ing posture? Not one.
They have been as obsequious as were all the king's servants that were
in the king's gate to the imperious Haman when he happened to enter the
palace.

Thus, when our Lord asked the people whether John resembled a reed
shaken by the wind, and implied their answer in the negative, could He
have more clearly indicated one of the most salient characteristics of
John's career--his daring singularity, his independence of mere custom
and fashion, his determination to follow out the pattern of his own
life as God revealed it to him? In this he resembles the good
Nehemiah, when he refers to the usual practice of men of his position,
and says, "So did not I, because of the fear of the Lord"; or the three
young men who, when all the myriads fell down and worshipped
Nebuchadnezzar's golden image, remained erect. In the singularity of
his dress and food; in the originality of his message and demand for
baptism; in his independence of the religious teachers and schools of
his time; in his refusal to countenance the flagrant sins of the
various classes of the community, and especially in his uncompromising
denunciation of Herod's sin--he proved himself to be as a sturdy oak in
the forest of Bashan, or a deeply-rooted cedar in Lebanon, and not as a
reed shaken by the wind.

Many a saintly soul has followed him since along this difficult and
lonely track. Indeed, it is the ordinary path for most of the choicest
spirits of these Christian centuries. I do not say of all, because the
great Gardener has his violets and lilies in sheltered spots; but
certainly most of the trees of his right-hand planting have not stood
thickly-planted in the sheltered woodland, but have braved the winds
sweeping in at the gates of the hills.

You, my reader, admire, but feel you cannot follow. When your
companions and friends are speaking depreciating and ungenerous words
of some public man whom you love; when unkind and scandalous stories
are being passed from lip to lip; when a storm of execration and hatred
is being poured on a cause, which in your heart you favour and
espouse--you find it easier to bow before the gale, with all the other
reeds around you, than to enter your protest, even though you stand
alone. Yet the reed thrust by the soldiers into the hands of Christ
may become the rod of iron with which He rules the nations. He can
take the most pliant and yielding natures, and make them, as He made
Jeremiah, "a de