purity, and
the preparation for His coming, penitence.

The next touch in this outline sketch is John's fulfilment of prophecy.
Matthew probably knew that wonderfully touching and lowly answer of his
to the deputation from the ecclesiastical authorities, which at once
claimed prophetic authority and disclaimed personal importance, 'I am
the voice of one crying in the wilderness.' The prophecy in its original
application refers to the preparation of a path in the desert, for
Jehovah coming to redeem His people from captivity. The use made of it
by Matthew, and endorsed by all the evangelists, rests on the principle,
without which we have no clue to the significance of the Old Testament,
that the history of Israel is prophetic, and tha