hey
endured; how they were delivered; and above all what ideals of
righteousness and truth and mercy they cherished, and how they came to
think and feel about God. It makes little difference to us what
particular idler at any particular time sat in the palace at Jerusalem
sending forth tax-collectors to raise funds for his luxuries. It is of
very great interest and concern to us if there were daughters like
Ruth in the barley fields of Bethlehem, if shepherds tended their
flocks in that same country who were so fine in heart and simple in
faith that to them or their children visions of angels might appear
telling of a Saviour of the world. On such as these, in this study,
let us as far as possible fix our attention.

CHAPTER I

SHEPHERDS ON THE BORDER OF THE DESERT

Ancient Arabia is the home of that branch of the white race known as
the Semitic. Here on the fertile fringes of well-watered land
surrounding the great central desert lived the Phoenicians, the
Assyrians, the Babylonians, and the Canaanites who, before the
Hebrews, inhabited Palestine. So little intermixing of races has there
been that the Arabs of to-day, like those of the time of Abraham, are
Semites.

The Hebrew people are an offshoot of this same Semitic group. They
began their career as a tribe of shepherds on the border of the north
Arabian desert. The Arab shepherds of to-day, still living in tents
and wandering to and fro on the fringes of the settled territory of
Palestine, or to the south and west of Bagdad, represent almost
perfectly what the wandering Hebrew shepherds used to be.

The Arabs of to-day are armed with rifles, whereas Abraham's warriors
cut down their enemies with bronze swords. Otherwise, in customs,
superstitions, and even to some extent in language, the modern desert
Arabs may stand for the ancient Hebrews in their earliest period. They
were nomads with no settled homes. Every rainy season they led out
their flocks into the valleys where the fresh green of the new grass
was crowding back the desert brown. All through the spring and early
summer they went from spring to spring, and from pasture to pasture
seeking the greenest and tenderest grass. Then as the dry season came
on and the barren waste came creeping back they also worked their way
back toward the more settled farm lands, until autumn found them
selling their wool to the nearby farmers and townspeople in exchange
for wheat and barley and some of the other