IX.

WHY HEROD FEARED JOHN.

MARK VI. 20: "Herod feared John.”

HEROD was a king; John was a subject. Herod was in a palace; John was in a prison. Herod wore a crown; John most probably did not even own a turban. Herod wore the purple; John wore camlet, as we should call it. Soldiers and servants watched the eye of Herod, and waited on his will; only the headsman waited hungrily for John. Herod came of a line that had never been famous either for morals or religion they said, practically what a famous American long afterwards said verbally, "that religion is a very good thing in its place;" they had done their best to establish a government in which the old Jewish worship should serve as a decoy duck to the new Jewish kingdom; they made it what the State forever makes the Church when it gets a chance a fountain of

preferment, with which it can bribe or buy the upper, and a mystic spell by which it can weave fetters of superstition for the lower, classes; and up to this time the dynasty had succeeded substantially in doing what it proposed to do. Yet still "Herod feared John."

Herod, the elder, father of this Herod Antipas who feared John, was a man of notable power. Appointed over Judea by Julius Cæsar, about forty-seven years before our Christian era, he fought his way through invasion from without and treachery from within, until he had at last established the throne on what seemed, for those times, to be deep foundations. He was what one might call an Eclectic in religion. When he ascended the throne, he made offerings to Jupiter of the capitol; his coins, as well as those of his son, bear only Greek inscriptions. Yet he rebuilt the temple at Jerusalem in a style of magnificence surpassing even that of Solomon. But then he built. a temple for the Samaritans, too; and, indeed, was a man full of politeness a sort of human Pantheon, in which Greek and Roman, Jew and Samaritan, were welcome to set up their sym

bols, for which he cared no more than if he himself had been so much marble; and finally,

so far as we can trace him, he left his principles and his kingdom, in the full prime of their strength, to his son.

John was the son of an obscure Jewish country priest and his wife: the child of their old age. There is no hint that John had any wealth, or name, or fame, or education, or influence, when he began his life as a man. He comes on the scene as a rough, angular man, with not many words and not many friends. Herod began to reign just about when John began to live, so that there was no preponderant age in the priest's son over the king's son: that was all on the other side.

Indeed, by all mere surface facts, principles, and analogies, John ought to have feared Herod; he ought to have bated his breath and bent his head before him. John's life was not worth thirty minutes' purchase, if Herod did but give the sign to kill him. And John knew that, and Herod knew it too. Yet they rise up like ghosts before us out of that distant time- the king in the palace, the reformer in the prison; the

king with the sceptre in his hand, the reformer with the shackle on his wrist. But the eye of the prisoner burns with a clear lustre, and looks right on; the eye of the king quails under its drooping lid. The hand of the prisoner is cool, and his foot firm; his head erect, and his voice clear as the voice of a trumpet. The hand of the king is hot, his step uncertain, his head bowed, and his voice broken, and, as you watch them, you get a great sense that the two men have somehow changed places the king is a prisoner, the prisoner a king.

Now, I propose to discuss at this time the roots of this power and weakness, to see what made Herod so weak and John so strong, and to ask this question, What can we, who are set as John was, in the advance guard of reformers, do to make a deep, clear mark?

And I note for you that John had three great roots of power: First, he was a powerful man by creation a man with a clear head, a steady nerve, and a nature set in a deadly antagonism to sin and meanness of every sort and degree. He was the Jewish John Knox, or John Brown. "When he saw a thing was true,

He went to work and put it through."

He could die, but he could not back down. Now, truly, there is a sure and solid principle at the heart of these old chronicles that tell us how angels came as messengers from God to notify the world of the advent of his most glorious sons; that when God wants a particular sort of man, to do a singular work for him, at a critical time, he makes him, and sends him, angel-guarded, to his place; so that no man can be John, but John himself.

Every time I meet a man who is a man, and not a stick, I ask myself one question: "Why are you the man you are? Whence does your power hint itself to me? Whence does it come?" And while the ultimate answer has never come out of Phrenology, or Physiognomy, or any of the sciences that profess to tell you what a man is by how he looks, yet the indicative answer has always lain in that direction. In the head, and face, and form of a man there is certainly something that impresses you in some such way as the weight, color, and inscription of a coin reveal to you, with a fair certainty, whether it be gold, or silver, or - brass; and it is possible, too, that the line in which a man has