afterwards identified with Jewish national aspirations and early Christian teaching. His life, however, is a record of self-indulgence and of failure. With more honesty of purpose he might have ruled as a loyal and unbending servant of Rome; with more courage he might himself have raised the standard of revolt; with a higher conception of life and more spiritual earnestness he might have listened to and obeyed the teaching of the Baptist; but, crafty and unstable in all his ways, he lost the respect of his people; he literally murdered the religious force and love which might have saved him, and finally, losing the confidence of Rome, was banished, with his kinswoman and so-called wife Herodias, to the distant city of Lyons.

As a boy we are told that he was brought up with Manaen, who afterwards became one of the great Christian teachers of Antioch (Acts xiii. 1). This may have some historical significance, as Antioch (as well as Ephesus) is said to have sent missions to Gaul in apostolic times. He had visited Rome and the Imperial Court before assuming his delegated sovereignty, and it is perhaps more than probable that his steward Chuza and the centurion-governor (both mentioned in the Gospels) came with him on returning to his province.

Later on, he and his wife Herodias came into immediate and startling relation with John the Baptist. The latter reproved the king for taking Herodias as his wife, and was consequently cast into prison. Here he was beheaded by the order of Herod at the instigation of Herodias.

The crime was no secret one, but committed in the full light of a public festivity, and all the gruesome details must have been fully known to the officers of the household, the servants and the assembled guests. The memory of it seems to have darkened all the future life of the king; while his people, who honoured the Baptist as a prophet from God, must have regarded the murder as a

sinister and ominous incident in the reign of their ruler.

Full of a superstitious remorse and fear, we read that when Herod heard of the ministry of the Saviour he said, "This is John the Baptist who is risen from the dead" (Matt. xiv. 2). On his final banishment such a mind and temperament could hardly fail to carry into exile the memory of his sin and connect it in some way with the darkness and misfortune of his closing days.

Such was the ruler and such the people of Galilee at the coming of the Saviour. Such, broadly and briefly, is the Galilean frame or setting from which emerge, as from a picture, the faces of the early disciples "called to be saints."

At the coming of the Saviour we find all the known members of His "family" already identified with the national party, and especially with that highest conception of it realised in the person and mission of John the Baptist.

St. John the Baptist was His second cousin, James and John, the sons of Zebedee, were second cousins also, their mother Salome, or Mary Salome, being (like Elizabeth) first cousin to the Blessed Virgin, while, according to Hegesippus, Cleopas, who married another Mary (" Mary the wife of Cleopas") was the brother of St. Joseph, and though his children would have no direct or blood relationship with our Lord, in the eyes of the world around Him they would have the nearest relationship, and these-James the Less, Simon Zelotes, and Judas Lebbæus, or Thaddeus-are sometimes more especially called "His brethren." In St. John's Gospel (John xix. 25) Mary, the wife of Cleopas, is directly called the sister of the Blessed Virgin.

Zacharias and Elizabeth, the parents of St. John the Baptist, and Joseph, the husband of the Blessed Virgin Mary, appear to have died before our Lord began His ministry; Zacharias, according to Arabic and Greek tradition, having been assassinated within the Temple courts because of his belief in the Miraculous Conception of the Virgin Mary. According to the same tradition our Lord refers to him in the 35th verse of the 23rd chapter of St. Matthew's Gospel, "From the blood of righteous Abel unto the blood of Zacharias son of Barachias, whom ye slew between the temple and the altar." His son, St. John the Baptist, was at the height of his reputation and mission when the public life of our Saviour was just beginning.

At this time Andrew and another disciple (presumably John the Evangelist) were already disciples of St. John the Baptist, and on that memorable morning, when the Baptist saw our Lord, and pointed Him out to His disciples, saying, "Behold, the Lamb of God!" (John i. 36), these followed Jesus, and at His invitation went home with Him and spent the day at His house. So at the very outset of His ministry we find our Lord surrounded first by the members and relatives of His own family, and secondly by their immediate friends, all, or nearly all, being known followers and disciples of St. John the Baptist. And of these friends the first to claim our attention are Peter and Andrew, who were partners with James and John, and Zebedee (their father) in a small fishing fleet on the Lake of Galilee. It is hardly correct, perhaps, to think and speak of them as "poor fishermen." They had at least two large boats, or "ships" as these are termed in our Testaments, and in the first chapter of St. Mark's Gospel, when Jesus called James and John to follow Him, we read, "they left their father Zebedee in the ship with the hired servants and went after Him."

From the use made of these ships, too, for long journeys and for night fishing, it is evident that they must have been of considerable size, and that in all probability some of the most important fishing of the lake was done by the men of these two families and the fishermen they employed to assist them in their work.

These partners of the brothers James and John (Andrew and Peter) had their friends also, notably Philip and Nathaniel, and these soon joined the circle of disciples. To each one came the Divine call, clear and unmistakable, and each was obedient to the Voice that called him; but simple human ties of family love and friendship were, then as now, the cords by which their hearts were drawn to the Eternal Love who dwelt among them, and it was the illuminating power of the human love that was in them that opened their eyes to behold His glory-" the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth."

At the time the main narrative of the Gospel opens Andrew and Peter and Philip are living at Bethsaida (John i. 44 and 45), one of the cities on the Lake of Galilee. James and John (the Evangelist) are almost necessarily their neighbours. Mary, the sinner (afterwards known as Mary Magdalene), is at her house in Magdala; St. John the Baptist is baptizing at Bethabara beyond Jordan; Nathaniel is probably living at Cana (John xxi. 2), the little town of the wedding feast and first miracle, while our Lord is still living at Nazareth with His mother and so-called "brethren."

If we take a rough map of the Lake of Galilee with the River Jordan running through it, we see that Capernaum is seated towards the northern aspect of the lake, Magdala about midway on its western border, and Bethsaida between the two. Cana lies to the west, about twelve miles off, and Nazareth five miles further still.

The exact locality of Bethabara (the House of the Ford), called Bethbarah in Judges, and Bethany by Edersheim, is uncertain; but it appears to have been below the southern boundary of the lake at the natural ford of the Jordan where the river can be crossed without a boat. It is not improbable, indeed, that there was more than one Bethabara-wherever there was a ford, the house of the ford might rightly be termed Bethbarahbut the place certainly given this name was the village, a resting-place exactly opposite Jericho, from which the Israelites started on their first entrance into the land of Canaan. It was probably here at the old fording-place (Bethabara) that John the Baptist began his ministry, and all classes appear to have been attracted by his preaching. It would even appear that his mission, although essentially a national one, did not altogether exclude those who belonged to another race, for there is some reason to believe that a few foreigners— and notably some Greeks from Ephesus-were admitted by St. John as his disciples. All who were so admitted, whether Jews or Gentiles, were "baptized in Jordan confessing their sins."

From the fact that it was at Bethabara beyond Jordan where John was baptizing-quite possibly at the old Bethbarah immediately facing Jericho, where the Israelites had crossed from the wilderness into Canaan, and that our Lord is described as "going or coming up out of the water" when the Holy Ghost descended upon Him— one cannot help wondering if this baptism of St. John did not essentially consist (after solemn confession of sin) of a ceremonial passage of the Jordan and a re-entry into the land of Canaan? St. John the Baptist stood on the farther or "wilderness" side of Jordan, and those who came to him confessing their sins-not only their own sins but the sins of their nation-may have been solemnly