The next flash strikes the lofty structure of confidence in their descent.  John knows that every man in that listening crowd believes that his birth secured him joy and dominion when Messiah came.  So he wrenches away this shield against which his sharpest arrows were blunted.  What a murmur of angry denial must have met his contemptuous, audacious denial of their trusted privilege!  The pebbles on the Jordan beach, or the loose rocks scattered so plentifully over the desert, could be made as good sons of Abraham as they.  A glimpse of the transference of the kingdom to the despised Gentiles passed across his vision.  And in these far-reaching words lay the anticipation, not only of the destruction of all Jewish exclusiveness, but of the miracles of quickening to be wrought on the stony hearts of those beyond its pale.

Once more with a new emblem the immediate beginning of the judgment is proclaimed, and its principles and issues are declared.  The sharp axe lies at the roots of the tree, ready to be lifted and buried in its bark.  The woodman’s eye is looking over the forest; he marks with the fatal red line the worthless trees, and at once the swinging blows come down, and the timber is carted away to be burned.  The trees are men.  The judgment is an individualising one, and all-embracing.  Nothing but actual righteousness of life will endure.  All else will be destroyed.

The coming of the kingdom implied the coming of the King.  John knew that the King was a man, and that He was at the door.  So his sermon reaches its climax in the ringing proclamation of His advent.  The first noticeable feature in it is the utter humility of the dauntless prophet before the yet veiled Sovereign.  All the fiery force, the righteous scorn and anger, the unflinching bravery, melt into meek submission.  He knows the limits of his own power, and gladly recognises the infinite superiority of the coming One.  He never moved from that lowly attitude.  Even when his followers tried to stir up base jealousy in him at being distanced by the Christ, who, as they suggested, owed His first recognition to him, all that his immovable self-abnegation cared to answer was, ‘He must increase, but I must decrease.’  He was glad ’to fade in the light of the Sun that he loved.’  What a wealth of suppressed emotion and lowly love there is in the words so pathetic from the lips of the lonely ascetic, whom no home joys had ever cheered:  ’He that hath the bride is the bridegroom....  My joy is fulfilled’!

Note, too, the grand conception of the gifts of the King.  John knew that his baptism was, like the water in which he immersed, cold, and incapable of giving life.  It symbolised, but did not effect, cleansing, any more than his preaching righteousness could produce righteousness.  But the King would come, bringing with Him the gift of a mighty Spirit, whose quick energy, transforming dead matter into its own likeness, burning out the foul stains from character,