Matthew 11:11 Truly I say to you, Among them that are born of women there has not risen a greater than John the Baptist… Each generation is on higher ground than the last. Fathers, respect your children, they are older than you. Do people speak of me as some forty years of age, more or less? Nonsense. I Amos 6,000 years old, at least. I have in me the sum of the lives and consciousness of all who preceded me, and something new added besides. We are trees which, through the root, drink up the virtue of the soil around them — soil made up of the buried generations of trees — and bring forth also something new in their own fruit and flower. In the light of this, what business have we to be always looking to the past, as if there were nothing of goodness or value in the world but what is hundreds and thousands of years old:' You get people who, in religion, are nothing if not antiquarian. If Quakers, they think there were never such days as those of George Fox; if Methodists, there will never be the like again of John Wesley and his fellows; if Churchmen, they grope about amongst the fathers, and hold that wisdom and worth died with them. This is a wrong mood of mind. We want to take in all our predecessors can teach us: hut, oh, if we have faith in the living God we shall have belief in the boundless possibilities also, of the present and of the future. Man is going on. He is pushed up from behind. He is drawn up from above. Yes [ John is mighty in his generation. But those who come after are higher than he. Onward, upward l Oh, that we may not hinder the progress in ourselves, but spread every sail, stretch every stitch of canvas to the breeze that bears us along to the celestial country! (J. Brierley, B. A.) Parallel Verses KJV: Verily I say unto you, Among them that are born of women there hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist: notwithstanding he that is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he. |
    |