“‘Neither durst any man from that day forth ask Him any more questions.’
“Had He denied the necessity of Davidic origin they could have overwhelmed Him with Scriptures. Had he not been of that family the most ignorant Jew would have promptly rejected His claims to being the Hope of Israel.
“Peter the apostle, amid the soul-trying solemnities of Pentecost, speaking to the representatives of people from all parts of the earth and for all time, cried: ‘Men and brethren, let me freely speak unto you concerning the Patriarch David: Being a prophet, and knowing God had sworn with an oath to him that of the fruit of his loins, according to the flesh, he would raise up Christ to sit on his throne.’
“This orator spoke then with the accuracy of one in the presence of the Holy Ghost, and not only made sincere, but illuminated, by the torch of God. This is conclusive, but the reiteratives of the inspired writers justify us in presenting their cumulative evidence.
“After Peter comes the learned Hebrew of the Hebrews, Paul; before his conversion to Christianity declaring himself to have been ‘after the most straightest sect a Pharisee;’ after that conversion, rejoicing to the end of life, as of the true, new Israel by faith in Him that makest all new.
“Twice Paul met Mary’s son mysteriously, face to face, within the very confines of Glory. Let Paul speak: ‘Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, separated unto the gospel of God, concerning His Son, our Lord, which was made of the seed of David according to the flesh!’
“Let us not longer make a mock of eternal, holy verities! Christ was of David’s flesh through His mother, and born to be a real king of a real kingdom, not a phantom kingdom! That kingdom must come; yea, blessed be Jehovah! it is coming.
“Joseph, the putative father of Jesus, adopted Jesus as his son, but he could not, by that legal act, make his foster son, whose father was the Holy Spirit of the seed of David, after the flesh! Jesus received, then, His royal blood from Mary, and bore His Kingly title after the flesh as ‘the crown wherewith his mother crowned Him.’ Revelations harmonize; Luke and Matthew must therefore agree with Paul and Peter.
“The tables of Luke and Matthew agree down to David’s time, but then they diverge, until they are converged in Jesus, through the undoubted legitimacy of Mary as a descendant of David and the adoption of Jesus by Joseph, a scion of another branch of the same great family. Luke gives a sentence, all luminous, but first puzzling: ‘Jesus himself began to be about thirty years of age, being, as was supposed, the son of Joseph, which was the son of Heli.’ ‘Ah, as was supposed!’ sneers the infidel. ‘As was supposed! supposed!!’ hatefully shouts some insinuating, ignorant Jews! But now let us fill out, naturally, Luke’s statement, ‘as was supposed, the son of Joseph, but in reality the son of Heli.’ But here it may be asked, was Jesus the son of Heli? It is, I answer, not infrequently in the Scriptures that a grandson is called a son. Jesus was probably the grandson of Heli. It was a common custom of the Jews, except in cases of especial necessity, not to record the names of women in tracing lines of descent. Men kept the books, and it had become a habit with the lords of creation to thrust woman into the background. Mary was too insignificant a person, socially considered, in her time, to be registered in her own name in the hereditary charters. Joseph was put in her stead, as her representative. There was not any supposition about the descent of Mary, but these scribes, who had charge of the books, thought it were more creditable to the male sex to record Joseph as the father of Jesus, and, by a little fiction, suppose him to have descended through the former from Heli, than to say Mary descended from Heli and Jesus descended from Mary. The Romans encouraged this, and also the politicians. Men were the only ones to fight or pay taxes, and, as political factors, were strictly watched by those in authority. Luke, in reality, gives Mary’s line. He was scholarly and accurate, besides that a physician, and we judge by all experience that there is that in the profession of medicine which makes its followers tender toward all suffering, consequently especially tender to women, the largest inheritors of the pains that beset our race. Doctor Luke, like those of his fraternity, by an act of graceful justice, in the spirit of Christianity which is essentially humane, just, and courtly, accorded gladly the woman her place. But the ‘doomsday books’ of the Jews, containing their family trees or genealogies, perished with the perishing of the Jewish nation. Those records had done their work; it was time for them to go. They had become by misuse agencies of evil. They stood long enough to demonstrate that God works through cycles vastly wide, and that His definite promise made to Adam, Abraham and many of their successors, had finally been fulfilled, at the end of thousands of years, with a miraculous explicitness. The records disappeared after Christ came, and herein was a providence saying to the watchers: ‘He is come. No need further of the patents of His ancestry to aid your watching.’ More than that, they being gone, no other could arise claiming to be Shiloh, with hope of convincing any by appeal to proof from the records of ancestry.