None of them survive; but there is perhaps a tacit criticism of them in the request made to the New Teacher:  “Teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples” (Luke 11:1).  One feels that the men wanted something different from John’s prayers.  Great and strenuous prayers they may have been, but in marked contrast to the prayers of Jesus and his followers, because of the absence in John’s message of any strong note of the love and tenderness of God.

Finally, the very righteousness that John preaches with such fire and energy is open to criticism.  Far more serious than the righteousness of the Pharisees, stronger in insight and more generous in its scope, it fails in the same way; it is self-directed.  It aims at a man’s own salvation, and it is to be achieved by a man’s own strength in self-discipline, with what little help John’s system of prayer and fasting may win for a man from God.  John fails precisely where his strength is greatest and most conspicuous.  His theme is sin; his emphasis all falls on sin; but his psychology of sin is insufficient, it is not deep enough.  The simple, strenuous ascetic did not realize the seriousness of sin after all—­its deep roots, its haunting power, its insidious charm.  St. Paul saw far deeper into it “I am carnal, sold under sin.  What I hate that do I. The good that I would, I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do.  I see a law in my members bringing me into captivity to the law of sin.  O wretched man that I am!  Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” (Rom. 7:14-24).  Sin, in John’s thought, is contumacy or rebellion against the law of God; he does not look at it in relation to the love of God—­a view of it which gives it another character altogether.  Nor has John any great conception of forgiveness—­a man, he thinks, may win it by “fruits worthy of repentance” (Luke 3:8).  Here again Paul is the pioneer in the universal Christian experience that fruits of repentance can never buy God’s forgiveness.  That is God’s gift.  That forgiveness may cost a man much—­an amended life, the practices of prayer and fasting and almsgiving—­John conceives; but we are not led to think that he thought of what it might cost God.  John has no evangel, no really good news, with gladness and singing in it (1 Peter 1:8).

When we return to the teaching of Jesus, we find that he draws a clear and sharp line between right and wrong.  He indicates that right is right to the end of all creation, and wrong is wrong up to the very Judgement Throne of God (Matt. 25).  He views these things, as the old phrase puts it, “sub specie aeternitatis”, from the outlook of eternity.  Right and wrong do not meet at infinity.  There is no higher synthesis that can make them one and the same thing.  Everything with Jesus is Theocentric, and until God changes there will be no very great change in right and wrong.  Partly because he uses the language of his day, partly because he thinks as a rule in pictures, his language is apt to be misconstrued