said (John 5:14.), ’Behold, thou art made whole; sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee.’  Was it (fitting the punishment to the crime proportionately) some outrageous sin as a boy, in the spring of years and days of his inexperienced youth of bodily life, that brought on him such physical sorrow, which youthful sin in its repetition would necessitate an even worse ill than this nearly forty years of sore affliction?  ’Who did sin, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’ (John 9:2.), was the question of the disciples to Jesus.  And our query is—­Sinned before he was born to deserve the penalty of being born blind?

“Then of John the Baptist—­was he a reincarnation of Elijah, the prophet, who was to come again? (Malachi 4:5.).  Jesus said he was Elijah, who indeed had come, and the evil-minded Jews had done unto him whatsoever they listed.  Herod had beheaded him (Matt. 11:14 and 17:12.).

“Elijah and John the Baptist appear from our reference Bibles and Cruden’s Concordance to concur and commingle in one.  The eighth verse of the first chapter of the second Book of Kings and the fourth verse of the third chapter of St. Matthew’s Gospel note similarities in them and peculiarities of dress.  Elijah, as we read, was a ’hairy man and girt a leathern girdle about his loins,’ while John the Baptist had ‘his raiment of camel’s hair and a leathern girdle about his loins.’  Their home was the solitude of the desert.  Elijah journeyed forty days and forty nights unto Horeb, the mount of God in the Wilderness of Sinai.  John the Baptist was in the wilderness of Judea beyond Jordan baptizing.  And their life in exile—­a self-renunciating and voluntary withdrawal from the haunts of men—­was sustained in a parallel remarkable way by food (bird—­brought on wing—­borne).  ’I have commanded the ravens to feed thee,’ said the voice of Divinity to the prophet; while locusts and wild honey were the food of the Baptist.

“‘And above all,’ said our Lord of John the Baptist to the disciples, ‘if ye will receive it, this is Elias which was for to come.’

“Origen, in the second century, one of the most learned of the Fathers of the early Church, says that this declares the pre-existence of John the Baptist as Elijah before his decreed later existence as Christ’s forerunner.

“Origen also says on the text, ’Jacob I have loved, but Esau I have hated,’ that if our course be not marked out according to our works before this present life that now is, how would it not be untrue and unjust in God that the elder brother should serve the younger and be hated by God (though blessed of righteous Abraham’s son, of Isaac) before Esau had done anything deserving of servitude or given any occasion for the merciful Almighty’s hatred?

“Further, on the text (Ephesians 1:4.), ’God who hath chosen us before the foundation of the world,’ Origen says that this suggests our pre-existence ere the world was.