es: "A man can receive nothing except it have been given him
from heaven. He must increase, but I must decrease" (see the whole
passage, John iii. 27-36). The very same spirit of meekness was
speaking in John as acted in his Lord, when, knowing that the Pharisees
had heard that Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John
(though Jesus Himself baptized not, but his disciples), "He left Judea
and departed into Galilee." What divisions might have been avoided in
the Church had his people followed his example! But there was no man,
not even the apostle John or Paul, whose spirit accorded more exactly
with the Master's than his faithful and self-effacing herald and
forerunner, John the Baptist. It might well be said, that of them that
were born of women there had not arisen a greater than he.

But what was in our Lord's thought when He made the reservation, "_Yet
he that is but little in the Kingdom of heaven is greater than he_"?
It has been suggested that the Lord was speaking of John not only as a
man, but as a prophet, and that this declaration applies more
particularly to John as a prophet. The words of the evangelist Luke
are noticeable--"There hath not risen a greater prophet than John the
Baptist": because to balance the sentence it seems needful to supply
the word _prophet_ in the second clause--"The least prophet in the
Kingdom of heaven is a greater prophet than he." John could say,
"Behold the Lamb of God"; but the least of those who, being scattered
abroad, went everywhere proclaiming the word of the Kingdom, preached
"Jesus and the resurrection."

But there is another way of interpreting Christ's words. John ushered
in the Kingdom, but was not in it. He proclaimed a condition of
blessedness in which he was not permitted to have a part. And the Lord
says that to be in that Kingdom gives the opportunity of attaining to a
greatness which the great souls outside its precincts cannot lay claim
to. There is a greatness which comes from nature, and another
greatness from circumstances. The child on the mountain is higher than
the giant in the valley. The boy in our village schools knows more on
certain subjects than Socrates or Confucius, the greatest sages of the
world. The least instructed in the Kingdom of heaven is privileged to
see and hear the things which prophets and kings longed and waited for
in vain. The least in the higher dispensation may know and understand
more than the lofti