78.  But there was another branch of the Pharisees than that which quibbled over Sabbath laws, traditions, and tithes, or that which itched to grasp the sword; they were men who saw visions and dreamed dreams like those of Daniel and the Revelation, and in their visions saw God bringing deliverance to his people by swift and sudden judgment.  There are some marked likenesses between this type of thought and that of John,—­the impending judgment, the word of warning, the coming blessing, were all in John; but one need only compare John’s words with such an apocalypse as the Assumption of Moses, probably written in Palestine during John’s life in the desert, to discover that the two messages do not move in the same circle of thought at all; there is something practical, something severely heart-searching, something at home in every-day life, about John’s announcement of the coming kingdom that is quite absent from the visions of his contemporaries.  John had not, like some of these seers, a coddling sympathy for people steeped in sin.  He traced their troubles to their own doors, and would not let ceremonies pass in place of “fruits meet for repentance.”  He came from the desert with rebuke and warning on his lips; with no word against the hated Romans, but many against hypocritical claimants to the privileges of Abraham; no apology for his message nor artificial device of dream or ancient name to secure a hearing, but the old-fashioned prophetic method of declaration of truth “whether men will hear or whether they will forbear.”  “All was sharp and cutting, imperious earnestness about final questions, unsparing overthrow of all fictitious shams in individual as in national life.  There are no theories of the law, no new good works, no belief in the old, but simply and solely a prophetic clutch at men’s consciences, a mighty accusation, a crushing summons to contrite repentance and speedy sanctification” (KeimJN.  II. 228).  We look in vain for a parallel in any of John’s contemporaries, except in that one before whom he bowed, saying, “I have need to be baptized of thee.”

79.  John had, however, predecessors whose work he revived.  In Isaiah’s words, “Wash you, make you clean” (Isa. i 16), one recognizes the type which reappeared in John.  The great prophetic conception of the Day of the Lord—­the day of wrath and salvation (Joel ii. 1-14)—­is revived in John, free from all the fantastic accompaniments which his contemporaries loved.  The invitations to repentance and new fidelity which abound in Isaiah, Ezekiel, Hosea, and Joel; the summons to simple righteousness, which rang from the lips of Micah (vi. 8), and of the great prophet of the exile (Isa. lviii.), these tell us where John went to school and how well he learned his lesson.  It is hard for us to realize how great a novelty such simplicity was in John’s day, or how much originality it required to attain to this discipleship of the prophets.  From the time when the curtain rises on the later history of