“But there is another line running backward, preserved through the centuries to connect the first Adam with this last one. This line runs from Christ through his mother to Eden. Behold the august truth suspended by that chain of names! Names; only names of the dead! names of the forgotten! Jesus by Mary is linked to the chain! It’s an old, old chain, but yet it has gems in its links. Each named is the child of another living before, and the history of each is recorded in two words, ‘begat,’ ‘died.’ A chain of dust! One man precedes another. Each in turn vanishes until immortality is confronted in the last sentence: ‘Adam, who was the son of God!’ The first mortal son of God uncrowned and led away from his kingdom, by a woman, to death! The twain go down together, each ruinous to the other, with nothing left them but a hope; and that hope rested upon a to them mysterious promise: ‘The seed of the woman shall crush the head of the serpent!’ It would have staggered their faith had one told them that in God’s revenges, all compensating, all healing, she that led down was of the sex that should lead upward. Out of their darkness there came a seeming dawn, and Eve cried ecstatically at the birth of Cain:
‘I have gotten a man from the Lord!’
“They thought he was a token of renewed favor and probably the redeemer from the curse. He turned out a murderer, and introduced them to the supreme horror of humanity—death. The conflict of light and darkness went on, and the first pair tasted death themselves, looking along the horizon of unrealized hopes to the last and waiting, as all their posterity through painful centuries waited, for the Man that was to save. The long years with leaden tread marched on, struggles amid suffering weighty and countless, accompanied the race; of them all woman bore the heavier part, but she kept somehow the larger hope. Each Jewish mother, with a pride of sex secretly cherished, watched and longed for the coming from herself of the ONE who was to lift her up and crown her queen, indeed.
“God at last gathered all woman’s trustful hopings into one great answered prayer, and deigning, in sovereign love, His marvelous co-operation, brought forth another and a perfect Adam.
“We are informed that Joseph and Mary went, about the time of Jesus’ birth, in compliance with Roman law, to Bethlehem to pay their personal taxes. The Roman tax lists were based upon the records of family descent so far as concerned the Jews.
“To make the collection certain beyond the possibility of any one’s escape, the law required each taxable subject to pay his allotted tribute in the city of his nativity. The father and mother of Jesus were cited to the city of David. Thither they went. And so in the providence of God it happened that pagan Rome was summoned to the cradle of the infant Savior and made unwittingly an attester to all time that He was of a family by right recorded among those descended from great David.
“The son and the mother here stand or fall together. If Mary was not of David’s line, then the Son she bore was not, and He is left without proof of being of the seed of David.
“Joseph was not the father of the Christ after the flesh. The lives of mother and son are eternally intertwined. If we honor one we must needs honor the other; abating the fame of one we degrade the other.
“Jesus’ claims to being the Messiah depended upon the fact that His mother was of the tribe and family royal. The absolute requirements of prophecy can only be met in the Messiah by His being of the House of David. Jesus himself admitted and fairly met this necessity. So he questioned the Pharisees: ‘What think ye of Christ? Whose son is he?’ ‘They say unto him, the Son of David.’ Admitting this, the Savior propounded the question involving sonship and spiritual unity with God which His questioners could not answer:
“‘If David then call him Lord, how is he son?’