“From this arose the custom,” says the quaint old author I have already quoted, “which the church observes in processions, of leaving the church by one road and returning to it by another. By this it would be well that all Christians should learn from the Magi not only to see Christ, but having found Him again, even though they had lost Him, to return by a different way from the other; because if at first they walked in the ways of sin, they should return to it by the ways of holiness; and in this country they will arrive at the true country, which is heaven.”
The Arrival of the Three Kings.
Painting by Bernardo Luini.
When Herod found that the three kings had returned home without fulfilling their promise to him he was greatly wroth. It was then that he issued his edict commanding that all children under the age of two years should be put to death. He hoped that the Messiah would be slaughtered among the rest. But, as the New Testament tells us, the Holy Family received a special warning from heaven and fled into Egypt before the emissaries of wicked King Herod could reach them.
As to the three kings, when they had arrived, each at his own capital, they cast aside their royal robes and abandoned their royal state. Giving all their goods to the poor they wandered about the earth announcing that the Savior of man had been born in Bethlehem.
Seven years after the death of Christ upon the cross the wise men were found in India by Saint Thomas, once the doubting disciple, now become firm in the faith, and an apostle to the East. Saint Thomas baptized them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, and they too became missionaries of the gospel. In the end they fell martyrs for their faith and their bodies were all buried together outside the walls of Jerusalem.
Three hundred years passed away. Then Saint Helena, mother of the Emperor Constantine, made her famous pilgrimage to Palestine. Though she was quite eighty years of age she was still full of life and vigor. All her time and energies she devoted to the discovery of early Christian remains. She is credited with the finding of the cross on which Christ suffered and the tomb in which He was buried.
She also identified the tomb of the Three Kings and carried their bodies away with her, on her return journey to Constantinople, to re-bury them in the church of Saint Sophia. Later the remains were transferred to Milan and later still to Cologne. There they are still shown, in a side chapel of the great Cathedral, lying in a golden shrine—their grinning skulls girt with golden crowns, and their skeleton bodies clad in royal purple, bedecked with jewels of enormous value.
This is the story of the Three Kings as it is related all over Europe. In the Latin countries and in Russia, an episode is added which is unknown in other lands.
On their way from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, so this added legend runs, the three kings came across an old woman who was cleaning up her house.