moment the most powerful personality in Palestine.
It must not be thought that all this was due to John. It is not explained on the ground of magnetism or hypnotism. These undoubtedly explain the power of some men, but never of such men as John the Baptist. It was because John was the spokesman of a feeling that existed far and wide in the minds of the people that the thronged him. And the one sentence which more than any other explains the career and ministry of John is this: "And even now is the axe laid unto the root of the trees: every tree therefore that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down and cast into the fire." In those words John is describing not at all something which he has hatched out of his own brain in the solitude of the desert, nor yet some event which he himself supremely desires, but something that is decreed by the conditions which exist.
John the Baptist was but the mouthpiece of his time, of humanity in the birth-throes of a new epoch in its life. That is all a prophet ever is. He never leads men into the new era. He simply sees it, feels its strenuous pulse, and announces it to his fellows. They hear his message, because it is nothing but the articulation of their own unworded thought and aspiration. His voice, his
