Most of all John would think again and again of a wonderful declaration of Isaiah, writing as if he lived in John's day, saying, "Unto us a child is born, unto us a Son is given; and the government shall be upon His shoulders, and His name shall be called Wonderful Counsellor, The Mighty God, The Everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace. Of the exercise of His government and peace there shall be no end, upon the throne of David." Had John known that these words of Isaiah referred to Jesus, he might have repeated them, not as a prophecy, but with a present meaning, saying, "The Child _is_ born!" As he read the prophecy of Haggai, uttered more than five hundred years before--"The desire of all nations shall come"--he might have exclaimed, "He _has_ come!" In John's reading in the Old Testament it seems strange to us that some things made a deeper impression on him than did others, and that he understood some things so differently from what we do, especially about the Messiah's kingdom. He noticed the things about His power and glory, but seems to have misread or overlooked those about the dishonor, and suffering and death that would come upon Him. We read in the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, how He was to be "despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, ... wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities, ... brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before his shearers, ... and make His grave with the wicked." We know that all this happened. We think of a suffering Saviour. We wonder that John did not have such things in his mind. But in this he was much like his teachers, and most of the Jews. Though, as we have imagined, his family and some others were more nearly right than most people, even they did not have a full knowledge or correct understanding of all that the Old Testament Scriptures taught, concerning these things. But at last John learned more concerning Christ than any of them. We are yet to see how this came to pass. For the present we leave him in Bethsaida, increasing in wisdom and stature. So is also his cousin in Nazareth, of whom let us gain a more distinct view before He is revealed to John as the Messiah. _CHAPTER VIII_ _Jesus the Hidden Messiah_ "There has been in this world one rare flower of Paradise--a holy childhood growing up gradually into a holy manhood, and always retaining in mature life the precious, unstained memories of perfect innocence."--_H.B. Stowe_.