Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, Vol. LVI: Augustini Epistulae Pars III

...who takes away the sins of the world, especially since he attained the highest peak of prophecy as a Baptist; a privilege, that He, to whom he had said: I ought to be baptized by you, was baptized by him, not out of the presumption of a superior, but out of the obedience of a disciple and servant-like fear. And when He asserts that among those born of women there has risen no one greater than John, He declares Himself—who was born of a virgin—to be greater, or that every angel, who is the least in heaven, surpasses all men on earth. For we progress toward the angels, and not the angels toward us, as certain men, dozing in the heaviest slumber, dream.

Nor is this sufficient in the praises of John, unless he himself, preaching the baptism of repentance, is reported to have been the first to say: Do penance, for the kingdom of heaven has drawn near. Whence, from the days of his preaching, the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, so that he who is born a man desires to be an angel, and a terrestrial animal seeks a heavenly dwelling. For the law and the prophets prophesied until John, not that John is the end of the prophets and the Law, but rather He who was preached by John’s testimony. John, however, according to the mystery which is written in Malachi, is himself Elias, who is to come; not that the same soul was in Elias and in John, as heretics suspect, but that he had the same grace of the Holy Spirit, girded with a belt like Elias, living in the desert like Elias, having suffered persecution from Herodias just as he endured it from Jezebel, so that, just as Elias is the forerunner of the second coming, so John is not only the herald of the Lord Savior coming in the flesh...