with the Holy Spirit by calling forth the consciousness of the Spirit of God's presence in the human soul. In as far as John connected this spiritual baptism with the expected Messiah, with the bringer in of the new covenant, with the messenger of the covenant, thus far the Baptist might be called the forerunner of Jesus. He closed the old covenant and pointed to the new one, though he did not recognize the same as come with Jesus. Some held John to be the prophet Elias, whose coming Malachi had foretold, though without designating him as the forerunner of the longed-for messenger of the covenant, of the Messiah. But because Elias had by Malachi been connected with the Messianic times, therefore Jesus may possibly have made no objection, if the people would receive it, that John was the promised Elias, though John said he was not Elias. The learned in Scripture and John himself knew that this Elias who was to come would turn the hearts of the fathers, the Israelites, to the children, the Gentiles, and the hearts of the children to their fathers. Only after the coming of the Messiah and of the new covenant, after the true explanation of Jesus and Elias, this concluding prophecy of the Old Testament can be fulfilled. Then the true connection between the sower and the reaper of the kingdom of heaven will become clear, and the promised glorious future of Israel will come.'

1 Matt. xi. 14; Mal. iv. 2-6. The passage in Matt. xvi. 28 about Elias having come in John, though he denied it, we regard as non-historical, and as inserted to prevent Paul's state

This explanation, which distinguishes John from Elias, is contradicted by the testimony of the evangelist Luke. According to the same the angel is to have said to Zacharias, that John "shall be great in the sight of the Lord, he shall drink neither wine nor strong drink, and he shall be filled with the Holy Spirit, even from his mother's womb, and many of the children of Israel shall he turn to the Lord their God. And he shall go before him in the spirit and power of Elias, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just; to make ready a people prepared for the Lord." Farther on we shall have to inquire whether, and how, it may be explained that John, who was filled with the Holy Spirit, did not recognize Jesus as him that should come, as the Messiah, and that the latter regarded the Baptist, who baptized with water, and pointed to the future baptism of the Spirit, as less than the least in the kingdom of heaven.

Thus far we have come to the conclusion that the Law and the prophets until John did not refer to the doctrine of the Spirit of God's presence in

ment in Thess. iv. 15-17 from being made to imply that he regarded himself as he that should come "in the name of the Lord" as Elias, to whom Jesus was supposed (we think rightly) to have referred in his great prophecy about Israel's future (Matt. xxiii. 39).

1 Luke i. 15-17. We shall show farther on that Paul accepted the doctrines of the Baptist, and referred to the faith "which should afterward be revealed." If John was Elias, Paul had some reason to explain the "word from the Lord" as he did.

mankind, though this presence is testified in the Book of Job and in the "Zendavesta," in the record of extremely ancient oriental tradition. The MedoChaldeans, adherents to the Zoroastrian religion, seem to have introduced this doctrine on the Spirit of God into the land of the Euphrates and Tigris, about four centuries before Abraham was born there, who must have been brought up in this knowledge. The promise made to Abraham of a blessing for humanity was to be realized through the spiritual seed of the ingrafted Word. Jesus as the sower of the Word of God has begun to fulfil the Abrahamitic promise, he is the introducer of the new covenant. The stone which the builders, that is, Moses and the prophets, rejected, symbol of the Spirit in mankind, became by the preaching and life of Jesus the head- and corner-stone of his spiritual house, the stone which Daniel in his vision described as becoming a mountain and covering the earth.

JESUS AND SPIRIT-POWER.

We assume here as proved the connection of John the Baptist with the Jewish dissenters, the Essenes, and with their expectation of an AngelMessiah.' It follows that John expected an incarnate angel as messenger or angel of the promised new covenant. Therefore he could not be converted to the belief in Jesus as the Messiah by the message of the latter which two disciples conveyed to him in

1 See, for the proofs, l. c., i. 325 f., 333 f.

prison, as reply to his question, "Art thou he that shall come, or shall we look for another?" Wishing that John should not die in his doubt, Jesus referred him to the works which he and others did, as proofs that the kingdom of heaven had come. John must have known that Jesus designated these miracles as works of God through the Holy Spirit. For to the messengers of John he declared: "Go your way and make known to John what ye hear and see; the blind see and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and to the poor the Gospel is preached, and blessed is he whosoever shall not find any occasion of stumbling in me," or who is not "vexed because of me." This message would not lead John to the conviction that the incarnate angel whom he expected had come in Jesus. But these words, which no critic has regarded as unhistorical, testify to the general knowledge of inexplicable deeds by which Jesus had become famous, and which were regarded as miracles at or before the commencement of his public teaching.

This message confirms the statement in the gospels that, before the decapitation of the Baptist, Jesus had become known by extraordinary manifestations of Spirit-power, by "the Spirit of God," through which he did his marvellous works. According to the gospels, John heard in prison that Jesus, "full of the Holy Spirit," performed acts of healing which implied Spirit-power. He went about in all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, and preaching the Gospel of the kingdom, and healing all manner

of disease, and all manner of sickness among the people. And his fame went forth into all Syria, and they brought unto him all that were sick, holden with divers diseases and torments, possessed with devils, and epileptic and palsied, and he healed them." Here the glad tidings of the kingdom, that is, of the rule of the Spirit in man, are brought into direct connection with healings by Spirit-power. Also other Israelites, though not followers of Jesus, as already observed, could cast out devils by their faith in the power of this indwelling Spirit, in the "name" or Spirit of Jesus. But John, who denied the presence of the Holy Spirit in mankind, who regarded as future the baptism with the Spirit, and who therefore was less than the least in the kingdom of heaven which Jesus preached, could not do any such marvellous works, and it seems to have been for this reason that he was angry about the fame of Jesus. The tradition recorded in the gospels refers not in a single instance to performances by the Baptist of healings or similar inexplicable works as performed by Jesus.

Before the death of John, Jesus could point to his marvellous works, and yet none of them are mentioned in the gospels as having taken place at this time. Evidently not all well-accredited and generally known miracles of Jesus have been recorded. They were the more dangerous to the hierarchy because rightly or wrongly connected with what were called magic powers, which many seem to have possessed. Before we try to explain the miracles of Jesus as not supernatural, the connection.

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