The second period is a shorter one.  It comprises the few months of his public ministry.  His difficulties were over; he had reached conviction enough to live and die on.  He knew not all, but he knew something.  He could not baptize with the Spirit, but he could at least baptize with water.  It was not given to him to build up, but it was given to him to pull down all false foundations.  He knew that the highest truth of spiritual life was to be given by One that should come after.  What he had learned in the desert was contained in a few words—­Reality lies at the root of religious life.  Ye must be real, said John.  “Bring forth fruits meet for repentance.”  Let each man do his own duty; let the rich impart to those who are not rich; let the publican accuse no man falsely; let the soldier be content with his wages.  The coming kingdom is not a mere piece of machinery which will make you all good and happy without effort of your own.  Change yourselves, or you will have no kingdom at all.  Personal reformation, personal reality, that was John’s message to the world.

It was an incomplete one; but he delivered it as his all, manfully; and his success was signal, astonishing even to himself.  Successful it was, because it appealed to all the deepest wants of the human heart.  It told of peace to those who had been agitated by tempestuous passion.  It promised forgetfulness of past transgression to those whose consciences smarted with self-accusing recollections.  It spoke of refuge from the wrath to come to those who had felt it a fearful expectation to fall into the hands of an angry God.  And the result of that message, conveyed by the symbol of baptism, was that the desert swarmed with crowds who owned the attractive spell of the power of a new life made possible.  Warriors, paupers, profligates—­some admiring the nobleness of religious life, others needing it to fill up the empty hollow of an unsatisfied heart; the penitent, the heart-broken, the worldly, and the disappointed, all came.  And with them there came two other classes of men, whose approach roused the Baptist to astonishment.

The formalist, not satisfied with his formality, and the infidel, unable to rest on his infidelity—­they came too—­startled, for one hour at least, to the real significance of life, and shaken out of unreality.  The Baptist’s message wrung the confession from their souls.  “Yes, our system will not do.  We are not happy after all; we are miserable.  Prophet, whose solitary life, far away there in the desert, has been making to itself a home in the mysterious and the invisible, what hast thou got to tell us from that awful other world?  What are we to do?”

These things belong to a period of John’s life anterior to the text.  The prophet has been hitherto in a self-selected solitude, the free wild desert, opening his heart to the strange sights and sounds through which the grand voice of oriental