man is laid up for his last struggles, now he is alone for deep communion with his God.  Fact very often says, “No—­now he is alone, as his Master was before him, in the wilderness to be tempted of the devil.”  Look at John in imagination, and you would say, “Now his rough pilgrimage is done.  He is quiet, out of the world, with the rapt foretaste of heaven in his soul.”  Look at John in fact.  He is agitated, sending to Christ, not able to rest, grim doubt wrestling with his soul, misgiving for one last black hour whether all his hope has not been delusion.

There is one thing we remark here by the way.  Doubt often comes from inactivity.  We cannot give the philosophy of it, but this is the fact, Christians who have nothing to do but to sit thinking of themselves, meditating, sentimentalising, are almost sure to become the prey of dark, black misgivings.  John struggling in the desert needs no proof that Jesus is the Christ.  John shut up became morbid and doubtful immediately.  Brethren all this is very marvellous.  The history of a human soul is marvellous.  We are mysteries, but here is the practical lesson of it all.  For sadness, for suffering, for misgiving, there is no remedy but stirring and doing.

Now look once more at these doubts of John’s.  All his life long John had been wishing and expecting that the kingdom of God would come.  The kingdom of God is Right triumphant over Wrong, moral evil crushed, goodness set up in its place, the true man recognised, the false man put down and forgotten.  All his life long John had panted for that; his hope was to make men better.  He tried to make the soldiers merciful, and the publicans honest, and the Pharisees sincere.  His complaint was, Why is the world the thing it is?  All his life long he had been appealing to the invisible justice of Heaven against the visible brute force which he saw around him.  Christ had appeared, and his hopes were straining to the utmost.  “Here is the Man!” And now behold, here is no Kingdom of Heaven at all, but one of darkness still, oppression and cruelty triumphant, Herod putting God’s prophet in prison, and the Messiah quietly letting things take their course.  Can that be indeed Messiah?  All this was exceedingly startling.  And it seems that then John began to feel the horrible doubt whether the whole thing were not a mistake, and whether all that which he had taken for inspiration were not, after all, only the excited hopes of an enthusiastic temperament.  Brethren, the prophet was well nigh on the brink of failure.

But let us mark—­that a man has doubts—­that is not the evil; all earnest men must expect to be tried with doubts.  All men who feel, with their whole souls, the value of the truth which is at stake, cannot be satisfied with a “perhaps.”  Why, when all that is true and excellent in this world, all that is worth living for, is in that question of questions,