[Footnote 8:  Matt. ix. 14.]

[Footnote 9:  Luke iii. 11.]

Although the centre of John’s action was Judea, his fame quickly penetrated to Galilee and reached Jesus, who, by his first discourses, had already gathered around himself a small circle of hearers.  Enjoying as yet little authority, and doubtless impelled by the desire to see a teacher whose instruction had so much in common with his own, Jesus quitted Galilee and repaired with his small group of disciples to John.[1] The newcomers were baptized like every one else.  John welcomed this group of Galilean disciples, and did not object to their remaining distinct from his own.  The two teachers were young; they had many ideas in common; they loved one another, and publicly vied with each other in exhibitions of kindly feeling.  At the first glance, such a fact surprises us in John the Baptist, and we are tempted to call it in question.  Humility has never been a feature of strong Jewish minds.  It might have been expected that a character so stubborn, a sort of Lamennais always irritated, would be very passionate, and suffer neither rivalry nor half adhesion.  But this manner of viewing things rests upon a false conception of the person of John.  We imagine him an old man; he was, on the contrary, of the same age as Jesus,[2] and very young according to the ideas of the time.  In mental development, he was the brother rather than the father of Jesus.  The two young enthusiasts, full of the same hopes and the same hatreds, were able to make common cause, and mutually to support each other.  Certainly an aged teacher, seeing a man without celebrity approach him, and maintain toward him an aspect of independence, would have rebelled; we have scarcely an example of a leader of a school receiving with eagerness his future successor.  But youth is capable of any sacrifice, and we may admit that John, having recognized in Jesus a spirit akin to his own, accepted him without any personal reservation.  These good relations became afterward the starting-point of a whole system developed by the evangelists, which consisted in giving the Divine mission of Jesus the primary basis of the attestation of John.  Such was the degree of authority acquired by the Baptist, that it was not thought possible to find in the world a better guarantee.  But far from John abdicating in favor of Jesus, Jesus, during all the time that he passed with him, recognized him as his superior, and only developed his own genius with timidity.

[Footnote 1:  Matt. iii. 13, and following; Mark i. 9, and following; Luke iii. 21, and following; John i. 29, and following; iii. 22, and following.  The synoptics make Jesus come to John, before he had played any public part.  But if it is true, as they state, that John recognized Jesus from the first and welcomed him, it must be supposed that Jesus was already a somewhat renowned teacher.  The fourth Gospel brings Jesus to John twice, the first time while yet unknown, the second time with a band of