has a patent on any great era of human history. We call this the Christian era, and we trace its beginning from the birth of a Galilean named Jesus, whom his followers afterward called the Christ. To me the term "Christ" has no meaning and no value whatever. It is a purely theological term. It is born of speculation and superstition. It is only as the man Jesus that the founder of Christianity has any value to me. We trace this era back to the birth of Jesus, we say. But no greater mistake can be made than to say or think that Jesus created or set in motion the influences which made this era. We are bound to ask, "Where did Jesus get his ideas? Who and what shaped and fashioned the mind of Jesus?" And the answer to that question does not carry us up through a rift in the clouds to a realm beyond the blue, whence like a shooting star this man swept down into the life of the world. Not at all. The lineage of moral ideas and spiritual power runs on and on far back into a past which no historian has seen or reported for us. For Jesus is the child of the Hebrew prophets—of Isaiah, of Hosea, of Amos, of Moses, of all the poets and seers of Israelitish history. And they, in turn, were the product of other and remoter influences.
But it is of the immediate predecessor of Jesus that I want to speak first of all. That man is known in history as John the Baptist. The name
