word, his summons, is only like the touch of a man's finger tip to the electric button whose pressure sets in motion the machinery of a vast enterprise. It is the one thing needed to establish the necessary connections. Before, men were insulated from each other. Buried under superstitions, cherishing false notions, living under the fatal spell of tradition and custom, the life current of progress was clogged. There is no unity, no consciousness of reality. By and by a man comes along whose word clarifies the air like a lightning flash, uncovers the truth, sends the invigorated blood leaping through arteries ‘and veins, and moulds the scattered particles of humanity into solidarity and strength.
Such a man was John the Baptist. And so potent was he, so responsive to the throbbing truth of the Eternal that ever beats at the heart of the world, so simply and sternly true to life, that his voice sent its summons a hundred miles away into the little village of Nazareth, into the home of Joseph the carpenter, into the very soul of his eldest son, and from that moment the fate of Jesus was sealed. He left his home for the Jordan side, and to the last day of his life he was not the same man he had been before. He could never return to Nazareth as he left it. Nazareth could never be to him what it had been before. Nothing could. Nothing was. Everything was changed.
