victed of his plot to put his own father off the throne, was executed in regular course of justice.

Between the discovery of his plot and his execution there were seven months. In this interval it was that our Lord Christ was born.

And now there was entered on the page of history by the hand of Herod, one of those hideous crimes, one of those enormities in wickedness, that signalize the actor and the age, and make the ear of the world tingle at the recital.

For many years before the advent of Christ the Eastern world was filled with predictions and expectation of the coming of some wonderful personage. He was to come as a universal sovereign, and his kingdom was to be in bliss and righteousness. These predictions had many of them received a definite form and statement, and he who was to reign was constantly expected. The place of his birth was designated in some of these predictions as Judæa. So Tacitus records the feeling thus: "Many fully believed that there was a prediction in the ancient books of the priests, to be fulfilled about this time, that a people from Judæa should obtain the empire of the world." v. 13. And Suetonius has a similar remark. "An old and fixed notion prevailed in the East, that near this time men should spring up in Judæa and obtain universal empire." In Vesp. 4. Simon, Anna the prophetess, and the Jews generally, expected in this wonderful personage, the Messiah. And in their idea of his reign they gave undue prominence to temporal redemption and supremacy. The Romans, and other gentile nations, who had the expectations just quoted from their historians, were looking only for a new and strange worldly king.

In the midst of these predictions, impressions and general expectations, Christ our Lord is born at Bethlehem. The great fact is somewhat known, yet feebly apprehended and understood even by the most godly and believing of the Jews, and by those immediately connected with the families of Elizabeth and of Mary. Still the vague yet exciting thought that Shiloh had indeed come, goes abroad. It is at first as a pale light enveloped by mist and shut up by clouds in some deep valley. Slowly the rays go out, climbing the hillsides, and lighting up obscurely here and there a mountain height. Then eyes from afar that

had long been watching catch the bright vision. They hasten with offerings for him who is born King of the Jews. They make inquiries for him—a strange company of travellers from afar. They pass over hills in the very sight of Jerusalem and Herod's palace and ask for another heir to the throne of Judæa. "Where is he that is born King of the Jews?" How swiftly some spy whispers those words in the ear of Herod.

He is troubled, and all Jerusalem with him. He runs over the bloody list of Maccabean and Herodian relatives whom he had ordered to be put to death, to protect his crown. And now there is another born, King of the Jews. He learns the locality where the predicted and expected king is to be born. He calls the wise men, and with satanic hypocrisy speeds them in their search for the young child. "And when ye have found him bring me word again, that I may come and worship him also." How cool and deep and awful the purpose of this monster!

and

But God interposed. The wise men worshipped and departed under the guidance of the Almighty. The holy family, warned of God, fled into Egypt. Then the anger, and madness, and fears of Herod were stirred. His throne was in danger. The wise men had mocked him. The reputed infant king was not to be found. Couriers run to fro, but in vain. The infant Jesus could not be discovered. Many families in Bethlehem rejoiced over an infant, that was more to them than all Herod's gifts, and all Judæa's honors. Ignorant of the flight of Joseph and Mary, Herod thought that this prophetic heir to a throne must still be one of those little ones that made the hills and valleys of Bethlehem so joyous. joyous. Had human life ever baffled him in a project? Had the shedding of blood ever kept him from executing a wish? Was not his throne already surrounded by the graves of his kindred? Why then should the blood of infants make him waver in his purpose? Doubtless no whisper of conscience troubled him. The word went to make sure work. The sword followed, "and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in the coasts thereof, from two years old and under." Then "was there a voice heard, lamentation and weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted because they were not."

We see the bloody men, as they hurry from house to house. We see the terror stricken mothers as they try to flee or to hide away their children. We hear the unconscious cry of the concealed little one, and the shriek of the mother that follows the discovery, and mingles with the dying moans of her babe. We see stout men who have fathers' hearts stand nobly by their children, and make their spears red with the blood of the hireling murderers. Yet all in vain. The eagle swoops upon the nestling brood and is away, and they are gone. Another day, and what sorrow among those hills of Bethlehem, what burial services, what lonely cottages, and what burning, bitter thoughts of Herod.

Strength fails

What a fact this awful tragedy to stand connected with the holy child Jesus, and with the man Christ Jesus. Very like in later days his remembrance of this gave a peculiar tenderness and earnestness to his manner and words with the little children. But we change the place and the scene. We leave Bethlehem for Jericho. An old man of seventy years lies there in a palace hall. Terrible diseases are on him. He has been to the hot baths beyond Jordan, but without benefit. him and he pauses short of Jerusalem in the return. His indomitable courage still abides, and his iron will is unbroken. He knows that he must die, and he knows too that all Judæa and Idumæa and Samaria will break forth into singing when it is proclaimed, Herod is dead. Swept on by a passion for iniquity on a scale beyond all former enormities in crime, he summons to him all the chief men of his kingdom, as if for counsel and state purposes, and then shuts them up under guard in the amphitheatre. Then he calls Salome his sister, that goddess of discord, and says: 'I will have mourning when I die. So soon as the breath leaves my body, turn loose the soldiery upon these my chief men, and put them all to death. Then shall there be weeping in all my realm, when it is said, Herod is dead.' But little latent remnant of humanity kept her from executing this atrocious command.

Now God's hand pressed more and more heavily on the giant sinner, crowding him into eternity. A slow fever burned within him. Ulcers ate his bowels and filled him with agonies. His limbs swelled and burst in dropsy. Sores that bred worms

wasted him. A foulness of breath kept attendants at a distance. Paroxysms and convulsions worried and tortured him. "Thus," says Josephus, "he died, in horrible pain and torment, smitten of God in this signal and grievous manner, for his many enormous iniquities."

ARTICLE III.

FAITH A SOURCE OF KNOWLEDGE.

HAVE we no medium of vision save these material organs of sight? Can we perceive nothing but that which comes to us through the discernment of the understanding alone? We look around on the outlying world: we send our investigating powers on excursions to distant ages and climes for knowledge. Is this all our resource? Are we shut up within these limits of instruction inexorably? May we learn nothing which cannot be mastered by the senses, the bare and naked intellect? It would pitiably narrow in our horizon to affirm this. There is a higher avenue of truth, there are loftier objects of knowledge to the spiritual man, than these. That avenue is Faith; those objects are the revelations of God which transcend, in parts of their projection and elevation, the entire comprehension of the finite.

But what is faith; what is it not? It is not superstition. It is not credulity. It is neither the weakness of first nor second childishness. Its absence is not the ascendancy of reason, the proof of manly thought. Just the reverse is often the fact. Extreme scepticism and credulousness are quite natural associates. The freest-thinking is frequently the most puerile. Prof. Trench has an excellent remark concerning Dives in the parable:

"His unbelief shows itself again in supposing that his brethren would give heed to a ghost, while they refused to give heed to the sure word of God-to Moses and the prophets. For it is of the

very essence of unbelief, that it gives that credence to portents and prodigies which it refuses to the truth of God. Caligula, who mocked at the existence of the gods, would hide himself under a bed when it thundered; and superstition and incredulity are evermore twin brothers" !*

So men now will run after half-crazed "spirit-rappers," who laugh to scorn the idea that holy men of old "spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost," and that these Scriptures are those divine words. Let us at the outset get rid of the notion that faith is mental imbecility, and its absence mental strength.

Christian belief does not require our assent to any palpable absurdity. It does not, for example, lay it upon our conscience to hold that, by a few spoken words, a man can turn a little cake of flour and water into the body, soul and divinity of Jesus Christ. When, at the sacramental feast, our Lord took the bread and said, "This is my body," it is not true that he meant to affirm an exact identity of substance between that bread and the hand which held it; or that he designed his church to believe that the holy eucharist is a literal consumption of his flesh and blood. By a constant miracle of power, even this might be possible. But all of God's miracles are those of wisdom as well as of omnipotence. This could not be the former. It could subserve no morally valuable end. It would simply be stupendous folly, a monstrous absurdity. To attempt to accredit its reality would be an effort of superstition, not of faith.

Nor does this challenge our assent to impossibilities. It makes no part of its creed that the Divine nature is a trinity with respect to the same facts and relations which constitute it a unity. It tells us not that God is able to be or to do what, in the nature of things, can neither be nor be done. He cannot be true and false, honest and dishonest; cannot govern a moral being by merely physical laws; cannot make wrong right, or the reverse. To strive to give him such ability is to confer on him no honor. He asks no such faith, as he claims no such sovereignty. God respects the limitations of the possible. Whatever can be accomplished he can effect. To believe more than this is not Christian belief.

Nor is this to concede what flatly contradicts reason. Within

Trench on the Parables," pp. 368-369.