Jesus had been preaching about two years, when John from his prison sent two of his disciples to ask,—“Art thou he that should come, or do we look for another? On this occasion Jesus uttered a testimony concerning John, of which it is said that, “all the people that heard him, and the publicans, justified God, _being baptized with the baptism of John_. But the Pharisees and the lawyers rejected the counsel of God against themselves; being not baptized of him.”—Luke vii, 29, 30. This occurred in Galilee, which district was not included in any of the statements of the evangelists, respecting the attendance on John’s ministry. He does not seem ever to have preached in Galilee. And yet, from that comparatively distant region, the people had so flocked to his baptism, that two years afterward the evangelist could state that all the people had been baptized of him, the lawyers and Pharisees excepted, and find in this the explanation of the universal acceptance of Christ’s testimony. The exception here greatly strengthens the former clause of the statement, and establishes the fact of the universal reception of John’s baptism by the common people. In fact, this conclusion is involved in the very nature of the circumstances of Israel. However viewed, the ministry of John created a most momentous crisis in the history of God’s dealings with that people. John came to them, the fore-announced,—the last,—the greatest, of all the prophets. He came on the loftiest mission that had ever been entrusted to man,—to act as the immediate personal messenger and herald of the coming King. He came to Israel, excommunicate from God, to call them individually, and as a people, to repent and return to the fold of God’s longsuffering mercy; and to seal the offered grace, by baptizing those who professed to obey his call. The alternative which his ministry set before them was plain and imperative. To absent themselves, or to attend on his preaching without receiving his baptism, would have been an open act of treason to the coming King, an express and aggravated rejection of his authority and of this extraordinary and final overture of grace to the nation. John’s ministry thus compelled a decision by which a broad and public line was drawn among the people. On the one side, were those who professed to repent and return to the forsaken covenant and God of their fathers, and to own the authority of the promised King of Israel; and whose profession was sealed by the reception of John’s baptism;—on the other, those who, in rejecting John’s testimony and turning their backs upon his baptism, repudiated the coming King and spurned his overture of mercy. Of the significance and importance of all this, the evangelists were fully aware. To suppose them in such circumstances to have indulged in a loose and exaggerated style of statement, asserting that Jerusalem, and all Judea, and all the region round about Jordan were baptized, when, in fact, not one in a