Self-righteous pedants who had turned religion into a jumble of petty precepts, and very superior persons who keenly appreciated the good things of this world, and were too enlightened to have much belief in anything, and too comfortable to be enthusiasts, were not hopeful material.  If they were drawn into the current, it must have run strong indeed.  These representatives of the highest and coldest classes of the nation had the very same red-hot words flung at them as the mob had.  Luke tells us that the first words in this summary were spoken to the people.  Both representations are true.  All fared alike.  So they should, and so they always will, if a real prophet has to talk to them.  John’s salutation is excessively rough and rude.  Honeyed words were not in his line; he had not lived in the desert for all these years, and held converse with God and his own heart, without having learned that his business was to smite on conscience with a strong hand, and to tear away the masks which hid men from themselves.  The whole spirit of the old prophets was revived in his brusque, almost fierce, address to such very learned, religious, and distinguished personages.  Isaiah in his day had called their predecessors ‘rulers of Sodom’; John was not scolding when he called his hearers ‘ye offspring of vipers’ but charging them with moral corruption and creeping earthliness.

The summary of his preaching is like a succession of lightning flashes.  We can but note in a word or two each flash as it flames and strikes.  The remarkable thing about his teaching is that, in his hands, the great hope of Israel became a message of terror, the proclamation of the impending kingdom passed into a denunciation of ‘the wrath to come,’ set forth with a tremendous wealth of imagery as the axe lying at the root of the trees, the fan winnowing the wheat from the chaff, the destroying fire.  That wrath was inseparable from the coming of the King; for His righteous reign necessarily meant punishment of unrighteousness.  So all the older prophets had said, and John was but carrying on their testimony.  So Christ has said.  No more terrible warnings of the certain judgment of evil which is involved in His merciful work, have ever been given, than fell from the lips into which grace was poured.  We need to-day a clearer discernment of the truth which flamed before John’s eyes, that the full proclamation of the kingdom of heaven must include the plain teaching of ‘the wrath to come.’

Next comes the urgent demand for reformation of life as the sign of real repentance.  John’s exhortation does not touch the deepest ground for repentance which is laid in the heart-softening love of God manifested in the sacrifice of His Son, but is based wholly on the certainty of judgment.  So far, it is incomplete; but the demand for righteous living as the only test of religious emotion is fully Christian, and needed in this generation as much as it ever was.  All preachers and others concerned in ‘revivals’ may well learn a lesson, and while they follow John in seeking to arouse torpid consciences by the terrors which are a part of the gospel, should not forget to demand, not merely an emotional repentance, but the solid fruits which alone guarantee the worth of the emotion.