John the Baptist was the fulfilment of that of Elijah in 'the fulness of time.'

For, alike in the Roman world and in Palestine, the time had fully come; not, indeed, in

the sense of any special expectancy, but of absolute need. The reign of Augustus marked,

not only the climax, but the crisis, of Roman history. Whatever of good or of evil the

ancient world contained, had become fully ripe. As regarded politics, philosophy,

religion, and society, the utmost limits had been reached.1 Beyond them lay, as only

alternatives, ruin or regeneration. It was felt that the boundaries of the Empire could be

no further extended, and that henceforth the highest aim must be to preserve what had

been conquered. The destinies of Rome were in the hands of one man, who was at the

same time general- in-chief of a standing army of about three hundred and forty thousand

men, head of a Senate (now sunk into a mere court for registering the commands of

Cæsar), and High -Priest of a religion, of which the highest expression was the apotheosis

of the State in the person of the Emperor. Thus, all power within, without, and above lay

in his hands. Within the city, which in one short reign was transformed from brick into

marble, were, side by side, the most abject misery and almost boundless luxury. Of a

population of about two millions, well- nigh one half were slaves; and, of the rest, the

greater part either freedmen and their descendants, or foreigners. Each class contributed

its share to the common decay. Slavery was not even what we know it, but a seething

mass of cruelty and oppression on the one side, and of cunning and corruption on the

other. More than any other cause, it contributed to the ruin of Roman society. The

freedmen, who had very often acquired their liberty by the most disreputable courses, and

had prospered in them, combined in shameless manner the vices of the free with the

vileness of the slave. The foreigners - especially Greeks and Syrians - who crowded the

city, poisoned the springs of its life by the corruption which they brought. The free

citizens were idle, dissipated, sunken; their chief thoughts of the theatre and the arena;

and they were mostly supported at the public cost. While, even in the time of Augustus,

more than two hundred thousand persons were thus maintained by the State, what of the

old Roman stock remained was rapidly decaying, partly from corruption, but chiefly from

the increasing cessation of marriage, and the nameless abominations of what remained of

family- life.

The state of the provinces was in every respect more favourable. But it was the settled

policy of the Empire, which only too surely succeeded, to destroy all separate

nationalities, or rather to absorb and to Grecianise all. The only real resistance came from

the Jews. Their tenacity was religious, and, even in its extreme of intolerant

exclusiveness, served a most important Providential purpose. And so Rome became to all

the centre of attraction, but also of fast-spreading destructive corruption. Yet this unity

also, and the common bond o f the Greek language, served another important Providential

purpose. So did, in another direction, the conscious despair of any possible internal

reformation. This, indeed, seemed the last word of all the institutions in the Roman

world: It is not in me! Religion, philosophy, and society had passed through every stage,