that listened to his voice, awed into silence by Jor dan's side -we hear of them no more. Herod heard John gladly—did much good by reason of his influence. What was all that worth? The prophet comes to himself in a dungeon, and wakes to the bitter conviction, that his influence had told much in the way of commanding attention, and even winning reverence, but very little in the way of gaining souls; the bitterest, the most crushing discovery, in the whole circle of ministerial experience. All this was seeming failure. And this, brethren, is the picture of almost all human life. To some moods, and under some aspects, it seems, as it seemed to the psalmist, "Man walketh in a vain shadow, and disquieteth himself in vain." Go to any church-yard, and stand ten minutes among the grave-stones; read inscription after inscription, recording the date of birth and the date of death of him who lies below,-all the trace which myriads have left behind of their having done their day's work on God's earth, that is failure seems so. Cast the eye down the columns of any commander's despatch, after a general action. The men fell by thousands; the officers, by hundreds. Courage, high hope, self-devotion, ended in smoke-forgotten by the time of the next list of slain; that is the failure of life once more. Cast your eye over the shelves of a public library. There is the hard toil of years, the product of a life of thought; all that remains of it is there in a worm-eaten folio, taken down once in a century. Failure of human life, again. Stand by the most enduring of all human labors, the pyramids of Egypt. One hundred thousand men, year by year, raised those enormous piles to protect the corpses of the buried from rude inspection.

The spoiler's hand has been there, and the bodies have been rifled from their mausoleum, and three thousand years have written" failure" upon that. In all that, my Christian brethren, if we look no deeper than the surface, we read the grave of human hope, the appa rent nothingness of human labor.

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And then look at this history once more. In the isolation of John's dying hour, there appears failure again. When a great man dies, we listen to hear what he has to say; we turn to the last page of his biog raphy. first, to see what he had to bequeath to the world as his experience of life. We expect that the wisdom which he has been hiving up for years will distil in honeyed sweetness then. It is generally not so. There is stupor and silence at the last. "How dieth the wise man?" asks Solomon; and he answers bitterly," As the fool." The martyr of truth dies privately in Herod's dungeon. We have no record of his last words. There were no crowds to look on. We cannot describe how he received his sentence. Was he calm? Was he agitated? Did he bless his murderer? Did he give utterance to any deep reflections on human life? All that is shrouded in silence. He bowed his head, and the sharp stroke fell flashing down. We know that, we know no more apparently a noble life abortive.

And now let us ask the question distinctly, Was all this, indeed, failure? No, my Christian brethren, it was sublimest victory. John's work was no failure; he left behind him no sect to which he had given his name, but his disciples passed into the service of Christ, and were absorbed in the Christian Church. Words from John had made impressions, and men for

got in after years where the impressions first came from; but the day of judgment will not forget. John laid the foundations of a temple, and others built upon it. He laid it in a struggle, in martyrdom. It was covered up like the rough masonry below ground; but when we look round on the vast Christian Church, we are looking at the superstructure of John's toil.

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There is a lesson for us in all that, if we will learn it. Work, true work, done honestly and manfully for Christ, never can be a failure. Your own work, my brethren, which God has given you to do, whatever that is, let it be done truly. Leave eternity to show that it has not been in vain in the Lord. Let it but be work, it will tell. True Christian life is like the march of a conquering army into a fortress which has been breached. Men fall by hundreds in the ditch. Was their fall a failure? Nay, for their bodies bridge over the hollow, and over them the rest pass on to victory. The quiet religious worship that we have this day how comes it to be ours? It was purchased for us by the constancy of such men as John, who freely gave their lives. We are treading upon a bridge of martyrs. The suffering was theirs the victory ours. John's career was no failure. Yet we have one more circumstance which seems to tell of failure. In John's prison, solitude, misgiving, black doubt, seem for a time to have taken possession of the prophet's soul. All that we know of those feelings is this: John, while in confinement, sent two of his disciples to Christ, to say to him, "Art thou He that should come, or do we look for another?". Here is the language of painful uncertainty. We shall not marvel at this, if we look steadily at the circumstances.

Let us conceive John's feelings. The enthusiastic child of Nature, who had roved in the desert, free as the air he breathed, is now suddenly arrested, and his strong, restless heart limited to the four walls of a narrow dungeon. And there he lay startled. An eagle cleaving the air with motionless wing, and in the midst of his career brought from the black cloud by an arrow to the ground; and looking round with his wild, large eye, stunned, and startled there, just such was the free prophet of the wilderness, when Herod's guards had curbed his noble flight, and left him alone in his dungeon. Now, there is apparent failure here, brethren; it is not the thing which we should have expected. We should have expected that a man who had lived so close to God all his life would have no misgivings in his last hours. But, my brethren, it is not so. It is the strange truth that some of the highest of God's servants are tried with darkness on the dying bed. Theory would say, when a religious man is laid up for his last struggles, now he is alone for deep communion with his God. Fact very often says, "No-now he is alone, as his Master was before him, in the wilderness to be tempted of the devil." Look at John in imagination, and you would say, "Now his rough pilgrimage is done. He is quiet, out of the world, with the rapt foretaste of heaven in his soul." Look at John in fact. He is agitated, sending to Christ, not able to rest, grim doubt wrestling with his soul, misgiving for one last black hour whether all his hope has not been delusion. There is one thing wei remark here, by the way. Doubt often comes from inactivity. We cannot give the philosophy of it, but this is the fact, Christians who have nothing to do

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but to sit thinking of themselves, meditating, sentimentalizing, are almost sure to become the prey of dark, black misgivings. John struggling in the desert needs no proof that Jesus is the Christ. John shut up became morbid and doubtful'immediately. Brethren, all this is very marvellous. The history of a human soul is marvellous. We are mysteries, but here is the practical lesson of it all. For sadness, for suffering, for misgiving, there is no remedy but stirring and doing.

Now, look once more at these doubts of John's. All his life long, John had been wishing and expecting that the kingdom of God would come. The kingdom of God is Right triumphant over Wrong, moral evil crushed, goodness set up in its place, the true man recognized, the false man put down and forgotten. All his life long, John had panted for that; his hope was to make men better. He tried to make the soldiers merciful, and the publicans honest, and the Pharisees sincere. His complaint was, Why is the world the thing it is? All his life long, he had been appealing to the invisible justice of Heaven against the visible brute force which he saw around him. Christ had ap peared, and his hopes were straining to the utmost. "Here is the Man!" And now, behold, here is no Kingdom of Heaven at all, but one of darkness still, oppression and cruelty triumphant, Herod putting God's prophet in prison, and the Messiah quietly let ting things take their course. Can that be indeed Messiah? All this was exceedingly startling. And it seems that then John began to feel the horrible doubt whether the whole thing were not a mistake, and whether all that which he had taken for inspiration