We thus behold the Redeemer in His threefold office. To save man, He must assume man’s nature; to satisfy God’s justice, He must suffer and die. His whole life must be an example of obedience under each form of sorrow and trial. He must bear the weight of poverty, endure the sting of contempt. It was by enduring that He triumphed—it was by suffering that He saved! The lamb bleeding beneath the sacrificial knife; the rock smitten, that its gushing waters might give life to the perishing people; Isaac bound by his own father on the altar;—such were the types of Him who, sinless, bore the punishment of sin, and who passed to His everlasting kingdom from the torments of the cross and the darkness of the grave.
As this work is merely a sketch of the history of the Jews, I shall not attempt to introduce into its pages any account of the life of our Redeemer, or the miracles of mercy which He wrought. My office is to describe the political state of the land in which He deigned to appear; to record the crimes of its rulers; to place the dark background of history behind that glorious form which inspired pens have delineated in the Gospels.
The tyrant Herod had reigned about thirty-three years, when his court was startled by the tidings of the arrival of sages from the East, who had received from a heavenly sign notice of the birth of a mighty Ruler. “Where is He that is born King of the Jews?” was the anxious question of the pious travellers; “for we have seen His star in the east, and have come to worship Him.”
THE WISE MEN BEFORE HEROD.
The monarch of Judea well knew that the expectation of his people was eagerly fixed upon the coming of the Messiah; he must also have known that prophecy pointed towards this time for the Holy One’s appearance. The conduct of the tyrant showed that in the mysterious babe, born at [Bethlehem], he dreaded a rival. He sought information of the sages regarding the child, that he might quench in blood this dawning light of Israel. Being frustrated by the secret return of the sages to their own land, Herod determined to make sure of his horrible object by a more sweeping act of cruelty. He sent forth and slew all the children in Bethlehem and in the neighbouring coasts, from two years old and under, ruthlessly tearing the innocent little ones from the arms of their agonized mothers, and filling the land with the lamentations of parents weeping over their slaughtered offspring.
BETHLEHEM.
But it is in vain for man to fight against the decrees of God. An angel had appeared in a dream to Joseph, the babe’s reputed father, and warned him to [flee into Egypt] with the Virgin Mary, and her infant son. Thus every babe in Bethlehem was slain by the cruelty of Herod, save the one whose life he aimed at—the only one whom he cared to destroy.