“No.... He said, I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness.... He it is, who coming after me is preferred before me, whose shoe’s latchet I am not worthy to unloose.” At Nazareth, in the meantime, an unknown working man was lacing up His shoes with His own hands to go out to the wilderness, resounding with the voice which three times had thundered, “No.” THE VIGIL John called sinners to wash in the river before repenting. Jesus presented Himself to John to be baptized. Did He then acknowledge Himself a sinner? The texts are explicit: the prophet preached the baptism of repentance in remission of sins. He who went to him acknowledged himself a sinner; he who goes to wash, feels himself polluted. The fact that we know nothing of the life of Jesus from His twelfth to His thirtieth year, exactly the years of fallible adolescence, of hot-blooded youth, has given rise to the idea that He was in that period, or at least held Himself to have been, a sinner like other men. The three remaining years of His life are the most brightly lighted by the words of the four Gospels because in thinking of the dead, what we most vividly remember are their words and deeds during the last days of their lives. Nothing of what we know of those three years gives any indication of this supposed existence of sin in Christ’s life between the innocence of its beginning and the glory of its ending. There is not even the appearance of a conversion in Christ’s life. His first words have the same accent as the last. The spring from which they run is clear from the first day; there is no muddy sediment of evil. He begins with frank absolute certainty, with the recognizable authority of purity. You can feel that He has left nothing turbid back of Him. His voice is clear and limpid, a melodious song not roughened by the sour lees of voluptuous pleasure, or by the hoarseness of repentance. The transparent serenity of His look, of His smile and of His thought is not the calm which comes after the clouds of the tempest, or the uncertain whiteness of the dawn which slowly conquers the malign shadow of the night: it is the clearness of Him who was born only once, and remained a youth even into His maturity: the limpidity, the transparency, the tranquillity, the peace of a day which ends in night, but is not darkened until evening: eternal day, childhood intact and untarnished until death.