Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER TWO. Opening Events. EANWHILE, John, the son of Zechariah and Elizabeth, was growing up in the seclusion of the wilderness. He dressed in camel's hair with a leathern girdle and lived on locust pods and wild honey. In the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, Herod of Galilee and his brother Philip of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Annas and Caiaphas were high priests, the call of Sovereign Love came to him. He went into the Jordan Valley and began to preach and to baptize. The burden of his message was, "Repent for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand!" Those that heeded his words, he baptized as a sign of the remission of their sin. Matthew 3: 1-12; Mark 1: 1-8; Luke 3: 1-20. All of this had been foretold by the prophet Isaiah, who said: HE. voice of one crying in the wilderness, Make ready the way of the Lord, Make his paths straight. Every valley shall be filled, And every mountain and hill brought low, The crooked shall be made straight, And the rough ways smooth, And all nations shall see the salvation of God." But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Saducees coming to his baptism, he said to them: "Oh, offspring of vipers, who has warned you to flee from the wrath to come? You must first bring forth the fruits of repentance. It will be no profit to you to claim Abraham as your father, for let me tell you, God is able of these very stones to raise up children to Abraham. Already the axe is at the foot of the tree and every tree that fails to yield good fruit will quickly be cut down and thrown into the fire." They asked him, "What must we do?" He replied, "He that has two coats, let him share with him who has none. He that has food, let him do the same." There were tax collectors that came to be bapt... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.