the
wise men's gifts would help to sustain their modest wants, and before
the day broke they were on their road. How strangely blended in our
Lord's life, from the very dawning, are dignity and lowliness, glory and
reproach! How soon His brows are crowned with thorns! The adoration of
the Magi witnesses to Him as the King of Israel and the hope of the
world. The flight of which that adoration was the direct cause witnesses
no less clearly to Him as despised and rejected, tasting sorrow in His
earliest food, and not having where to lay His head.

But the most important part of the story is the connection which Matthew
discerns between it and Hosea's words. In their original place they are
not a prophecy at all, but simply a part of a tender historical _resume_
of God's dealings with Israel, by which the prophet would touch his
contemporaries' hearts into penitence and trust. How, then, is the
evangelist justified in regarding them as prophetic, and in looking on
Christ's flight as their fulfilment? The answer is to be found in that
analogy between the national and the personal Israel which runs through
all the Old Testament, and reaches its greatest clearness in the second
part of Isaiah's prophecies. Jesus Christ was what Israel was destined
and failed to be, the true Servant of God, His Anointed, His Son, the
medium of conveying His name to the world. The ideal of the nation was
realised in Him. His brief stay in Egypt served the very same purpose in
His life which their four hundred years there did in theirs,--it
sheltered Him from enemies, and gave Him room to grow. Just as the
infant nation was unawares fostered in the very lap of the country which
was the symbol of the world hostile to God, so the infant Christ was
guarded and grew there. The prophecy is a prophecy just because it is
history; for the history was all a shadow of the future, and He is the
true Israel and the Son of God. It would have been fulfilled quite as
really, that is to say, the parallel between Christ and the nation would
have been as fully carried out, if His place of refuge had been in some
other land; but the precise outward identity helps to point the parallel
to unobservant eyes. The great truth taught by it of the typical
relation between the nation and the Person is the key to large regions
of Old Testament history and prophecy. Rightly, therefore, does Matthew
call our attention to this pregnant fact, and bid us see in the divine
sele