with which Elijah is introduced.  Matthew makes no allusion to his relationship to Jesus, has nothing to say about his birth or long seclusion in the desert.  He gives no hint that his vague expression ‘in these days’ covers thirty years.  John leaps, as it were, into the arena full grown and full armed.  His work is described by one word—­’preaching’; out of which all modern associations, which have too often made it a synonym for long-winded tediousness and toothless platitudes, must be removed.  It means proclaiming, or acting as a herald, and implies the uplifted voice and the brief, urgent message of one who runs before 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 that the bondage and deliverance are types of the sorer captivity from which Christ redeems, and of the grander deliverance which He effects.