THE MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS. MATTHEW ii, 16-18. Thus saith Jehovah: A voice is heard in Ramah, Rachel weeping for her children; She refuseth to be comforted for her children, Because they are not. Jeremiah xxxi, 15. XVI. THE MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS. MATTHEW ii, 16-18. THE immense advance of modern civilization Gentleness of is in few things more strikingly manifest than in the difference between the manner in which a deed of blood affects us and the manner in which the same deed of blood would have affected our fathers. Let a massacre of children like Herod's be perpetrated in our day: the sickening details would be bulletined in every daily throughout the land, and all Christendom for a moment would quiver with horror. But such tragedies were so common in the centuries past that the perpetration of them excited little attention beyond the circle immediately involved. Go back to the age when Rome was mistress of the world and the Cæsar was master of Rome. What an age of arbitrary, irresponsible, absolute government; of imperial maim and dungeon; of secret strangulation and open massacre; of poison and cross. Look at Herod, at once tiger over Palestine and spaniel under Rome, wading through blood to his throne, inaugurating his reign with the massacre of the sanhedrin, murdering his own sons Antipater, Christian Aristobulus, and Alexander, and his own wife Mariamne; so that even the cold-blooded Augustus is said to have uttered concerning him the bitter witticism, "Better be Herod's swine than Herod's son"; and at last, if such a story can be true, commanding on his own death-bed as his final order that the principal Jews, whom he had shut up in the hippodrome of Jericho, should be massacred the moment that he died, in order that there might be at least some mourners at his funeral. What, then, though no contemporary of Herod except the biographer Matthew has told us the horror of Bethlehem's massacre! What was there so extraordinary in the killing of a few infants in the hamlet of Bethlehem, and by a butcher and hyena so notorious as Herod, that should move Josephus or any writer in that period to make special chronicle of it? The very silence here of contemporaneous history is in its way an awful testimony to the reign of barbarity and carnage. And if today a massacre, like that of Cawnpore or that by the Indian Modocs, sends a thrill of horror throughout Christendom; if the homicide of a drunken wretch in some obscure purlieu is gazetted the next morning in every journal from Newfoundland to Vancouver, and men talk of the awful depravity of our times-it is because Jesus Christ has been born into the world, and his ministers have preached the glad tidings of his love and peace. * Melius est Herodis porcum esse quam filium.—MACROBIUS. the Inno cents. And now let us go back for a moment to those Massacre of dark days. Herod the foreign, heathen, crafty, unscrupulous, despotic, bloodthirsty Herodis Matt. ii, 16. sitting on the throne of David. But he knows that his session is most precarious. For he holds that throne neither by right of election nor by right of inheritance, nor even by right of popular consent, but simply by right of usurpation, brute force, and favor of capricious Cæsar. He knows that that throne may at any moment crumble beneath him. Strange rumors, also, are now in the air-rumors of one who is to restore the throne to David's line. Not alone from Jewish Simeons Luke ii, 25–38. and Annas, looking for the consolation of Israel and the redemption of Jerusalem, but also from blind and sorrowful heathendom come breathings for and expectations of a heaven-sent deliverer, who shall take earth's kingdoms to himself and reign in universal and endless peace. Such utterances, passing from mouth to mouth, cause the Idumean usurper to tremble on his throne. And now, lo, from the far-off east come wayworn Matt. ii, 1, 2. Magian pilgrims, with the startling question: "Where is he that is born King of the Jews?” and with the no less startling announcement: "For we saw his star in the east, and are come to worship him." Consternation seizes Herod and his court. Son of Esau though he is, his relations with the sons of Jacob have made him somewhat familiar with their expectations of a Messiah as based on the sayings of their own prophets. How suddenly Herod convoked the sanhedrin, and in- Matt. ii, 3–15. quired of them where they expected their Mes |