was the passage in Hosea. It
is a highly imaginative and grandly weird personification of the mighty
mother of three of the tribes, stirring in her tomb, and lifting up the
shrill lamentation of Eastern grief over her children carried away to
captivity. That hopeless wail from the grave by Bethlehem is heard as
far north as Ramah, beyond Jerusalem. Once again, says Matthew, the
same grief might have been imaginatively heard from the long-silent tomb
so near the scene of this pitiful tragedy. And the second ancestral
weeping was fuller of woe than the bitterness of that first lament; for
this bewailed the actual slaughter of innocents, and wept the miseries
that so soon gathered round the coming of the King, so long waited for.
Seeing that the prophet's words do not describe a fact, but are a
poetical personification to convey simply the idea of calamity, which
might make the dead mother weep, the word 'fulfilled' can obviously be
applied to them only in a modified and somewhat elastic sense, and is
sufficiently defended if we recognise in the slaughter of these children
a woe which, though small in itself, yet, when considered in reference
to its inflicter, a usurping king of the Jews, and in reference to its
occasion, the desire to slay the God-sent King, and in reference to its
innocent victims, and in reference to its place as first of the tragic
series of martyrdoms for Messiah, was heavy with a sorer burden of
national disaster, when seen by eyes made wise by death, than even the
captivity which seemed to falsify the promises of God and the hopes of a
thousand years.

III. The return to Nazareth, and the prophecy fulfilled therein.--They
who patiently wait for guidance, and move not till the cloud moves, are
never disappointed, nor left undirected. Joseph is a pattern of
self-abnegating submission, and an example of its rewards. The angel
ever comes again to those who have once obeyed him and continue to wait.
This third appearance is described in the same words as the former. His
coming was the appearance of a familiar presence His command begins by a
verbal repetition of the former summons, 'Arise and take the young
child and His mother, and go,' and then passes to a singular allusion to
that command to Moses which was the first step towards the former
calling of God's son--the nation--out of Egypt. 'All the men are dead
which sought thy life,' was the encouragement to Moses to go back. 'They
are dead that sough