Such washing was the manner in which the Jews
accepted their proselytes, as they called the strangers who embraced the
Law. The great purpose of the Old Covenant was accomplished when John,
having made his followers feel all the weight of their sins against the
Commandments, pointed out Him whom he had already baptized, and said,
"Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world!" A few
faithful Galileans followed and believed, and miracles began to testify
that here was indeed the Christ, the Prophet like to Moses, giving bread
to the hungry, eyes to the blind, feet to the lame. Decreasing as He
increased, John offended Herod Antipas by "boldly rebuking vice." This
Antipas had forsaken his own wife, the daughter of an Arabian king, and
had taken in her stead, his niece Herodias, the wife of his brother
Philip; and for bearing witness against this crime, John was thrown into
prison, and afterwards beheaded, to gratify the wicked woman and her
daughter, Salome. The Arab King avenged his daughter's wrongs by a war,
in which Antipas met with a great defeat.
Meanwhile, the Pharisees and Sadducees, their heads full of the
prophecies of greatness and deliverance, to which their minds gave a
temporal, not a spiritual meaning, grew more and more enraged at every
token that the lowly Nazarene was indeed the Saviour, the Hope of the
whole world.
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