ction of the place where the young life of God manifest in the flesh
was sheltered, a fulfilment of prophecy. Egypt was the natural asylum of
every fugitive from Palestine, but a deeper reason bent the steps of the
Holy Family to the shelter of its palms and temples.

II. The slaughter of the innocents, and the prophecy fulfilled
therein.--Herod's fierce rage, enflamed by the dim suspicion that these
wily Easterns have gone away laughing in their sleeves at having tricked
him, and by the dread that they may be stirring up armed defenders of
the infant King, is in full accord with all that we know of him. The
critics who find the story of the massacre 'unhistorical,' because
Josephus does not mention it, must surely be very anxious to discredit
the evangelist, and very hard pressed for grounds to do so, or they
would not commit themselves to the extraordinary assumption that nothing
is to be believed outside of the pages of Josephus. A splash or two of
'blood of poor innocents,' more or less, found on the Idumean tyrant's
bloody skirts, could be of little consequence in the eyes of those who
knew what a long saturnalia of horrors his reign had been; and the
number of the infants under two years old in such a tiny place as
Bethlehem would be small, so that their feeble wail might well fail to
reach the ears even of contemporaries. But there is no reason for
questioning the simple truth of a story so like the frantic cruelty and
sleepless suspicion of the grey-headed tyrant, who was stirred to more
ferocity as the shades of death gathered about him, and power slipped
from his rotting hands. Of all the tragic pictures which Scripture gives
of a godless old age, burning with unquenchable hatred to goodness and
condemned to failure in all its antagonism, none is touched with more
lurid hues than this. What a contrast between the king _de jure_, the
cradled infant; and the king _de facto_, going down to his loathsome
death, which all but he longed for! He may well stand as a symbol of the
futility of all opposition to Christ the King.

The fate of these few infants is a strange one. In their brief lives
they have won immortal fame. They died for the Christ whom they never
knew. These lambs were slain for the sake of the Lamb who lived while

'Little flowers of martyrdom,
Roses by the whirlwind shorn,'

That quotation, from Jeremiah xxxi. 16, requires a brief consideration.
The original is still less a prophecy than