John the Baptist, like other earlier prophets, delivered a message which, probably enough, he did not himself more than dimly understand, and never in its full compass of meaning. Christ occupied another station. Not only was he the original Interpreter, but he was himself the Author--Founder, at once, and Finisher--of that great transfiguration applied to ethics, which he and the Baptist alike announced as forming the code for the new and revolutionary era now opening its endless career. The human race was summoned to bring a transfiguring sense and spirit of interpretation (_metanoia_) to a transfigured ethics--an altered organ to an altered object. This is by far the grandest miracle recorded in Scripture. No exhibition of blank power--not the arresting of the earth's motion--not the calling back of the dead unto life, can approach in grandeur to this miracle which we all daily behold; namely, the inconceivable mystery of having written and sculptured upon the tablets of man's heart a new code of moral distinctions, all modifying--many reversing--the old ones. What would have been thought of any prophet, if he should have promised to transfigure the celestial mechanics; if he had said, I will create a new pole-star, a new zodiac, and new laws of gravitation; briefly, I will make new earth and new heavens? And yet a thousand times more awful it was to undertake the writing of new laws upon the spiritual conscience of man. _Metanoeite_ (was the cry from the wilderness), wheel into a new centre your moral system; _geocentric_ has that system been up to this hour--that is, having earth and the earthly for its starting-point; henceforward make it _heliocentric_ (that is, with the sun, or the heavenly for its principle of motion).